“No. Thank you.” I am surprised by how calm it sounds. A lifetime of customer service jobs and secretarial work left me with the ability to sound fine under any circumstances.
I shower because I need a thing I can complete. Steam fills the glass. I sit on the closed lid, still rocking. I get into the shower,hoping it’ll work like a baptism. I wash until my skin feels like it belongs to me. Only, it doesn’t. This is the skin of Vitaly’s assassin.
The skin of a mother who will stop at nothing to save her children.
I retch into the drain. I haven’t eaten anything all day, so it’s little more than bile, but I can’t keep anything down when I think of stabbing Roman.
I step out and wrap in a towel and stand in front of the mirror until my face goes blank. I put on cream and a little makeup. My hands are steady now. I am good at pretending.
I make tea because my mother would. Mint. I drink it hot. It pushes metal taste out of my mouth.
The dress I choose for the night is black. It hides blood well, and that seems like an asset right now. I set a small clutch on the chair and put nothing in it. No phone. No pen. No object that can be taken and turned into a reason to die. Nothing the police will take when I’m arrested.
Not that I believe that will happen.
Vitaly knows tonight will end one way and one way only. If I kill Roman in his club, his men will take me out. Vitaly said that thing about us being together after this, but he’s always been a liar.
I won’t survive the night.
But my boys might. My mother might. I don’t want to kill Roman for “might,” but what choice do I have?
I’ve never trusted Vitaly. Not even when we first started dating. There was always a nagging thought in the back of my mind, telling me he was too good to be true.
But my choices aren’t what they were back then, and tonight, I have to believe Vitaly when he says he will let them go. The alternative is too mean to accept.
Even still, a quiet voice in my head asks, “What if he kills them anyway? You’ll all be dead for nothing.”
I can’t give that voice any energy. I have to believe he will be true to his word. It’s the only hope I have.
I raise the shade one inch and check the lawn. Trees. Fence. Nothing else. I let the shade fall. I sit on the edge of the bed and do not reach for the phone. I count four breaths. I stop when the counting starts to feel like a cliff.
24
ROMAN
The house isdim when I walk in. Rugs mute the steps of men who know how to walk without being noticed. The air still carries her shampoo and a ghost of mint from tea. Everything is in its place.
Nothing feels right in it.
Mina lies on the bed with her eyes open. She’s on top of the bedspread in her black dress. It reveals too much leg and cleavage, but that’s perfect for Rope. She tries to smile. It does not reach the part of her face that tells the truth. She looks past me for a second and then back like she cannot help it.
“They are safe. The same report as an hour ago.”
She nods. “Okay.”
“Sleep a little more,” I tell her. “We go out later.”
“Can’t sleep. Just staring at the ceiling, hoping this all goes right.”
“Then stare more. I need time to get ready.”
“Don’t worry about entertaining me, Roman. I’m fine on my own.”
In my bath the mirror tells one story. A man who slept when he could, and that wasn’t often enough. Lines sit deeper at the eyes and mouth. The gray in the stubble shows more than it should. I do not shave it away.
I take a hot shower long enough to loosen the muscles that stayed tight on the flight. Old memories haunt beneath my skin. A shoulder that took a fall on a bad road. A rib that remembers a fighter from Boston. That bullet in Sochi. The heat makes them quiet. I turn the dial to cold at the end. The shock is a good one.
Leon’s words rattle in my head, refusing to settle. He called me a good man. Or near enough. But do good men make their wives into bait? I don’t think so.
