Her fingers curl into my shirt, a small unconscious fist, holding on to something even in sleep. I cover her hand with mine and shut my eyes.
She told me the truth tonight. Ripped it out of herself, handed me the ugliest pieces of her life, and trusted me to hold them without flinching. She gave me the real version.
I gave her the safe one.
I pull her closer and try very hard not to think about what happens when she finds out what I am.
11
NATALIA
I havethirty minutes to erase a man from my house.
Johnny’s coffee mug goes into the cabinet, not the drying rack. His toothbrush disappears under the bathroom sink. His clothes go to the back of the closet behind a suitcase I haven’t opened since I got here. The sketch he drew of me tucked flat under my mattress where no one will ever think to look.
I’m thorough. I’m careful. I move through the rooms with the focus of a woman who grew up watching her father’s men clean up after worse, and by the time I’m done, there’s not a single visible trace of Johnny left in this house.
I stand at the sink and scrub my hands even though they’re already clean. Somewhere out there, Johnny is walking toward Ronnie’s. No phone. No way to reach me.
We argued about it again before he left, his mouth a hard line, hands white-knuckled on the counter, looking at me like I was asking him to walk off a cliff. I told him Nikolai would kill a stranger in my house without blinking.
Johnny’s eyes went dark. For a second, he looked like someone who could match that violence.
Then he grabbed his jacket and walked out, and the house went cold.
I told him to come back after dark. Not because Nikolai will be here that long. Because my brother is the kind of person who doubles back. Who forgets something on purpose so he can catch you off guard.
I check my watch. He’s late. Of course he’s late. I straighten the throw pillows on the couch for the third time and stop myself before I start on a fourth.
I wonder what he was doing in Miami. Could be anything. With my family,businesscovers everything from real estate to body disposal.
Three hard knocks on the front door.
My shoulders climb toward my ears before I can stop them.
I smooth my face the way I’ve been smoothing it since I was a child. Pleasant. Unbothered. A little bored, maybe. The Kozlov daughter who never gives you anything you can use against her.
I open the door, and my brother fills the frame. Cropped dark hair. Our father’s jaw. Eyes the same shade of blue as mine, which I’ve always hated. The one thing I can’t separate from him.
“Nikolai.”
He doesn’t greet me. Walks straight past, his shoulder catching mine hard enough that my hip hits the doorframe, and the smell of stale cigarette smoke and expensive cologne trails behind himlike a warning. He’s across the living room before I’ve recovered my balance.
He drops his jacket on the arm of my couch, pulls open my fridge, and stares into it like it personally offended him.
“You don’t have shit in here.” He shuts it and moves to the bar cart. Pours himself three fingers of the good vodka without asking. “How long have you been here? Two months? And you’re living like a college dropout?”
“I keep it simple.”
“You keep it pathetic. There’s a difference.”
He drops onto the couch, knees spread, arm thrown wide. Taking up every inch of space his body will allow, the way he has in every room he’s walked into since he was old enough to realize it made people uncomfortable.
I sit in the chair across from him. Six feet of distance. Not enough.
I’ve spent my whole life reading Nikolai’s moods the way other people read weather reports.
Partly cloudy with a chance of violence.
