Chapter 21
Ivan
Mary McCarthy had been living in the east wing for over a month, and the east wing had not known what hit it.
Before Mary, it was a quiet stretch of guest rooms with old portraits, heavy curtains, and furniture nobody sat on unless they were waiting to be judged by ancestors.
Then Mary arrived, and within seventy-two hours the east wing sounded like someone had opened a boarding school and immediately lost control of the students.
There were shopping bags in the hall. There was music at odd hours. There was a yoga mat in the corridor for three days before anyone identified what it was. Gregor had stepped over it twelve times before finally asking, "Is this a threat?"
"It's for stretching," Maeve said.
"Stretching what?"
Maeve laughed. "Muscles, Gregor. She's stretching her muscles."
Gregor had looked at the mat for a long moment. "Just walk."
The motivational quotes appeared in week two.
The first one was taped to the portrait of my great-grandfather who was a dour man with mutton chops and a look that said he had never once been pleased by anything. Under his gilt frame, a neon-pink Post-it read:
YOU MISS 100% OF THE SHOTS YOU DON'T TAKE.
Gregor removed it.
Mary put it back, this time higher.
Gregor removed it again.
Mary replaced it with one that read:
MANIFEST. MOTIVATE. GROWTH.
I found Gregor standing in front of the portrait later that day, arms crossed, staring at the Post-it like it was a personal insult. "This is provocation."
"It's a quote, Gregor."
"It's mambo jumbo."
"She's young. Pink is developmentally appropriate."
"She has taped it to a Petrov."
"A dead Petrov."
"That doesn’t make it better."
I sided with Mary immediately. It was the most entertainment I'd had since the wedding, and also Gregor's face when confronted with youth culture was something I planned to enjoy for as long as Mary's supplies held out.
Her bedroom had undergone a transformation that I could only describe as "aggressively optimistic.
" Mary had painted the walls a color she called terracotta sunrise, which meant orange.
Very, very orange. The kind of orange that made you blink when you walked in.
The kind of orange that probably registered on satellite imagery.
"It's warm," Maeve said when she first saw it, in the tone of someone trying very hard to find the right adjective.
"It's a war crime," Gregor said.
Mary crossed her arms over her chest. "It's terracotta."
Gregor added. "It's the color of construction barriers."
Mary had beamed. "Thank you."
"You are welcome," Gregor said, which was not what he had meant and everyone knew it.
The girl was eighteen, almost nineteen, and legally dead in the eyes of her father's syndicate. Which meant she was freer than she'd ever been, and she was operating at a speed that suggested she was trying to cram three years of missed adolescence into every twenty-four-hour period.
She ate cereal at midnight. She watched films with the subtitles on in languages she didn't speak because she "liked the aesthetic."
She had asked Blade, completely sincerely, if he had ever considered a career in modeling, and Blade had looked at her like he had been asked to defuse a bomb.
Maeve watched all of this with the haunted tenderness of an older sister trying not to hold too tightly.
I saw it from the kitchen doorway, from the armory hall, from the back terrace when Mary sat with Mac and pretended she knew what to do with a baby.
Maeve's hands would hover. Her mouth would open and close.
She'd bite the inside of her cheek and force herself to stay still while Mary figured it out—the right way to support a head, the right angle for a bottle—because she knew, on some level, that Mary needed to figure things out on her own.
But it cost her. I could see it costing her.
Family, I was learning, was a more complicated weapon than anything I'd ever been trained on.
I found Mary in the kitchen at two in the morning.
She was cross-legged on one of the marble island stools in oversized sweatpants and a band T-shirt for a group I'd never heard of, eating dry cereal straight from the box and typing on a laptop with the focus of someone defusing the bomb Blade had been imagining.
"Normal people sleep at this hour," I said, heading for the fridge.
"Normal people haven't been locked in an Irish mob house for their entire adolescence." She didn't look up. "I have catching up to do."
"Fair." I grabbed a water bottle and leaned against the counter. "What are we catching up on?"
"My future."
She hit the Enter key with a decisive thwack and spun the laptop around.
Boston University. Red and white logo. Below it, in very official type:
We are pleased to inform you...
I blinked. "Boston. As in America."
"The one in Lincolnshire is apparently less exciting. I checked." She popped another handful of cereal into her mouth. "I applied under my new name. The transcripts you lot got me held up. I start spring semester in January, but they've approved early housing. I can leave this week."
"Business Management and pre-law," I read off the screen. Then I looked at her. "You're going to legally dismantle organized crime."
"I figure if I'm going to spend my life hiding from a syndicate, I should know how to take one apart from the inside." She said it the way other people talked about gap years. “And I couldn’t get in for art.”
I laughed. I couldn't help it. The sound bounced off the marble and the copper pots and the quiet of a house that had never heard anything like Mary McCarthy.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Because I came down here prepared to have a responsible older-brother-in-law conversation, and you've already handled every point I was going to make." I shook my head. "You've thought of everything."
"I've had a lot of time to think." Her voice slipped, just for a second. The confidence flickered. Underneath the bravado, the girl who'd spent years locked in her father's house was still there, still waiting for someone to tell her the door wasn't real.
I pushed off the counter and walked over. Put a hand on her shoulder. "Marli Jacobson."
She looked up at me.
"That's your name now?"
"That's my name now." She tested it like a coat she wasn't sure fit yet.
"It's a good name."
"It's a fake name."
"All names are fake. We just get used to them."
She snorted. "That's either very deep or very stupid."
"Both, probably. It's a family tradition."
She closed the laptop. The kitchen settled into the hum of the refrigerator and the soft tick of the clock above the Aga. Outside, the security lights threw pale rectangles across the lawn.
"Will Maeve be angry?"
The question was too careful. Not will she miss me. Not will she be sad. Angry. That was what Callum McCarthy had taught his daughters to expect. That wanting something for yourself was a betrayal, and betrayals were punished.
I set the water bottle down.
"She'll be terrified," I said. "Then proud. Then terrified again. Possibly all at once. She has quite the range."
Mary's mouth twitched.
"She won't be angry because you want a life. She fought too hard for hers to deny you yours."
Mary stared at the closed laptop. The screen was dark now, a black rectangle where an acceptance letter had been.
"What if I get there and I'm nobody?"
I'd asked myself the same question once. Different context. Same shape. I'd been eighteen, standing in a Moscow courtyard, looking at the body of the first man I'd ever killed and wondering if that was all I was now. A weapon, and nothing else.
"Then you become somebody," I said.
"Is that your motivational speech?"
"I kill people for a living. You should be grateful your choice doesn't have casualties."
She laughed. Small but real, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
"Go to sleep," I said. "I have to figure out how to tell my Pakhan he's paying your American tuition."
Three days later, her bags were in the foyer.
Four suitcases. Three were Mary's. One was a care package Maeve had assembled at three in the morning with the intensity of a woman preparing a polar expedition.
It contained, among other things: a travel blanket, two packs of British tea bags, a printed list of emergency contacts laminated by Gregor, a spare phone charger, and a small stuffed dog that looked suspiciously like Fergus.
Artem had arranged a jet out of Farnborough to Logan International. Blade was loading the luggage into the SUV with the sour look of a man who had not signed up for bellhop duties but was too professional to complain.
Mary—Marli—stood in the grand foyer in a trench coat that was trying very hard to make her look like a sophisticated adult and mostly succeeding.
Maeve was holding onto her like she planned to physically prevent the jet from taking off.
"Every week," Maeve said. Her voice was thick in the way that meant tears were being forcibly suppressed by sheer willpower. "You call me every week. And if you need anything. I mean anything, money, a flight home, someone to—"
"Bury a body," Mary supplied. "I know. You've mentioned. Several times."
"I'm serious."
"I'm going to college, Maeve. Not joining a cartel. I think I'll manage the body-burying on my own."
Maeve pulled back and gripped Mary's face in both hands. Her green eyes were blazing. "He won't come for you. I'll make sure of it."
"I know," Mary said. She looked past Maeve, catching my eye, then Artem's. She gave Gregor a small wave, who was by the door with Fergus tucked under his arm, the dog wearing a camouflage waistcoat.
"Thank you," she said. "All of you. For everything."
"Study hard," Artem said. He smiled. "And don't let anyone intimidate you."
"Please." Mary's grin snapped back into place as she turned toward the door. "I survived Callum McCarthy and lived with the Petrov Bratva. A bunch of frat boys in Boston aren't going to know what hit them."
Gregor stepped forward.
Everyone paused, because Gregor stepping forward unexpectedly was the kind of thing that made people check their exits.
He held out a small black case.
Mary eyed it. "If that's a weapon, I'm touched, but I have concerns about getting it through customs."
"Emergency phone. Encrypted." He opened the case. "One button reaches me. One reaches Ivan. One reaches Artem. One reaches Maeve."
Mary took it. Her expression softened as all the sarcasm drained out of her. "Thank you."
"Don’t lose it."
"There it is. Sweet moment cancelled."
Gregor grunted.
Maeve made a sound and hugged Mary again. This one was longer as Mary's arms came up around her sister's back, and for a moment neither of them moved.
"I'll call," Mary whispered.
"You'd better. I know dangerous people now."
"You married dangerous people."
"Exactly. Very efficient."
Mary pulled back. She walked out the front doors, and to the car. We stood in the doorway watching the SUV crunch down the long gravel drive. The morning was gray and damp.
Maeve leaned back against Artem's chest. He wrapped his arms around her. I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. We waited until Mary’s silhouette in the back window got smaller and smaller and until the taillights flared once at the gates and then vanished.
"Marli Jacobson," Maeve said quietly. "It suits her."
"She picked it herself,” Artem said.
"Of course she did."
We stayed in the doorway for a long moment. The gravel settled. The guards resumed their positions. Fergus squirmed in Gregor's grip and was set down with a small, indignant noise.
Then a cold thought arrived.
Mary was gone and safe. The McCarthy alliance was nothing but paper now. A piece of paper he was furious about because we chose to marry in Vegas rather than giving his devout catholic family the large wedding expected from the arrangement.
I knew the argument wasn’t the end of it.
Probably the beginning of something worse. And we hadn’t told Maeve about the situation yet.
I looked at Artem. He was already looking at me. The Pakhan was back behind his eyes.
"Later," he said quietly.
"Later," I agreed.
But the prickle at the base of my neck didn't fade until the gates closed and the house sealed us back inside.