She points at a stool. “Sit.”
My best friend’s wife is getting bossy as hell these days. But I sit anyway.
She refills her mug from a kettle on the stove, then pulls down another, fills it, and slides it across to me without asking what I want. It’s tea. Some herbal thing. I don’t drink tea, but I hold it for the warmth.
Jillian leans against the counter across from me. She sips her tea and watches me over the rim of her mug, her green eyes steady, and waits for me to spill my guts.
This is an old reporter trick of hers. I’ve watched her do it to sources. She did it to me the first time Kir brought me to dinner, and I sat there and told her, unprompted, about a case I shouldn’t have been talking about, because the silence got long enough that I filled it.
I’m not going to do it this time.
“So are you gonna talk,” she asks at last, “or are you gonna make me put my reporter hat on and start asking prying questions?”
I shrug. “What’s there to talk about?”
She rolls her eyes. “The hard way it is, then. Alright. Why are you here?”
“I wanted to see Kir.”
Her gaze narrows. But then she exhales and the hardness goes out of her face. “Whatever it is, you can say it out loud in this kitchen. It won’t leave.”
I set the mug down and run a hand over my jaw. I haven’t shaved, so the stubble is past the point of being attractive and into caveman territory.
“There’s a… job,” I say carefully. “The kind that comes with collateral.”
Her hand moves, very slightly, to her stomach again. I don’t think she knows she does that. It’s been happening a lot in the last few weeks, every time something’s heavy in the room.
“Hm.” She picks up her mug again. “And you came to Kir, on New Year’s morning, to ask him to talk you into it? Or out of it?”
“Something along those lines.”
She nods. “You’re stuck with me instead, though.”
“Lucky me.”
She pulls out the stool across from me and sits on it. “Okay. I’m not going to ask who the collateral is, or what the job is. I don’t want to know. But I’m going to ask you something else.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why did you say yes?”
“To the job?”
She nods.
I look at the mug in my hands. I haven’t thought about my dad in a long time. The last time I saw him, Afon was showing me how to rinse the blood off my hands in a puddle before we left him behind for good. That was also the moment that Afon and I intertwined our fates. I owed my uncle every breath I would ever take from then on.
I tried to fight that link. I convinced myself that walking away from the Bratva at fifteen would be enough to sever the tie. Law school, the firm, the clean suits and clean record. For a littlewhile there, I was so sure I’d done it. Achieved escape velocity. Broken free.
Turns out, the tie has always been loose around my neck.
Just waiting to tighten.
“Because I owe somebody,” I answer at last. “And this is the bill.”
Jillian nods. She expected something along those lines, I’m sure, so she’s not surprised in the least.
“Mat,” she says eventually, “can I tell you something?” She turns her mug in her hands. “I’m a late addition to this family. You know that. I came to it as a reporter, originally, asking questions I shouldn’t have been asking. And then I stayed. I’ve learned a lot of things, and I made my peace with a lot more. So when I tell you this, I’m not telling you from the cheap seats. Okay? I’m telling you from inhere. With you.”
