Chapter 20
NORA
The cigars are the one thing I haven't been able to win.
We've had the thermostat war, which I lost and then won by stealing all his hoodies until he turned the heat up to get them back.
We've had the boots-in-the-house war, ongoing, a stalemate.
But the cigars are a real fight. He smokes them on the back terrace in the evening like a man in an oil painting, one ankle on the other knee, looking out at the dark like he owns it, which he mostly does.
The smell gets in my hair. I hate it, he knows I hate it, and he does it anyway.
So I order the poppers off the internet, the trick kind, the little paper twists you slip inside a cigar that pop a tiny harmless flash when the cherry burns down to them. They come in a discreet brown box. I feel like a cartoon. I have never been happier.
Marisol is at the kitchen island when the box comes, here under the walls more days than not now, half-moved-in without anyone calling it that.
"Tell me that's not what I think it is," she says, watching me slit the tape.
"Depends what you think it is."
"I think it's you starting a war with a man who has a body count."
"It's novelty poppers, Mari. They're for children's birthday parties." I tip one into my palm, the little twist of paper light as nothing. "The worst it does is make a noise and a spark. I checked twice. I'm reckless, not stupid."
"You married the scariest man in California and your hobby is pranking him." She says it flat, but there's a grin fighting the corner of her mouth. "Does he know you're like this?"
"He's finding out in installments." I grin back. "You want to help, or you want plausible deniability?"
"Deniability. Total deniability. I want to be three counties away when this goes off." She watches me palm the popper, though, and she's not leaving. "How do you even get it past him?" She sets her hip against the counter. "He notices everything. He noticed I switched coffee brands."
"He notices you. He doesn't notice me, not the way he should. He's stopped expecting me to do anything to him." I tuck the box behind the good flour where Vera never looks. "That's the whole trick, Mari. He quit watching his own wife for knives a month ago. Big mistake. Enormous."
"That's either the most romantic or the most alarming thing you've ever said."
"Why not both?" I bump the cabinet shut with my hip. "That's the marriage."
"He's got a call this afternoon. Study, door shut, forty minutes." I close my hand around the little twist. "Forty minutes is all I need."
It takes me three of those calls across three days to get one into a Cohiba without him noticing, because the man does notice everything, easing the popper down into the tobacco at the end of one of the good ones from the box on his desk, my heart going like I'm defusing a bomb instead of building one.
Then I wait. I'm very bad at waiting. Marisol says patience isn't in my body and she's right, but for this I find some, because the payoff is going to be worth every hour.
It pays off the first evening cold enough that he's got the outdoor heater going on the terrace, a glass of something amber at his elbow, the dogs at his feet, Waffle asleep in the breast pocket of a sweater that costs more than my first truck.
I bring him the cigar myself. I am a portrait of a devoted wife.
"You're being nice to me," he says, taking it, suspicious already. "You're never nice to me without a reason."
"Can't a woman bring her husband a cigar?"
"This woman can't. This woman brings me a cigar the way other people bring a process server." He turns it over in his fingers, checks the band, the wrapper, everything but the inside. "What did you do?"
"Nothing. I've made my peace with the cigars. I've decided to support your one disgusting hobby."
"My one." He raises an eyebrow. "I have several disgusting hobbies."
"The legal one, then." I drop into the chair across from him, pull my feet up, and arrange my face into the picture of innocence I have been practicing in the mirror. "Smoke your cigar, Isaak. Enjoy your evening. Don't mind me."
He looks at me for a long moment, and I think for one terrible second he's going to inspect the thing, that three days of work is going to die on the vine.
Then he decides I'm up to something he can't find and that not finding it's its own kind of fun.
He clips the end. He lights it. He takes the first slow pull looking right at me over the flame like the whole thing is a dare.
"Whatever you're planning," he says, smoke curling out of him, "it won't work. I've been ambushed by professionals."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
He smokes. I wait. The cherry burns down slow, orange in the dark. I keep my face calm while everything in me is coiled. He's three pulls in and starting to relax, starting to believe he's won, when it burns down to the twist.
The pop is tiny. A bright little snap and a flash of sparks an inch from his nose.
My husband, who walks into rooms full of armed men like he's bored, jerks back so hard he nearly goes over backward in the chair.
The cigar flies. Both dogs explode up barking at a threat they can't find.
Waffle launches out of the sweater pocket like a furry mortar and hits the flagstones running.
And Isaak Radulov, pakhan of the LA Bratva, the man three city councils are afraid of, barks a word in Russian I've never heard him use, slapping at his own face like it's caught fire, knocking his amber drink clean off the side table in the process.
It's the single greatest thing I have witnessed in my adult life. I wouldn't trade it for the ranch.
I lose it. I come apart completely. I am bent double in the chair, no sound coming out, just the silent full-body wheeze of a person who has waited three days for exactly this and got more than she dreamed.
He stares at the smoking cigar on the flagstones. He stares at the dogs. He stares at me, folded in half and crying. The look on his face goes from shock to understanding to something truly dangerous, slow, while it builds, and I know I have about four seconds.
"You," he says.
"I have no idea what you're talking about." I can barely get it out. "Sounds like a quality control issue with Cuban tobacco."
"A popper. You put a popper in my cigar."
"Allegedly."
He sets down his glass with great care, slow, deliberate, not spilling a drop. That's how I know I'm in real trouble. He stands.
"I'm going to give you a head start," he says, "because I'm a sporting man. You have until the count of three."
I'm already out of the chair. "Isaak."
"One."
"It was funny. You have to admit it was extremely funny."
"Two." He's grinning now, the real one, the rare one, the whole of it, all the menace turned to delight and pointed straight at me. My stomach drops the way it does at the top of a fall. "Run, Nora."
I run.
I make it through the kitchen on a shriek, the dogs galloping after both of us thinking it's a game, Vera somewhere yelling about her floors.
I get as far as the stairs before he catches me, because of course he catches me, the man does sprints at dawn for fun.
He gets an arm around my waist and hauls me clean off my feet.
I'm laughing too hard to fight, kicking, useless, both of us breathing like we've run a mile.
"Got you," he says into my neck.
"You cheated. You're enormous, that's cheating."
"You blew up my face with contraband. There are no rules now.
" He carries me up the stairs over his shoulder like a sack of feed, one arm clamped over the backs of my thighs.
It's an enormous arm and I am not going to apologize for noticing that.
I'm pounding on his back, laughing, and he isn't slowing down for any of it.
"Twenty years building a reputation. Men shake when I walk into rooms. Just now I screamed in front of two dogs and a cat because my wife pranked me like I'm at summer camp. "
"The cat saw everything," I gasp. "Your authority is gone. Yuri will hear about this."
"Yuri will hear nothing." He kicks the bedroom door open. "No one will ever hear about this. You especially will never speak of it."
"I'm going to speak of it at every meal for the rest of our lives."
He drops me onto the bed and stands over me, both of us spent from it, his hair a mess, his chest heaving, that grin still all over his face.
He braces a hand on either side of my head and looks down at me like I'm the funniest, most infuriating, most wanted thing he's ever gotten his hands on.
His hands are flat on the mattress on either side of my head.
His chest is heaving, his hair a mess. My body has been waiting for this specific moment since long before I admitted it.
"You are," he says, "the single most exhausting person alive."
"You love it."
The word's out before I clock it, the careless way you say a thing in the middle of laughing.
It sits there in the air between us, love, the first time either of us has put it anywhere near this room.
His face changes, the grin going still, his eyes searching mine for whether I meant the whole of it or just the easy half.
I don't take it back. I don't dress it up bigger either. I just hold his gaze and let him read it however he can stand to right now. Then I reach up and pull him down by the collar of the sweater that cost more than my truck.
"Shut up and lose to me properly," I tell him.
He loses to me properly.
He comes down laughing, the full weight of him pressing me into the mattress, and I meet him with my mouth, my legs, my hands already shoving at what's left of his clothes.
He strips the sweater off in one pull. His chest is hot under my hands, heaving, and I drag my nails down through the muscle just to feel him shiver and grin wider against my lips.