Page 124 of Mafia King’s Dangerous Vow

“Kalinin still thinks he has something you need,” Aleksander says.

I look back toward the road, toward the town, toward the school I can no longer see. “He has something he stole from me.”

The wind moves across the pond, thin and cold.

For eight years, my father let me grieve a child who was alive. He let me bury an empty casket. Then he put my son’s photograph in my hand and watched me bleed for it.

He wanted to see me break.

“I want him ruined. Not paid back. Not punished. Ruined. I want him to lie awake counting everything he used to have.”

“Tamara.”

“Don’t.” I turn and look at him fully. “Don’t hand me back to the woman who flinched in his office. I’m done flinching.”

Recognition moves through Aleksander’s expression.

“He took eight years from me. I’m not asking for eight years back. I’m asking for all of his.”

“That’s a war.”

“Good.”

The word leaves me without hesitation, my own voice foreign.

“Take everything that makes him matter. The doors. The papers. The men who answer when he calls. I want him standing in an empty room wondering when he became no one.”

His face doesn’t move.

“And when there’s nothing left of him, I want to be the one who tells him I did it.”

Aleksander understands what I am asking him to become. Then he says, “Yes.”

The decision settles inside me.

Not peace.

Something colder, sharper, and entirely mine.

30

COFFEE IS POSSIBLE. (ALEKSANDER)

The Maybach is twenty minutes south of Woodstock when Tamara finally stops crying.

After that, she sits beside me with my handkerchief folded in her hand and her face turned toward the darkening window, watching the Hudson Valley flatten into highway, then industry, then the first hard edges of the city.

Her eyes are dry now. That concerns me more than the tears did.

Grief that moves can be held. Grief that goes still begins choosing what it will become.

Take it from him, she had said.

Not kill him.

Take the doors. The papers. The men who answer when he calls. Whatever makes him useful to you, take it.

My wife had asked me for revenge in the language of infrastructure.