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“Thank you, Erik,” I said as Erik Dernov stopped in front of me and gazed down, then slowly extended the coffee toward me. I pretended not to notice his deliberate teasing and instead smiled at him. I took a sip from the cup, the caramel and espresso bursting on my tongue. “Were you outside the whole time?”
“Yes, imp. How dare you not say hello?” Erik reached out and pinched my cheek, just a little too hard. We’d been sort-of-friends, sort-of-family since my father brought him from Russia almost nine years ago, an intense and whip-thin boy who was nothing but high cheekbones, floppy ice-blonde hair, and burning green eyes.
Only his eyes remained the same. Everything else had filled out in cords of muscle and steel, his sharp jaw covered in a neat beard, his ice-blonde hair shaved down almost to the bone, and his boots lending him almost a foot and a half on me.
“How could I see you in that mob?” I nodded at the Bratva still swarming my Maserati.
“You and your Italian fixation,” he teased. I rolled my eyes. “Hey. Knock it off or I won’t tell you how much I missed you.”
“Didn’t you just do that?”
“Did I?” He slung his hands in his pockets. “Probably not as much as you missed me, though.”
“Oh yes, very true,” I said glibly, with a small and painful pinch of guilt.
As always, when I was with Erik, I couldn’t shake the sense that our friendship was nothing but geography. We were in each other’s orbit and the same age, both indulged by my father, as much as a man like my father could be indulgent. Beyond that, it was so hard to say. Was I an obligation more than I was an actual friend to Erik?
Or was it vice versa?
Because while Erik and I had kept in contact over the past five years that I’d been in school, I’d forgotten about him more often than not. It had nothing on the agonized separation between me and my bestie Clara. We’d kept up a fervent, near-daily text chain, calling and facetiming each other for hours on end, whether to chat or watch a movie or do homework together.
“Hmph.” Erik got that slightly superior look on his face and narrowed his gaze at me from behind his glasses, made from a thin, almost invisible metal frame. “Not as much as Clara, huh? I’ll have to make sure to change that.”
“Sure,” I said with a laugh and quickly spun on heel. “Well, my father’s expecting me.”
Erik said something, but I missed it because I was already through the front doors and on my way to the elevator bank. Only there was a quick, heavy sound of boots behind me, and Erik reappeared by my side, his eyes now narrowed at me, and he was about to speak when his name was called, causing him to slow down.
“Lisitsa,wait,” Erik commanded in a soft voice.
My shoulders stiffened.No one bosses me around.I cast a glance over my shoulder and when his stern and annoyed gaze met mine, I stuck my tongue out.
Erik’s mouth thinned into an invisible line, but someone grabbed his arm, speaking in urgent Russian, and I heard something that sounded like,“...fucking Scorpion, do you know what this means? Erik, you have to—”
The elevator dinged and I hopped on. As the doors closed, I caught a quick glimpse of Erik and the man speaking to him, who’d lowered his voice. I noted that the cords in Erik’s neck were standing out like he was a boxer being held back in a ring from tearing some guy’s head off.
Can’t tell me what to do, not sorry,I sang out in my head.
Just as the doors were about to close, Erik shook himself and glanced over in time to see me flash a smirk and the peace sign, then I was zooming up to the top floor.
I left my thoughts about him on the ground floor and instead began to think about the coming hours spent with my dad. First, we’d head to Moth Hill Stables, exclusive stables tucked against a river to the north, riding our favorite horses on our favorite trails. After, we’d split up briefly to go to the spa, indulging in a steam or a soak, then meet back up for a lunch at the restaurant. Later, we might drive to a little town in the middle of nowhere and dig through a thrift shop, which was a secret weakness of my father’s. He found it hilarious how Americans were such cluttered, extravagant capitalists.
If he was in areallygood mood, he might tell me stories of North Russia and the horses he rode on the plains, the way the light hit the winter snow and the open, windy skies. He hadn’t lived there long, but it still made an impression on him and sometimes if I caught him staring into space, I thought he was back in the tundra, trying to race toward freedom and avoid the bloodied Bratva destiny that his family had already decided for him.
For, in a cruel twist of fate, the Fedulov family sent young Viktor to the country for the first fourteen years of his life, only to abruptly remove him from the only world he knew to be trained in cities across Russia before being shipped to America to join a father he barely knew.
Or is that just the story he told you?Whispered a husky voice in my ear as the elevator smoothly pulled to a stop and the doors slid open.What did I always tell you?I hurried off as though I could escape it, but it kept going, dropping to a hiss.
Don’t let him fool you, daughter.
I stopped dead and rubbed at my forehead, glancing out the window to the waving green and sparkle of a little pond behind this hulking building. There was a memory out there, waiting and flickering, and I tried to only remember the bright spots.
My father with his white shirtsleeves rolled up and his gray suit jacket tossed onto the grass. His big and capable hands tearing off chunks of bread to hand to me so I could feed the ducks. Then, catching me up in a hug and laughing, making me squeal as he tossed me toward the blue sky and caught me before gravity could even catch up.
No more.A sharp burst of pain went through my temple. I didn’t want to remember the rest. It had been one of the few times that my mother and I had come to this office to visit him.
Why am I thinking about her?I asked myself angrily, and a little helplessly.
For the most part, I’d done a good job tamping down her voice, but in times of stress or sleep deprivation—of which I’d had neither recently—my mother’s poison returned in full force.
