I workedthrough the next day, helping Maksim put out a dozen fires that Sergei’s fight at the bar had started, and it was late when I came home. I was stiff, sore and running on fumes, but nothing prepared me for what awaited me inside the house.
In the last day, someone had moved everything familiar out of the main floor of my house. There were now heavy curtains at the windows that blocked the view and the light. There was new furniture that looked stiff and uncomfortable. Plastic plants, ornamental vases and cushion slipcovers completed the look.
I walked slowly into the kitchen, looking around. Grisha and Lena were lounging on the new couch, watching a movie in Russian on a new television.
“What happened here?”
“I decided to fix things up,” Lena said.
I worked to hide my annoyance. “Did Mila have anything to say about this?”
She shrugged, uncaring. “She was gone most of the morning.”
Grisha barely looked at me. “I need you to take me down to the docks.”
He didn’t tell me why, and I didn’t ask. “Give me ten.”
I moved upstairs and found Mila curled up on our bed, watching a movie.
She gave me a cute little smile. I could tell she was trying to act normal, but her shoulders were rounded with tension and she looked tired.
I sat down beside her. “How was your day?”
She shrugged. “It was okay, you?”
“Could have been better,” I confessed.
She gave me a sad smile. “Did you see downstairs?”
“She’s taking over, isn’t she?”
Mila looked worried. “It doesn’t even feel like our place anymore.”
“When they’re gone, we’ll just redecorate.” I knew it was a lie, but I couldn’t help pretending that we could one day go back to where we were right before they arrived.
She studied me as if to gauge if I was telling the truth. “Okay.”
“In the meantime, we can go back to David’s and replace the fluffy tree.”
She looked at me with more wisdom than she should have had at her age. “That’s okay.”
I couldn’t tell you why, but her soft refusal nearly broke me. In any other world, Grisha and Lena wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes as my houseguests, but here I was, pandering to them like some sort of soft idiot.
All for the sake of the job.
All so they would refrain from letting me go too soon.
So we could continue to strategically set up our ambush.
So we could maximize our impact on this family.
All I wanted to do was rage against her relatives, give them a satisfying boot to the curb and tell Grisha to take his job and shove it. Instead, I looked like a spineless man who couldn’t protect his own wife.
That was the point that really burned me.
“What’s wrong?”
I refocused on her. “Nothing.”
