Page 43 of Cruel Lies

"No," Navi agrees easily, smoke curling up between us. "But it wasn't a shallow grave in the marshes, either. Take the win, Ro. You're allowed one occasionally." He studies me. "You're in a mood. And it's not just Pyotr. You've had this look since I called. What happened to you today?"

"Business," I say sharply, before my mind drifts to anything or anyone it shouldn't be drifting near.

But I'm not thinking about Pyotr anymore, not really. The problem he leaves behind is the same problem that's been keeping me up for months: I need a new way to make dirty money look clean.

To do that, I need something legitimate, something real. A business with real revenue and real customers, with books that audit clean because theyareclean, a structure complex enough that money could disappear into it and come out the other side smiling.

Just like that, I have my answer.

And luckily for me… I still owe her one more drink.

12

CALI

It's weird to be on the other side of a life-changing event. There are plenty of movies and books that will show you exactly how to handle planning and revenge and the climactic moment of complete and total victory over your enemies.

But nobody tells you what to do the next morning.

I spent all this time pointed at a single goal like a heat-seeking missile, and now, the target's vaporized, with a mushroom cloud of atomic smoke still rising up over Whitmore Stearns.

Mission accomplished.

Job well done.

You go, girl.

And now, I'm… standing in my own kitchen at nine forty-five in my ratty pink bathrobe with a half-eaten waffle, blinking like I've just walked out of a movie theater into the afternoon and forgotten where I parked.

It's a Saturday. No therapy, not that there ever was any to begin with. Todd is gone—notgonegone, but he's not here, which is fine by me. I assume he's at a hotel. Or maybe he's at Paula's? Either way, I genuinely do not care.

That's weird, too. How can I justnot care?I cared so much, and then it just vanished. I keep poking at the emotional space where I expected to care like a tongue worrying a missing tooth, half-expecting it to hurt. No matter how many times I poke, it doesn't.

Hayden is at the kitchen table reading me Wikipedia facts about how milk is pasteurized and the various technical aspects of the SR-71 Blackbird, which is apparently some kind of very fast plane, I think. Isabella is on the floor performing surgery on a stuffed narwhal with a butter knife.

I'm almost starting to relax into it when the doorbell rings.

"I'll get it!" Hayden announces, springing half out of his chair.

I put a hand on his chest and say, "You will absolutely not get it" with the instantaneous reflex of a mother who has watched too many true-crime documentaries.

I check the little window beside the door?—

—and my heart jumps into my throat.

It's him.

Ronan Akov is standing on my front steps in charcoal suit pants and a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He's calm and casual, but in a poised, almost coiled kind of way. He's like a panther asked a genie for one wish, and that wish was to be turned into a very rich and very good-looking man. Nice work by the genie, if we're being honest.

Stomaching roiling, I open the door six inches and not one fraction more.

"How do you know where I live?" I say immediately.

"Your husband's retainer agreement," he answers, unbothered. "It had the marital address on it."

"You creeped on Todd's paperwork so you could stalk me?"

“I told you I sat on his case. I never said I didn't read the file."