I know it’s dawn, not because there are windows in my cell to show me the sky—there aren’t—but because I feel it in my heart that the first day of the rest of my life has arrived, and it’s nothing like how I thought it would look.
Some clocks aren’t on the wall.
Some clocks are in yourbones.
The man who just ripped off my hood stomps away, keys jangling at his belt. As he goes, he informs me with all the warmth of a brick fucking wall that someone has posted my bond.
He doesn’t tell me who and I don’t bother asking. There’s only one person who could’ve known already what happened and then done something about it.
They process me out the side door, return my belongings in a manila envelope with my name spelled wrong, and dump me on the curb of East Sixty-Seventh in the same clothes I was arrested in—black slacks, black shirt, no jacket, no belt, no laces.
February is doing what February does: freezing the shit out of everything it touches. My breath is coming out in white puffs. So is the exhaust from the Mercedes idling at the curb, waiting for me.
The passenger door pops open as I approach. I slide in and close it behind me, then shut my eyes and let my head fall back against the seat. “Fuck.”
Afon, smoking a Sobranie and exhaling it through a crack in the window, points a tobacco-stained finger at a Styrofoam cup in the center console. “That’s for you, nephew.”
I take the coffee and drink gratefully.
We ride in silence to the FDR and then down to the Williamsburg Bridge. I don’t know where we’re headed, but right this second, I don’t give a damn. I feel beaten-down in a way I’ve never been beaten before.
What the fuck happened? How did we end up here? I have a thousand questions, and nine hundred and ninety-nine of them have to do with Cass. But I don’t ask them yet.
“They tossed your apartment,” Afon says out of nowhere as we’re passing over the bridge.
“And?”
“Waste of their time. We got there first.”
“I’m sure they have everything they need from the scene,” I mutter.
Afon shakes his head. “Nah. The Glock is gone. An unfortunate littleoopsfrom the Evidence department. There’s enough of a hole in the story for you to slide through. How exactly you do that is up to you, but the Bratva has given you the out you need.”
I rub my throbbing temples. “My thanks to the head honcho, then. I assume we’re gonna go pay him a visit?”
“Not yet. Lukas thinks you need some time to decompress before you’re of any use to us. In my opinion, he’s not wrong.”
“Fuck,” I say again. “Let me get one of those cigarettes.”
My uncle has never offered me one before and I’ve never asked. But he offers me the pack and his lighter with nothing more than a mildly arched eyebrow. I light it up and inhale, but if I thought it was going to offer me some comfort, I’m dead fucking wrong. It just makes the ashes in my mouth taste more like ashes.
But I’m nothing if not stubborn, so I’ll burn this joyless bastard down to the filter. As I do, smoke spiraling around my head, I stare blankly out of the window and think about Cass.
She’s awake by now. Has to be. That half-milligram doesn’t last forever, and they’d have shaken her out of it sooner rather than later. New York cops aren’t exactly known for letting a person sleep through their own arrest.
I can picture her fear all too well. Her mouth dry. Her hands cuffed. Some mustached lifer across the table from her with a folder full of photographs he’s going to slide her way one at a time, watching her face for every little micro-tell.
She’ll ask about me. She won’t be able to help it. Whatever he tells her about where I am, whether true or false, she’ll hear it and her stomach will drop in a way that I will, if there is any justice in this world, get to apologize for in person. One day.
Will that day come soon? I have no fucking clue.
I’m here, dikarka, I think uselessly, as if she can hear me.I haven’t gone anywhere. Hold on.
When the cigarette is half-gone, Afon glances over at me. His eyes are tired in a way I’ve only ever seen them tired twice in my life: once when my father died, and once, twenty years back, on the day his wife was buried.
“Talk to me,plemyannik,” he orders. “Start at the beginning. I want every part of it. Including the parts you have been keeping from me.”
So I do. It doesn’t take as long as I figured it would. In the end, the story isn’t that complicated: I met a woman I never should’ve met, and things got complicated.
