“Everyone can feel that way,” he grumbled. “Don’t act like it’s so strange.”
Misha shrugged, gaze dropping back to his food. “Not everyone. I can’t. But I’ve known this always. I suppose I misjudged you.”
Okay, definitely insulted, now. “Maybe you misjudged yourself. Maybe if you spent time with someone besides addicts and hookers–”
“I’m getting married,” Misha said, and halted Toly mid-sentence.
“You –what?”
“I’m getting married.” Misha reached for the salt, expression placid, as though he hadn’t just said something absurd. “To Andrei’s daughter.”
He had a brief flash of memory: a drab girl in a school uniform, tear in her tights, nose red, wiped on the back of her hand. He had no idea what his face did – he had no idea what tothinkof that bit of news. “Mila?” he asked, when he could.
“She just turned twenty-one,” Misha said with a nod. “He’s sending her here next month. I’ll be his son and heir, then.” Pride touched his voice, curved his mouth faintly.
Toly’s brain was experiencing some sort of whiteout, like a snowstorm obscuring all his thoughts in pale fluff. “But…you’re already that.”
“No. Not officially. I’m not really family.”
“But–”
Misha pinned him back against the booth with a look. “I used to think that we were very similar, you and me. We are not, but that’s okay.” He smiled, and though it was a small smile, it seemed genuine; almost warm. “I will marry for power, and maybe someday you will marry your – Raven.” He stumbled; nearly saidwoman, Toly knew. “For love.” He shrugged. “It’s better this way, I think. To be in different places now, and living different lives, since we’re different people.” Another smile. “You were never meant for the bratva, my friend. I’m glad you found your place.”
~*~
Toly had planned to either walk back to the building – an unwelcome prospect given the sharpness of the wind – or get an Uber. Misha insisted on driving him, though, and his thoughts were so muddied that he didn’t argue. Inside the warm interior of the Cobra, the engine purring through the car’s frame, vibrating through the souls of his boots, he replayed Misha’s words over and over:I’m glad you found your place.
But where was that? At the clubhouse, where he crashed occasionally in an upstairs bedroom, and lived out of a rucksack year-round? No chest of drawers, no permanent cup on a bathroom counter. In the Manhattan apartment that was more or less Pongo’s home, these days? A bunk room, and someone else’s smelly socks everywhere, and never knowing where to find things in the kitchen. Or Raven’s apartment? With all its gleam and glamor and her fine, silk clothes hanging color-coded in the closet. Her marble bathroom, and her marble kitchen, and her marble entrance hall…the woman loved marble.
The woman, again. But thought fondly, and not dismissively, as Misha had meant it.
He wasn’t surprised, though. Under his indignation and anger on Raven’s behalf, he could admit that he’d never thought to find himself in this position. Friendless, homeless, aimless, patched into a club that didn’t feel like a family tohim, and domesticated by a lover, suddenly and severely.
He wasn’t unhappy.
But he wasn’t happy, either. He wasn’t sure he knew how to be.
Misha pulled up to the curb in front of the safehouse building and sat there, idling, foot on the brake, car still in drive. “Don’t worry,” he said, and unlocked the doors. “He will call, and I’ll call you when he does. We can arrange a meeting.”
Toly nodded. Gripped the door handle – and then turned to regard his mentor.Formermentor. The distinction didn’t feel so distinct anymore these days.
“Misha. Have you ever been happy?Trulyhappy?”
Misha frowned. “I think happy is for people who aren’t like me,” he said. “Happy is a luxury.”
Toly nodded, sinking sensation in his stomach, and climbed out of the car.
~*~
A text arrived from Tenny. Raven locked herself in the private bathroom of her office before she opened it.
There was a photo. The inside of a diner, booths and a counter, taken from a few booths back, the very edge of a thumb at the edge of the lens. She recognized Toly with a pang, the side of his head, his ear, his black stud earring, black hair flared out from beneath a dark cap. She couldn’t see his face, but she could read the tension in his shoulders, the way his foot beneath the table rested on the toe, as though he’d been tapping it.
The man seated across from him was big and broad-shouldered, strong-looking, a brawler with a handsome face beneath the bill of his cap. Bold, Slavic features, pale hair at his sideburns. The weak winter sunlight through the diner windows illuminated an expression so serious it sent a shiver down her spine, and not in the pleasant way one of Toly’s stares did. Toly the watchful wolf, the raven on a power line, slouched and ready to bolt. No, by contrast, this man was an apex predator; his was a face not used to being told “no” by anyone.
She knew right away he was bratva, the out-of-focus tats on the backs of his hands, half-hidden by rings and a watch. And she knew he could be only one person: Misha.
Below the photo, Tenny had typed:u were right.
