Page 149 of Cruel Lies

"Todd's a loose end," I say slowly. "But he's not mine. He's not on my payroll, he's not in my chain, I can't reach into him and shut his mouth or shut his story. He's out there flapping, and every word he says makes it worse for us, but we can't do a single thing about it."

"That's about the size of it, yeah."

I stand up and walk to the window. As a yellow cab crawls down the road forty stories below, I wonder if it contains Cali. She has no idea what's coming.

That's the thought that clears my head. Not the subpoena. Not the men who now think I'm a rat.

Her.

"Navi," I say. "Listen to me carefully." I regrip the phone in my sweaty hand. "If our people think I flipped, they think Todd flipped, and if they think Todd flipped, who else might they suspect? What will they do when they draw that inevitable conclusion?"

It doesn't take him long to arrive at the answer. "They'll go after her," Navi whispers.

I nod. "Exactly. Todd is under federal protection as long as he keeps snitching. Me, I'm thepakhan, I've got soldiers and walls. But Cali? She has nothing. She's a civilian in a brownstone with two kids under ten. To them, she looks like the easiest way to figure out what I've told the feds and how much they need to burn to get clear of it."

"Okay," Navi says. "Fuck. Okay. What do you want to do?"

This is the stuff I know. This part, at least, I've done a thousand times. I've spent a lifetime practicing how to set aside everything but the essential facts. My feelings for Cali, as much as they're torturing me, are irrelevant right now.

It's her life that matters most of all.

"Put men on the brownstone. Now. I don't want her to know they're there. Undercover, plainclothes, but make sure they're armed. Two on the front, one on the alley, one on the roofline across the street. Rotate them so nobody clocks a pattern."

"Consider it done."

"Then some on the kids. Both kids' camps, wherever they are this week—Cali will have it in her calendar, hack it, steal it, I don't care how you figure it out, but do it. Somebody near the drop-off,somebody near the pickup. If a car sits too long, I want to know the plate before the engine's cold."

"You got it."

I pause. There's one more thing, and it makes my jaw tighten just to say it, because everything in me that's still my father's son wants to let it happen. Todd flipped. He's the reason the roof is coming down. He took a hatchet to Cali's life for a year and a half and did it smiling. If somebody put the motherfucker in the river tomorrow, I would not shed one tear, and neither would most of the men who work for me.

But…

"Put men on Todd, too," I say.

Navi actually laughs out loud. "OnTodd?! Ro, why waste the manpower? He's the snitch. If anything, we should have our people take him off the board?—"

"That's exactly why I want eyes on him." I press two fingers to the bridge of my nose. "I don't give one single damn what happens to Todd Bradshaw's skin. But if he turns up dead, if some idiot with something to prove decides to do the Bratva a favor and cleans up the loose end… You know what he is? He's a father. That's Hayden and Isabella's father, dead in a gutter, and no matter what he did or how much he deserves whatever's coming to him, those two kids will spend the rest of their lives knowing their dad got murdered in the middle of all this. And Cali—" I stop to regather myself. "She'll know it happened while she was in orbit of me. I'm not going to let those kids carry that. So you keep him breathing. Not for him. Forthem."

Navi's quiet for a second. Then: "Your old man really is dead in you, huh?"

"I don't want to talk about him."

"I mean it as a compliment." But he lets it go. "I'll handle all of it. Give me an hour and there won't be a square foot of pavement around that woman that isn't watched."

"Go," I say. "Call me when it's set."

He hangs up.

I stand at the window and let myself breathe for the first time since she walked out. She's covered now, or she will be within the hour, and she'll never know it. That's how it has to be. I broke her trust, and here I am doing it again, but this time, I can't even tell her it's for her own good, because I've used up that phrase. I've burned it down to toxic ash. She'll never believe another word I say.

Fine. She doesn't have to believe me.

She just has to be alive.

That's when I decide something. I've been trying to do preciselythisthe whole way through: Be the man who makes the necessary calls.

And every step, she saw a man who decided things for her without her consent.