"You will." He takes my hands, turning them palm-up, examining the damage with the focus he usually reserves for wounds that might kill. "When the shock wears off. You'll feel all of it."
"Is that a threat or a promise?"
"Both."
He pulls splinters from my skin while Andrei navigates crosstown traffic, and I watch my blood well up in the spaces they leave behind. Red on white. Life on silk. The same colors as The Plaza ballroom floor that night, bodies cooling while we walked out alive.
Some stains never wash out.
I'm starting to think I am one.
We pickup Mila from school, because life doesn't stop for verdicts. Because nine-year-olds need routine. Because if I go home to that empty penthouse right now, I'll start screaming and never stop.
She's waiting at the pickup line with her backpack clutched to her chest—different backpack than the one Matthew bugged, thank God—and when she spots the SUV, her face does something complicated.
Hope. Fear. The wariness of a child who's learned that cars bringing parents can also bring bad news.
Then she sees my face through the window, and the wariness melts.
"Did the lady go to jail?"
I pull her into the backseat, into my lap, not caring that I'm bleeding on her uniform. "Yeah, sweetheart. She went to jail."
"Good." She says it with the vicious certainty only children possess. "She was mean."
"She was."
"Papa says people who make other people sad should face contest-quences."
"Consequences," Sergei corrects from the front seat.
"That's what I said." She pulls back, examining my face with those too-old eyes. "You look weird."
"Weird how?"
"Like you're gonna fall down. But also like you might bite someone." She touches my cheek, small fingers gentle. "Are you gonna fall down or bite someone?"
"I haven't decided yet."
"If you're gonna fall down, do it on the couch. It's squishy." She wriggles off my lap, settling into her booster seat. "If you're gonna bite someone, do it to the news people. They were outside school again asking about Daddy's 'checkered past.'"
Sergei's knuckles go white on the steering wheel. "Which reporters?"
"The blonde one with the big teeth. And the man who smells like onions."
"Names, ptichka. Did you get names?"
"Daddy." She rolls her eyes with the exasperation of a teenager trapped in a nine-year-old's body. "I'm in fourth grade. We're not studying journalism."
I laugh. It comes out wrong—too sharp, too loud, more bark than laugh—but it's something. A sound that isn't screaming or crying or the flat nothing that's been pressing on my chest since the gavel fell.
"Ice cream," I announce. "We're getting ice cream."
"It's March."
"Ice cream doesn't have a season."
Mila grins. The same grin Sergei uses when he's won an argument. "That's what I always say."
