***
Time flits by. The other side of an hour finds us at the bar, our laughter intermingling seamlessly. I’ve learned so much about myself tonight.
Once I got used to the weight of the axe, I had a blast conquering it. My aim is still best with knives. Iosif lookedimpossibly pleased about it, just as he looked affronted when we discovered that I adore a rum and coke but find vodka gross. “We just can’t make an honorary Russian of you.”
“Leonid prefers whiskey, too!”
“He was lying so he could fuck with me about you.”
“Oh.”
The urge to lean in and do something reckless, like kiss his horribly handsome face, doesn’t dissipate so much as it fades to the background. In the forefront, we talk. Incessantly. About nothing and everything—the café, his siblings, my old school friends, and even when pineapple belongs on pizza.
I’ve never laughed this much in my life.
Every inch of my skin is flushed and buzzing when he leans in, his hand covering my knee. Squeezing it. “You’re amazing, do you know that?” Those words are quiet and soft, an intimacy reserved for me alone in this arena of casual violence.
His praise is like the sun to me. It warms me down to the marrow.
“Are you hoping flattery will get you somewhere?” I look him in the eye. I’ll be blaming the rum for how breathless I sound.
His mouth opens.
“Well, well, well. Look what we have here,” someone drawls behind us.
Iosif whips around. My spine is ice. Every muscle in my body freezes. I know this voice, thickly accented and sickeningly lecherous.
Kavinsky looks the same. He’s plucked right out of my nightmares—the same white-blonde hair, greasy-looking withgel, still in the black mesh tank he was that night, though his motorcycle jacket is missing now. When he smiles, his silver canine winks at me. My stomach roils in terror.
The wound he cut into me—the one he roared with stone-cold laughter about—goes cold and tight.
“Yuri, you couldn’t send someone to make the return?” Kavinsky clucks his tongue. I can’t look at Iosif’s face. I can’t. “She’s in pretty great shape. Huh. I would’ve thought you’d broken her in worse. Looks like no wear and tear.”
Iosif is still as a statue. Yet I can viscerally feel the storm that is roiling within him. When my gaze finds his hands, they are in tightly wound fists. I see one twitch toward his knife.
“Don’t,” I find myself insisting.
What surprises me most is that it isn’t because Idon’twant him to do to Kavinsky what he did to Hernandez that night. I could live with standing in a pool of Kavinsky’s blood. But I’m through being a pawn.
No more.
“Surely, you’ve gotten your money’s worth out of her now,” Kavinsky scoffs. His eyes rake over me again and again. I am numb to it, so cold.
Iosif’s gaze finds me. I’m not sure what he sees in my face. Whatever it is elicits an exhale from him, and he makes a sweeping gesture in front of himself, telling me togo on.
“Is he done using you?” Kavinsky hollers from across the room. “I’ve been fuckingdreamingabout that pretty little mouth. Been thinking about it since I had you up on that wall, all helpless and—”
I’ve drawn the dagger before he knows what I’m doing. It whistles through the air, plunging by his head. I wouldn’t besurprised if I sliced off a few strands of his disgusting hair. The hunger pulsing in his bottomless eyes, watching me bend at the waist and drag up my pant leg, snuffs out.
I don’t have to look back at Iosif to know he’s looking at me with another hunger entirely. Something purely Iosif.
“I’ve been dreaming about you, too,svolotsch,” I admit. Nadya taught me that one as a part of my Russian education.
When I hold out my hand, Iosif automatically slips the handle of his knife into it.
“I want that back,” he mutters in my ear.
I look down to find it’s the one he pulled from the target by my head that first night.
