21. Sofia
SOFIA
The smoke got to me before the ribs did, thick and sweet, drifting sideways across the yard every time Kirill lifted the lid to poke at something that had clearly stopped being food about ten minutes earlier.
"You're doing it wrong," Yuri said, not for the first time, leaning over Kirill's shoulder with a beer in one hand and an opinion in the other. "You're supposed to leave the lid down."
"I know how to grill a rack of ribs, Yuri."
"Do you, though? Because from where I'm standing, that's not a rack of ribs anymore. That's a warning."
Kirill jabbed at the meat with a pair of tongs like the argument had personally offended him. Pavel, seated at the card table with his sleeves rolled and a stack of chips already growing in front of him, didn't even look up.
"Let the man cook, Yuri. Some of us are trying to enjoy the one night nobody's deciding whether we live or die."
"That's not funny."
"It's a little funny."
String lights ran the length of the yard in loose, uneven loops, strung up that afternoon by two of the younger men under Kirill's very specific and very contradictory instructions, and they threw a warm gold light over everything that made even the smoke look intentional.
A card table sat near the back steps with mismatched chairs pulled around it, and past that, close enough to the grill that nobody seemed worried about the smoke reaching it, sat a folding table loaded with more food than the ribs had any hope of contributing to.
I stood near the edge of it all with a beer I hadn't finished, watching Kirill's wife laugh at something Yuri said while she carried a tray out through the kitchen door behind her.
"Elena made the sides," Kirill said, catching me watching. "The sides will survive tonight. I make no promises about the ribs."
"Low bar."
"Realistic bar."
I laughed, and it came out easier than I expected, easier than almost anything had in the five weeks since I'd walked onto a dock in a hard hat that didn't fit and told myself none of this would ever feel like more than a job.
"Reyes." Yuri waved me toward the card table with the tongs he'd apparently confiscated from Kirill somewhere in the last minute. "Sit. Lose your money to me like a woman with self-respect."
"That's a strange sales pitch."
"It's an honest one. I respect honesty."
I sat. Pavel dealt without being asked, quick and precise, and within three hands I understood this was not a friendly game so much as a blood sport that happened to use cards instead of fists.
"You bluffed me last time," Yuri said, squinting at me over his cards. "I haven't forgotten."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"She's lying," Pavel said, still not looking up. "She's very good at it."
"I'm sitting right here."
"We know."
Maxim came out of the house somewhere in the middle of the second hand, sleeves already rolled, and dropped into the chair beside me without asking, close enough that his knee found mine under the table and stayed there.
"Who's losing?"
"Everyone but me," I said.
"That tracks."
"Are you going to play or narrate?"
"I've learned to do both. It's a skill." He glanced at my cards without shame, and I let him, because some habits had stopped being worth fighting a month ago. "You should fold."
"I'm not folding."
"You should still fold."
I didn't fold, and I lost the hand spectacularly, and the sound Yuri made when he raked in the pot was loud enough to startle a bird out of the tree near the fence line.
"See," Yuri said, delighted. "This is why I like her. She loses with dignity."
"I lost on purpose. I wanted you to feel something good tonight."
"That's an even worse lie than the last one."
The night went on that way for a long time, hands won and lost, Kirill wandering back and forth between the grill and the table with increasingly desperate updates on the ribs, Elena finally taking the tongs away from him entirely around the third disaster and salvaging what she could with the calm efficiency of a woman who had clearly done this before.
Nobody talked business, and nobody mentioned Doyle, or Marchetti, or the leak that still hadn't found a name, and somewhere around the fourth hand I realized I had stopped waiting for someone to bring any of it up.
That was the part that unsettled me, sitting there with a losing hand and a beer gone warm in my fist, not the warmth itself but how completely I had stopped bracing for it to end.
"Kirill," Elena called from the grill, holding up something charred beyond recognition, "your ribs have achieved a new form."
"They're smoky."
"They're extinct."
The whole table laughed, Kirill loudest of all at his own failure. He crossed to her anyway, took the plate from her hands, and ate a piece of the wreckage right there in front of everyone, chewing with the exaggerated satisfaction of a man determined to defend a lost cause on principle alone.
"Delicious," he announced, to a chorus of disbelief.
"You're lying."
"I am. It's terrible. I stand by it anyway."
I watched Pavel lean over and murmur something to Yuri that made them both laugh, watched Elena rest a hand on Kirill's shoulder for exactly as long as it took to steal a chip from his stack, watched Maxim reach over without looking and refill my glass before I'd even noticed it was empty.
None of it was staged, and none of it needed to be, which was exactly what finally cracked something open in me that I had spent five weeks keeping carefully shut.
These people loved each other. Not the kind of loyalty men in this life performed for cameras and courtrooms, but the real, unglamorous kind, built out of ruined ribs and stolen chips and a woman who'd married into all of it anyway because the man underneath the danger was worth marrying.
I had walked in here with a clean story, the idea that men like this hurt people and deserved whatever came for them. My job was to make sure it came fast, with paperwork attached.
Watching Kirill eat burned ribs to save his own pride, I realized that story had been dying for weeks. Tonight just finished it off.
"To Andrei," Yuri said suddenly, lifting his beer like the thought had arrived without warning. "Wherever he is right now, hopefully somewhere that doesn't smell like burned pork."
"He'd hate this," Kirill said, raising his own glass anyway. "He'd also never admit he missed it."
"He misses it," Pavel said, not looking up from his cards. "He calls me sometimes just to ask if the poker table's still standing."
"He does not."
"He does. Last month he asked if Yuri had finally learned to fold."
"I have never once needed to fold in my life."
"That's the exact answer he predicted you'd give."
The table laughed again, easy and unbothered, and I found myself smiling at an empty chair that had never once been filled tonight. Andrei was a man I'd only met through photographs and stories, and it was clear how much these people missed him.
The party wound down slow, the way good nights did, Yuri and Pavel the last to leave, Elena kissing my cheek on her way out like it was the most natural thing in the world, like I had always belonged at that table instead of having earned my way there one hand of poker at a time.
"You're quiet," Maxim said, once the yard had emptied out and the string lights were the only thing left holding back the dark.
"I'm thinking."
"About?"
"About how much I liked tonight." I turned my glass in slow circles, watching the last of the ice melt. "That should probably worry me more than it does."
"Why would it worry you?"
"Because I came here with a very simple idea of what this family was, and tonight made it a lot less simple."
He didn't answer right away, and I let the silence sit there instead of filling it, the grill still ticking as it cooled a few feet away, smoke thinning into the dark overhead.
"You want to know why Andrei and I chose this," he said finally, not quite a question.
"You already told me some of it. The five years. The debt."
"I gave you the clean version. The one that fits in a dinner conversation." He looked at me then, something unguarded moving behind his eyes that I hadn't seen from him since the night with the chart. "You want the real one?"
"Yes."
He was quiet a moment, the kind of quiet that meant he was deciding how much of it he actually trusted himself to say out loud.
"My father died owing money to men who don't forgive a debt just because the man who owed it stopped breathing.
Andrei was thirty. I was thirty-two. Neither of us had ever run anything more complicated than our own bar tabs, and suddenly we owed a number that would have taken either of us a lifetime to pay honestly.
" He rolled his glass between his palms, not drinking from it.
"We had a man named Sergei back then. He'd worked for my father since before either of us was born, drove him everywhere, stood outside every door that mattered.
When the men my father owed decided collecting from two grieving kids sounded easier than collecting from a dead man, Sergei was the one who stood between us and the first attempt to make an example out of Andrei. "
"What happened to him?"
"He stopped them. He didn't stop what it cost him to do it.
" Maxim's voice stayed level, but something underneath it had gone very still.
"He died three weeks later. Complications from the beating, the doctors said, though everyone who actually knew him understood he'd simply given everything he had left protecting two boys who weren't even his. "
I didn't say anything, because there wasn't a version of a response that wouldn't have felt small standing next to that.
"That's when I understood walking away was never actually on the table.
Not because someone told us so, but because staying was the only way to make sure nobody else's Sergei ever had to bleed for our name again.
" He finally looked at me, steady, no performance left in his face at all.
"Andrei chose the version of this that let him leave once the worst of it was over.
I chose the version that stayed and made sure it never happened again to anyone who worked for us. "
"You blame yourself for him."
"Every day. I've gotten good at not saying it out loud.
" He set the glass down on the table between us, careful, like it might otherwise slip.
"I built a whole life out of making sure debts like that one never came due on someone else's kindness again.
Most days I believe that's a good enough reason to be the man I became. "
"And the other days?"
"The other days I remember exactly how many people I've had to bury to keep that promise, and I wonder if Sergei would have thought it was worth the trade."
The yard had gone fully dark around us now, string lights the only warmth left in it, and somewhere past the fence a dog barked twice and went quiet again.
"Everyone I love, I have because of this life," he said, quiet, no performance left in it. "Everyone I've buried, I've buried because of it too."
I sat there in the dark and looked at his face, at the grill still cooling a few feet away, at the card table where a woman who loved a dangerous man had laughed until she cried two hours earlier. I didn't have a clean answer anymore for which side of that sentence I was supposed to be rooting for.
I wasn't sure I ever really had.