"I just found out this morning," Jade said, setting the cake box gently on the island. "Lily told me at the crack of dawn like it was a hostage drop."
"Same," Sienna said, lowering the ramen bags. "The man does not put it on the calendar. The man does not acknowledge there is a calendar. The man would deny linear time if you asked him to confirm it."
I pressed my hands against my cheeks. I was already laughing.
"Okay," I said. "What's the plan?"
Lily pulled a glittery paper cone hat with an elastic string out of her bag and held it up like a trophy.
"Kiddie party," Lily said. "We make fun of them. They walk in, and they cannot say no in front of us. That is the entire trap."
There was a beat. Then we all lost it at the same time, the kind of laugh that makes your stomach hurt. Rhea, sensing chaos, abandoned her secret project and came running.
"What are we doing?" Rhea demanded.
"Baby," Jade said, dropping into a crouch, "we are throwing your uncle a birthday party."
Rhea's eyes went enormous. "Can I help?"
"You're in charge," Lily said. Rhea gasped like she had been knighted.
We moved into the dining room. Streamers came out of Lily's bag like a magician's scarves, and Sienna stood on a chair to thread them across the chandelier while Jade fed her the ends. The cake landed in the center of the table, buttercream with rainbow sprinkles and Happy Birthday Daniil piped in crooked cursive across the top. Balloons anchored to chair backs. Plates with cartoon stars at every place setting, and beside every plate, one pointy paper hat.
"Where did you even get all this?" I asked, taping a fan of streamers to the wall.
"Party City has a drive-through energy if you commit," Sienna said over her shoulder from the chair.
"That's not a thing," Jade said, handing up another streamer.
"It is when I'm the customer," Sienna said.
Rhea claimed a corner of the table with a stack of construction paper, three packs of color pastels, and the focused expression of a Renaissance painter. She would not let any of us look. She was working, she informed us. The rest of us were not to disturb her.
It took twenty minutes flat. Watching the three of them I realized they had done this before, maybe not for Daniil, butfor someone. They handed each other tape without asking. They corrected each other's streamer angles before a word got said.
Lily glanced at her phone.
"Alek says they are wrapping up." She looked up, eyes lit. "Positions. They're coming."
We scrambled. Sienna flicked off the overhead and left only the soft lamp in the corner so the table glowed. Jade dropped into a chair by the window. Rhea hid her card behind her back and grinned with her whole face. Lily took the far side of the room. I stationed myself by the door, party hat in hand, heart suddenly thudding.
I heard them before I saw them. Four sets of footsteps in the hall, the low rumble of Russian, Mikhail saying something in English about needing a sandwich the size of his head.
They came through the doorway in a row, and we shouted.
"Happy birthday!" we shouted.
Mikhail stopped first, blinked at the balloons, and broke into a grin that lit his whole face. Ivan stopped second, took in the streamers, and wore the look of a man who had walked into the wrong house. Alek stopped third, his single good eye moving slowly across the room, taking inventory.
Daniil stopped in the doorway.
His face did something I had never seen it do. The muscle along his jaw worked once. His gray-green eyes went bright in a way that had nothing to do with light. His mouth parted, then closed, then parted again, and for a second I thought my brawler bratva boyfriend was going to cry at the sight of streamers and a sheet cake.
"Is it really my birthday?" he said, low, almost to himself. "I did not expect this."
I stepped to him with the hat in my hand. He looked down at me. I rose up on my toes and set it on his dark hair, snapped the elastic gently under his chin. The scar at his temple caughtthe lamp light. He stared at me like I had just handed him something more important than I knew.
"Let's just be happy on your birthday," I said softly.
