Page 171 of Mafia King’s Dangerous Vow

I stop several feet away from him. Any closer, and I might ask for comfort before I know whether I can survive receiving it.

“Your father?” he asks.

“Still alive.”

Mikhail sighs behind me. “Regrettably.”

Aleksander doesn’t acknowledge that. “And?”

I take a breath. “I watched him realize what’s happening.”

“Nice.”

I want to ask what happens next. Then a pencil scratches against paper in the dining room, and I forget the question.

Aleksander sees the shift. His voice lowers. “He’s at the table.”

I walk past him before I can decide not to.

Ivan sits at the dining table with one knee tucked under him, dark hair falling over his forehead, pencil moving in careful, frustrated strokes. Half a waffle sits abandoned on a plate beside him, smeared with Nutella and forgotten. He has changed out of his school clothes into a gray sweatshirt too big in the sleeves. His face is pale and tired, the way children look after crying too hard and pretending they are done.

Anna sits beside him, close enough that her arm brushes his shoulder.

She looks up as I enter. Ivan’s pencil stops. I see the drawing before I understand I am looking for it.

The blue house.

The same peaked roof. The same crowded trees. The same too-many windows. The square room drawn off the back is darker now, the lines gone over again and again until the paper has started to dent beneath the pressure of the pencil. He has added a second path leading away from the front door.

No people. No sun. No car.

Just the house and the paths and too many windows.

“Hi,” I say.

Ivan looks at Anna before he answers.

That hurts.

I let it.

“Hi,” he says finally.

His voice is smaller than it was outside the school. Younger. The adrenaline is gone now. What remains is a child who has been taken somewhere unfamiliar by adults who keep lowering their voices whenever he walks into the room.

Anna’s hand shifts closer to his.

I almost ask her how he is.

Then I catch myself.

He is sitting right here, pencil in hand, shoulders too stiff beneath the oversized sweatshirt, eyes moving between adults as if every lowered voice is another thing he is supposed to understand.

So I look at him instead. “How are you feeling?”

Ivan’s mouth tightens. “Fine.”

The answer is automatic. A child’s version of a locked door.