"Mm." He drank. "And what do you think the boy gave us, Aleksi, on the desk in this room? When Warrick took his finger?" He set the glass down. "That was the price. The organization took its flesh. I watched it come off, and I'll carry that the rest of my life, same as you will. The books are square. He paid in full, and he paid more than the debt was worth, and I won't be collecting on it twice."
The thing in my chest that had been clenched since the elevator let go all at once. I'd come in here braced for a fight, for a price, for Nikita to name some condition I'd have to swallow. Instead, he was telling me it was already done. Had been donefor weeks. Fin had bought his own freedom with a finger on this desk, and I'd been too busy keeping him alive to understand it.
"He's free," Nikita said. "Off the books. Sanctioned. If any man in this organization lays a hand on him, he answers to you, and then he answers to me. I'll put the word out myself." He almost smiled. "Now stop looking at me like I've performed a miracle. I'm an old queer who did terrible things for the man he loves. I'm only giving you what I'd have torn this city apart to keep."
I stood to go. My business was done, and there was a drive ahead of me and a man in the waiting room I wanted to get to.
Yuri set his glass down on the arm of the chair. He hadn't touched more than a sip of it.
"Aleksi."
I stopped.
He looked up at me, and for a second, I saw my father in him the way I always did and always hated — the same bones, the same hands, gone quiet and careful where Sacha had been loud. Yuri had buried his brother. He'd done the work himself, in his own home, with his own hands, because he wouldn't let anyone else touch him. He never talked about it. He wasn't going to talk about it now.
"Your father couldn't have done what you did this month," he said. "Any of it. He'd have run to Paris, or run to a bottle, or run to a woman, and called it love the whole way." He folded his hands. "You stayed. You bled. You took the boy in, and you stood up for the stray, and you came in here and asked for the thing you wanted instead of stealing it in the dark." He paused, and the room warmed a few degrees. "He'd be proud of you. I knew him better than anyone alive, so you can believe me when I say it. He'd be proud, and he'd never have managed to tell you, and that was his great failing, not yours."
My throat was suddenly too tight to swallow.
"Go on," Yuri said with a gentle smile. "Your man’s waiting. So is mine." He gave Nikita a look that, a few months ago, would’ve had me running for the door. But now I understood what it was. It wasn’t the hollow, shallow thing my father handed out like chewing gum. It was something real, something bought and paid for with blood and years. It was the same look I hoped to wear when I looked at Fin in thirty years.
The waiting room was the usual gray box with the usual bad coffee. The first thing I saw coming out of Nikita's office was Gregori with his sleeves pushed up to the elbows and EJ damn near in his lap looking at his tattoos.
Gregori had a piece on that forearm I'd seen a hundred times and never thought about — skin done up to look like it had been peeled back, flayed open, and underneath it pistons and valves and the guts of an engine, inked so real it looked like you could reach in and burn your hand. He was turning his wrist in the light. EJ had his chin in his hand and his elbow on his knee, and his whole face tipped up at Gregori like the man was reading him poetry. Gregori — who could make a tail in traffic from three cars back, who'd never missed a threat in his life — was explaining crankshafts and didn't notice that EJ was clearly, hopelessly falling in love.
"Gregori."
He looked up. EJ jumped a foot.
"That's my brother now," I said.
Gregori blinked. "I was just showing him my—"
“Well don’t.” And to EJ I said, “You’re barking up the wrong tree, kid. Gregori’s so straight it hurts.”
“Aye, that’s what ye used to think too, and ye turned out to be somethin’ else, didn’t ye?”
And there was Fin, leaning against the poor secretary’s desk in his houndstooth suit, fedora on crooked, looking like a million bucks.
"I’ll show you something else," I threatened, and crossed the room to him.
I didn't care that we were in Nikita's waiting room, or that the secretary was pretending very hard to read her monitor, or that my newest brother was watching me with his whole moon face. I grabbed a handful of that houndstooth suit and yanked Fin into a messy kiss.
When I pulled back, he was grinning up at me from under the crooked fedora.
"Well?" he said. "Am I free, then? Did ye square it with the boss?"
"You're free." I took his maimed hand and laced mine through it without thinking, the way I did every night now. "Anybody lays a hand on you, they answer to me."
“And me!” Niko appeared out of fucking nowhere to pinch Fin’s cheeks. “And the squirt too.” He gestured to EJ.
“Me?!” EJ squeaked.
“Aye, yer a Laskin now, lad,” Fin said, grinning. “Get used to it.”
Niko and I both somehow wound up staring at Gregori at the same time as if we expected something from him.
The big, stoic Russian glanced slowly between us, shrugged and said, “What the hell? Me too.”
