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“You couldn’t just drop me off in the nearest town and do this by yourself?” I ask as Jasha pours me a steaming cup of tea.
Power has been returned to the train since we’ve given up trying to conserve fuel, and the windows are all fogged up. It almost feels like everything is back to normal, like a little winter train ride with my new lover, but that’s just an illusion. Chaos waits for us on the horizon.
For the time being, though, I’m just happy to be truly warm again.
Jasha takes a sip of black coffee from a little paper cup, swirling it around in his mouth like a fine wine before swallowing it. It’s fitting that he would drink his coffee black, but I don’t see how he could possibly enjoy it that way. I need about a hundred grams of sugar and half a container of creamer to fully enjoy a cup of coffee.
“You’re a target, whether you want to believe it or not,” Jasha says, sitting down across from me as I blow on my peppermint tea. “Carrying the heir to the Antonov Bratva comes with responsibilities, and one of those is to make sure you don’t die.”
I laugh. “Yeah, well, I was managing just fine until I ran into you again.”
“That’s not something we can take back,” he replies, his voice enriched into a velvet tone by the heat of his drink. It’s almost making me forget that I’m angry at him.
I look down at my tea, holding it tighter and savoring the heat through the thin paper cup. “Would you take it back?”
“What part?” he asks.
“All of it.”
“Never,” he replies, and the sincerity of his words surprise me. I thought I was a burden to him, but he doesn’t see me that way. Maybe he did at the beginning, but things have changed. No matter how hard I push against him, he doesn’t give up on me. On us.
I’m impressed just as much as I am terrified.
“You wouldn’t take anything back?” I ask, studying his face closely this time. I’m momentarily distracted by the crow’s feet pressed into the corners of his eyes, a sign of years of laughter, or perhaps too many summers in the sun without shades.
“Honestly, the only thing I wish I could’ve taken back is leaving you the first time.”
He can’t keep getting away with twisting my emotions like this. He’s too good at it, making me wilt under the heat of his gaze, melting into a puddle on the floor of the train with every beautifully cruel word that slips out of his wicked lips.
I’m prone to believe the things he tells me, but there’s always the chance he’s just an incredibly good liar. But that would mean he was only pretending to be a bad liar just a few minutes earlier.
“You really feel that way about me?” I ask, finally taking a sip of my tea to calm the bundle of nerves in my stomach.
“I do,” he replies, speaking the words like we’re getting married.
Which is something he mentioned before. I should ask again if he’s serious about that, but I’m not sure I’m ready to hear his answer.
“I only hope you can forgive me for the first time I left you. It won’t happen again. I’ve come to see the error of my ways,” he says, smiling a bit as he takes another sip of his coffee. He puts it down on the table between us. “But that also means you’re stuck with me, whether you want to be or not.”
“I guess I’m lucky you’re so handsome,” I reply with a playful smile.
He grins, eating up my compliment without trying to deflect it like most people would. He isn’t a humble man, but he doesn’t need to be. He can have anything and everything in the world, which makes it all the more unbelievable that he’s chosen me.
He rolls his tongue under his lips for a second before diving back into the real reason we came here. “We’re going to set up a trap for Lorenzo. He thinks he’s going to cut us off further down the tracks, but we’re not going to go that far. We’re going to make him come to us.”
I tilt my head to the side, intrigued by his idea. “How so?”
He leans in, lacing his fingers together like he’s hiding a secret in the weathered palms of his hands. “You and I are going to leave the train with a select few of my men, leaving obvious tracks through the snow so that Lorenzo believes the train has been abandoned. It’s believable at this point.”
“And really what we should be doing,” I add.
He laughs through his nose. “No, I don’t do compromises. It’s all or nothing in this world.”
“So, we’re not really leaving the train.”
“We are,” he says, one side of his mouth twitching up in a smirk. “But only some of us, and we won’t be going far. We need to be able to see the train and strike when they arrive to reclaim it.”
“What if they don’t?” I ask, worried about freezing my ass off in the snow for nothing.
