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“I liked you better when you were depressed,” I tell him.
“Then you shouldn’t have brought Dad home, should you? Next time, think ahead.”
“Don’t think ‘cause we’re the same height now I won’t beat the shit out of you.”
Rafe cocks an eyebrow at me.
“Same height? I’ve got an inch on you at least.”
“Just fucking try me,” I snarl. “It was a long flight. I’m dying for some exercise.”
“No thanks,” Rafe says. “I got enough of that at Kingmakers.”
I sigh. “Those were the days. You were always sure of knocking someone out in the course of a week.”
“Sometimes several people.”
“Almost makes me miss it.”
“Don’t worry—I’m sure there’ll be plenty of opportunities for mayhem in Moscow.”
“He’s not going there for mayhem,” my father calls back over his shoulder. He’s got the ears of a bat—always has.
“ ‘Konechno net, otets,”I say.Of course not, Father.“I’ll follow all your orders to the letter. Just like you did at my age.”
Fully cognizant of his own bad behavior, my father turns around and fixes me with a steely stare.
“Now is not the time for levity, boys. We have many more enemies than friends. Especially in Moscow.”
“I know. There’s a lot of people trying to kill us,” I say. And then, so quietly that not even my father can hear, I mutter to Rafe, “And some of us keep fucking those people.”
Struggling to keep a straight face, Rafe whispers back, “Nixwas never trying to kill us. Just her dad.”
“Well, give her time … she doesn’t know you as well as I do.”
Rafe grins. “When has a Petrov married someone safe?”
My gaze fixes on Sabrina, stepping through the front doors of the mansion.
She pauses, looking back over her shoulder. In the gloom of the house, her face is in shadow, her eyes glinting like a jungle cat.
“Who the fuck wants to be safe?” I say.
* * *
It takes an excruciatingfourteen minutes of chit-chat to finish greeting every goddamn person I’m here to visit before I can isolate Sabrina from the group.
“We don’t have enough rooms,” Sloane says to me without apology. “You’ll have to bunk with Rafe.”
“That’s fine,” I lift my bag again. “Sabrina can show me the way.”
No one remarks upon my choice of escort, though I catch the twitch of my aunt’s lips that tells me she understands perfectly well what I’m up to.
You have to be pretty fucking sly to get anything past Sloane.
My aunt has always been my favorite relative because she’s blunt and unsentimental, as ruthless as a man and as calculated as myself. She taught me how to shoot in the woods behind the monastery.
“Marksmanship is meditation,” she told me. “You have to clear your mind of everything but the shot. A sniper is a monk. He separates his mind from his body. Cold can’t touch him, nor wind, nor time. He’ll wait three days with no food or water if that’s how long it takes for the target to enter the kill zone. When you pull the trigger, it’s your mind that moves, not your finger.”
