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He nods. “It’s a show of power. An open announcement that you are now untouchable.”
I crawl into bed next to him, desperate to snuggle against the warmth of his body. But I hold myself back, sliding my bare legs under the thick comforter with a careful sliver of space maintained between us. I roll onto my side to face him. He does the same, facing me so we’re barely a foot apart. His expression is miles away, though, lost in a myriad of plans that I’m hoping he’ll share with me, even as I know that I have no right to expect that.
“It’ll also make your mother happy,” I point out.
He snorts. “Is that why you’re willing to do it? To please my mother?”
“You have no idea how nice it was to meet her tonight. I don’t know if you understand how lucky you are to have a mother who cares.”
“It can be claustrophobic.”
“Spoken like a man who’s only ever known love from his parents.”
“Parent,” he corrects unexpectedly. “Singular. My father subscribed to the tough love system of parenthood. Actually, he subscribed to the tough system of parenthood. Love never factored into it.”
I realize a second later that I’m holding my breath. He’s never really brought up his father before. “Were your parents married until the end?”
“She didn’t have a choice; she had to stay whether she liked it or not. Leaving would have meant abandoning us and she never would have done that. So she turned a blind eye.”
“A blind eye to what?”
“My father kept mistresses since the day they got back from the honeymoon.”
“Oh my God,” I breathe. “And she just put up with it?”
“The one time she said something, he gave her a black eye. So she kept her mouth shut and focused on the three of us.”
“Misha…” I place my hand on his arm. The muscles of his forearm flex under my touch, but he doesn’t pull away. “How did you all feel about it?”
“It was our version of normal,” he murmurs casually. But I can sense the weight in his voice. The budding anger that he’s probably never fully expressed. “He was the don. He could make the rules and he could break them. It wasn’t our place or in our power to correct him.”
“What about when he wasn’t the don?”
His voice, when it finally emerges, is a low rasp. I feel it more than I hear it. “The day of his funeral, Maksim and I visited his latest whore in the four-bedroom house he bought for her. We told her she had a week to vacate the premises before we were coming back to burn it to the ground. Then we drove back home and opened a bottle of champagne with my mother and Nikita. The four of us got drunk that night.”
I smile, feeling the warmth of that memory like a campfire. I realize a beat too late that I’ve managed somehow to enter the crook of Misha’s arm. A beat after that, I realize he’s actually letting me stay there.
“I got drunk the day after Clara’s funeral,” I admit, lips brushing against his chest. “I was alone, so it wasn’t nearly as comforting as your memory. It was also really cheap wine, so I was sick for days after.”
He turns his silver gaze to me and tightens his arm around my shoulders. “How did she die?”
I’m so conscious of the way he’s holding me that it takes me a moment to process the question. “A shooting,” I say. “A drive-by. We lived in a bad neighborhood. There was this gang, a motorcycle club, who were involved in a lot of bad stuff in the area. There were three drive-by shootings that year. Clara was lucky number three.”
I’m amazed that my voice doesn’t shake. It’s been years since I’ve talked about this with anyone. But Misha holds my gaze for so long that I feel the anxiety of telling the story settle and ebb.
The strength of his arms lends me some strength of my own, because I hear myself say something I’ve only ever thought in the darkest, deepest recesses of my mind.
“I… could have stopped it,” I whisper. “I could have saved her.”
“No.” Misha shakes his head. “If there was any way you could have saved her, I know you would have. If there was even a sliver of a chance, she’d be alive right now. You did what you could. Sometimes, that just isn’t enough.”
61
MISHA
“You don’t understand…” she starts to say before a sob overtakes her.
I roll fully onto my side and fit Paige against me, fusing our bodies together. The t-shirt she’s wearing is thin enough that I can feel the swells of her breasts and the points of her nipples. I can also feel the cold metal of her pendant resting just an inch from my dog tag. Like the two objects are drawn together. Like each one recognizes the other.
