"Get it," I said. "Get both colors. Let them choose."
Her smile could have powered the entire fucking store.
This was what normal people did. They went to bright stores on Saturday mornings and bought things they didn't strictly need. They debated the merits of different products. They built small, soft lives around creatures that depended on them. They existed in the world without constantly calculating angles of attack and escape routes.
I'd never had normal. Never wanted it, never thought I could pull it off even if I tried. My world was violence and vodka and the kind of loyalty that was signed in blood. But standing in that ridiculous pet store, watching Maya hold up cat collars like they were surgical instruments, I thought maybe—maybe—I could learn.
"We need a carrier too," she said, already moving toward the next section. "For vet visits. Two, actually. They shouldn't have to share if one is more stressed than the other."
Vet visits. Future tense. Like we'd still be doing this in six months, a year. Like the kittens would grow up and we'd be there to see it.
Like we were building something that might last.
"Whatever you think is best," I said, and meant it.
She beamed at me over her shoulder, then went back to examining carriers, and I pushed the cart full of our new life after her, ignoring the way other customers pressed themselves against shelves to avoid getting too close to me.
Let them be afraid. I had cat toys to buy.
BrightonBeachwasafar cry from the tourist postcards—gray ocean meeting gray sky, wind sharp enough to cut, only the hardcore joggers and Russian grandmothers brave enough to face the boardwalk. We walked with our PetSmart bags rattling in the gusts, probably looking like the world's most unlikely couple—a bratva enforcer and a fugitive doctor, carrying enough cat supplies to stock a small shelter.
The wooden boards creaked under our feet. Maya's hair whipped around her face in dark tangles, and her cheeks had gone pink with cold. She'd stolen my jacket from the car—just grabbed it without asking, like she had the right—and it swallowed her small frame. The sleeves hung past her hands, and she had to keep pushing them up to maintain her grip on the shopping bags.
She looked fucking perfect.
"I used to come here as a kid," I heard myself say. The words came out without planning, pulled by something about the gray water and the familiar salt-rust smell of the boardwalk.
Maya glanced at me but didn't push, just kept walking beside me, matching my longer stride with two steps for every one of mine.
"Before my mother left," I continued, surprising myself with the need to tell her this. "She'd bring us—Nikolai, Maks and me—on Sundays. There was a stand that sold piroshki, the real kind, not the shit they serve to tourists now. She'd buy us each one and we'd sit on the benches, getting grease on our faces, watching the seagulls fight over scraps."
The memory was fragmentary, worn soft around the edges like sea glass. I could remember the taste—cabbage and beef, the dough crispy and hot enough to burn your tongue if you weren't careful. Could remember Nikolai, maybe eight years old, trying to eat his without dropping any filling because even then he needed everything to be perfect. Could remember the weight of my mother's hand on my head, smoothing my hair back from my face.
Couldn't remember her face, though. That was gone.
Maya's hand slipped into mine, her fingers cold and small. I wrapped mine around them automatically, covering them completely, sharing what warmth I had.
"What happened to her?" she asked quietly. "Your mother?"
The wind tried to steal her words, but I caught them. Held them for a moment before answering.
"She left when I was five. Ran off with some fuck from a rival family—the Morozovs. Ultimate betrayal in our world." I kept my eyes on the horizon where gray met gray. "My father went half-insane after that. Paranoid, controlling. Died of a heart attack when I was twenty-five, but I think he really died the day she left."
We walked in silence for a moment. A jogger passed us going the other direction, took one look at me, and nearly tripped over his own feet trying to create distance.
"Do you remember her?" Maya asked.
"Pieces," I admitted. "Her hands—she had small hands, like yours. The way she hummed when she cooked. Russian lullabies she'd sing when we were going to sleep." I paused, throat tight. "I don't remember her face anymore. Just her voice, getting softer as she sang us to sleep. Sometimes I think I made that up, too. That maybe she never sang at all."
Maya squeezed my hand. Didn't offer empty comfort or bullshit about how my mother must have had her reasons. Just held my hand while we walked past closed snack bars and empty benches, the wind cutting through everything.
"My mother died when I was seven," she said after a while. "Lung cancer. She was a researcher too, worked with chemicals back before proper safety protocols. I remember her laugh more than anything. How it would start as this tiny giggle and build until her whole body shook. My father never laughed the same way after she died."
The gray waves crashed against the beach below us, rhythmic and endless. Seagulls wheeled overhead, crying about nothing and everything. The bags in our hands rustled with each gust—all those normal things we'd bought, those small domestic promises.
"I've never done this," I said suddenly. The words escaped before I could lock them down, carried away by wind and her presence and the strange vulnerability of daylight.
"Walked on a beach?"
