He’s quiet for a moment, and then he nods once, but I see him calculating something he won’t verbalize.
“I need to sit down,” I say. “I’ve had a very big morning.”
The corner of his mouth moves, just barely, in the way it does when something has gotten through. He pulls out the chair across from his desk, and I sit in it, and he sits across from me, and for a moment we are simply two people in an office at theend of a day that has rearranged the world, and the city darkens around us.
He’s still thinking, though. Something lingers in his mind about all of this, and I pray I didn’t hurt his feelings. A refused proposal has to hurt a guy, doesn’t it? No matter how much he might say he’s okay, tension radiates from Pavel.
I think I’m going to be sick.
That doesn’t change my answer, though.
16
PAVEL
I wantto tell her she’s wrong, but she’s not wrong.
She’s not wrong about any of it—not about the proposal, not about the timing, not about the door, or who should be the one to open it. I understand what she said. I understand it more completely than she knows, because I have spent twenty years making decisions for people who didn’t get to make them for themselves.
Her mother. Fifteen years old and desperate enough to run toward anything that looked like escape, not realizing she was dooming her child to be haunted by that decision.
I think about that for a moment, and the particular anger I reserve for men who use their size and their authority to diminish the people in their care bubbles to the surface. Molly’s grandfather. A man I will never meet and do not need to meet to understand completely.
He was a bully. I have spent many years fighting men like that, and, in some ways, have become the same because of that fight.
I proposed to Molly like the children were the argument for marriage, like I was her grandfather standing behind her with the circumstances in my hand instead of a gun.
I understand why she said no. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that she has to say yes anyway.
I come around the desk. I don’t reach for her. I stand close enough that she has to look up at me, and she can’t look away easily. “I understand what you told me. I understand why you said no, and I’m not dismissing it, no matter what this may sound like. What your mother went through is an awful thing that happened, and what you feel because of it is legitimate, and none of that is something I intend to argue with.”
“But?”
I hold her gaze steadily. “But I need you to hear something now, and I need you to hear it the way I mean it, which is not as a man trying to get his way. It is as a man trying to keep you alive.”
Something shifts in her expression. “Keep me alive?”
“Fedor Vinogradov knows about you. Do you know who he is?”
“I’ve heard his name whispered by your men, but that’s about it.”
“That is a shame. This would be easier if you already knew.” I lean on the desk to settle in for the explanation. “One of his men sat across a table from me and used you as a bargaining chip. He said the wordsafelike it was a threat, which it was, and it meant that Fedor has already identified you as the mechanism by which he intends to make me compliant.” I let that sit for a moment. “You understand what compliant means in this context.”
Her deep breath and long exhale tell me a lot already. “So, all this time, all these precautions, Vet, it’s all… real.”
“Quite.”
“How come you never told me before?”
“That’s a valid question. One I don’t have a good answer for. The truth is, I am selfish, and I wanted you around. So, I didn’t tell you directly about what being with me could mean. That was wrong of me, and for that, I am sorry.” Why does apology feel like defeat? “But the facts remain that Fedor, an enemy of mine, knows your name and knows you are special to me. Do you know what that means?”
“Yes,” she says quietly. “I understand what it means.”
“In the world of the bratva, a girlfriend is disposable.”
“Real progressive of you people.”
