CHAPTER THREE
BY NOON, WE WERE OUTSIDE, the city unfolding before us with no set destination in mind. The sun warmed the back of my neck as Ethan guided me past the courthouse—a grand, weary building where he said he’d “cut his teeth.”
He pointed out a narrow alley where a cigar lounge hid behind what looked like a speakeasy door, its brass handle worn smoothly by use.
Then came a bookstore I must have passed a dozen times without noticing, its window cluttered with stacks of old paperbacks and a discreet sign pointing upstairs to a whiskey bar.
He wasn’t showing off; he was opening doors to the life he moved through daily, letting me glimpse the texture of his world, and I drank it all in like something rare and real.
"So, how'd you end up in law?" I asked as we waited at a crosswalk, as if I didn’t know.
Ethan glanced at me. "That's a very long answer."
"We have nowhere to be."
Something about that made him smile.
"My family always had lawyers around."
"That sounds ominous."
The light changed, and we crossed with the crowd.
"I was good at arguing," he continued. "Good at finding holes in things other people thought were airtight. My brothers used to say I could convince someone the sky was green and have them apologizing for ever calling it blue."
"Useful skill," I commented.
"Extremely." His reply came quickly and clean.
"Morally questionable."
"Also, extremely." A faint smile touched his mouth as he said it, there and gone in the space between one step and the next. I bumped my shoulder against his arm, feeling the solid warmth of him.
"So, you became a defense attorney."
"I became a lawyer first." His expression shifted, the earlier amusement giving way to something more serious.
"Defense came later. I figured out pretty quickly that everyone deserves someone in the room who knows the rules.
Doesn't matter whether I like them. Doesn't even matter whether I think they're innocent. "
"That's very noble of you."
"It's really not." The words came out flat, definitive.
"No?"
"No." He slid his hands into his pockets, shoulders rolling back slightly. "I'm very good at what I do, Julia. I like being very good at what I do."
There was a kind of certainty there that seemed to live in the set of his jaw, the directness of his gaze. I liked that he didn't dress it up as some childhood calling to save the innocent. He liked the law because he understood it, could manipulate it, and apparently enjoyed winning.
That, I understood.
"What about you?" he asked, turning his head just enough to catch my eye.
"What about me?"
"Music."
I turned my head to look at him fully, the movement sharp. "I don't remember telling you I was a musician."
He let a full second of street noise fill the space between us before answering. The corner of his mouth twitched a tiny fracture in his composure. "You didn't."
Interesting. I folded my arms across my chest, feeling the borrowed fabric of his shirt—now knotted at my lower back—strain with the motion. "So how do you know?"
"I know who your father is."
All trace of amusement vanished from my face. The sidewalk seemed to amplify around us, the hiss of tires on asphalt, the fragmented conversations of passing strangers, the distant blare of a car horn three blocks away.
"Do you?"
"I do."
"And you knew last night?" My voice came out flatter than I intended.
"No." The answer was immediate.
I waited, letting the silence stretch.
"I knew your first name. That's it." He shifted his weight, sunlight catching the stubble along his jawline. "This morning, I had someone make sure you were who you said you were."
My eyebrows lifted. "You had me checked out?"
"I had a woman I met in a nightclub, who woke up in my home, checked out."
I stared at him. "When you say it like that, you make me sound like a potential organ thief."
"You could be." His tone was matter of fact.
"Do I look like I know how to remove a kidney?" (I did)
His gaze traveled over me with deliberate slowness—from my knotted shirt to my crossed arms to the skeptical tilt of my chin—with absolutely no shame. "You want me to answer that?"
I fought a smile and failed. "Asshole."
His grin flashed, quick and bright.
"So," I said, "you know my Tato."
"I know of him," he said, the words clean and precise, leaving a deliberate space between knowledge and acquaintance.
There was a difference.
A significant one.
"And that doesn't bother you?" I asked, watching the way his thumb brushed against the seam of his pocket.
"Should it?" He didn’t look away from me, his gaze steady beneath the afternoon sun.
I gave him a look sharp enough to cut glass. Ethan laughed, a low sound that seemed to start in his chest. "Julia, I'm a criminal defense attorney. Your father's name isn't exactly going to send me sprinting across six lanes of traffic."
Fair. The tension in my shoulders eased by half a degree. "What exactly did your little investigation tell you about me?"
"Enough." A single syllable, wrapped in certainty.
"That's vague." I could feel the sun warming the back of my neck.
"You're Julia Kovalenko." He began ticking points off on his fingers. "You play violin. You've been performing since you were nine. You have an apartment you apparently don't spend enough time cleaning."
My head snapped toward him so fast the world blurred at the edges. He laughed, the sound rich and unapologetic. "I'm kidding about the apartment."
"You better be." I could feel the heat on my cheeks. "I alphabetize my spices; I'll have you know."
"And you have people," he continued, his voice dropping into something more serious, "who would become extremely inconvenient for me if you disappeared after leaving a nightclub with a stranger."
I smiled, all sweetness and sharp edges. "Inconvenient?"
"Violently inconvenient." The words came out flat, but factual. “That was why I suggested you let everyone know you were safe and alive before we headed out.”
"A wise suggestion."
His laugh was low and genuine, crinkling the corners of his eyes. I watched him for a second before looking ahead again. Most men who knew Tato's name did one of two things. They tried too hard to prove they weren't intimidated by it, or they suddenly treated me like an extension of him.
Ethan did neither. He simply absorbed the fact of my father like a detail in a case file, his expression not shifting from its baseline of calm assessment. “So how did you get into music?” he asked again, the question landing as cleanly as the first time.
I smiled. “We’re circling back?”
“I asked a question.” His tone was patient, but there was an attorney’s persistence beneath it.
“And apparently lawyers can’t survive without answers.”
“Now you’re learning.”
I looked down at the pavement sliding beneath our feet, thinking. “I don’t really remember starting. It was just... there.”
His expression softened with genuine interest, the late sunlight catching the faint lines at the corners of his eyes.
“There was always music in our house. Mama played everything—scratchy old records of salsa, Tchaikovsky on the stereo, folk songs from Sevastopol that sounded like they’d been recorded in someone’s kitchen.
Shit she probably shouldn’t have been playing around children.
” I smiled at the memory. “I gravitated toward the violin. Something about the shape of it, I think. Tato didn’t hesitate, just bought me one the next week.
I’ve been playing for almost twenty years now. ”
We reached the bookstore he’d mentioned, its front window stacked with haphazard piles of new releases and faded classics. Ethan reached out and pulled open the heavy wooden door for me, hinges groaning softly.
The air inside was thick and sweet with the ghosts of old paper, undercut by the sharp, clean scent of lemon oil on polished wood floors and the rich, dark promise of coffee brewing somewhere in the back.
I stopped just over the threshold, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light.
Bookshelves—dark oak, crammed to sagging—stretched into a deep, shadowy interior, their aisles narrow and inviting.
Handwritten cards in looping script were tucked beneath select spines like secret recommendations.
A narrow, uncarpeted staircase with worn treads curved up and out of sight.
"This place has a whiskey bar?" I asked, my voice low.
"Upstairs." His answer was simple, his hands in his pockets.
I turned my head slowly to look at him, one eyebrow raised. "Books and whiskey?"
"I thought you'd appreciate the efficiency of vices." A faint smile touched his mouth.
"You might actually be useful."
"I’m glad you’re starting to notice."
I let out a soft laugh and drifted toward the nearest shelf, running my fingers along a row of cloth-bound spines.
For the next half hour, we drifted apart and converged again in the quiet maze, our footsteps hushed on the wooden floor.
The silence was broken only by the occasional rustle of a turned page or the soft thud of a book being reshelved.
I learned he gravitated toward thick biographies of dead politicians, legal thrillers he dismissed with a quiet chuckle for their procedural inaccuracies, and an obscene number of dense historical treatises.
He learned that I would pick up a book for its cover alone despite my claims to the contrary.
At one point, I pulled a novel with a deep blue cover and silver foil lettering from a middle shelf. I read the back-flap synopsis twice, then set it carefully back in its gap.
"You didn't like it?" he asked from the next aisle over.
"I did."
"Then why’d you put it back?"
"I own too many books."
He rounded the corner. "That's not a real problem."
"It is when you run out of shelves." I gestured vaguely toward the ceiling. "It becomes an architectural issue."
He picked the book up and tucked it neatly beneath his arm.
"Put it back."
"I'm buying myself a book," he argued, already turning away.
"That is very clearly the book I just touched."
"Then that’s a coincidence."