“Yeah.” I can feel her calming.
“Remind me what she was like.” I remember, but that’s not the point.
“She liked old things.”
“And?” I shouldn’t be getting her to talk right now. I should be getting her to sleep.
“She was beautiful,” she whispers. “She laughed a lot. Picnics. She liked ABBA. Scrabble. Badminton down by the lake.”
“A prissy sport.”
I can see from the shape of her cheek that she’s smiling. “You played it.”
“Maybe once.”
“The birdie in the air and Mom laughing. And Sundays…” She trails off. “Umbrellas in the sun Sundays. Tea party. With cubes of sugar. Flowers on them. What was the question?” she says after a while.
She’s drifting off, but I don’t want her to go.
I put my face to her sweet-smelling hair. “Up in the playroom. The happy baby animals? Are they still painted on the wall?”
Her chest moves. I suppose it’s a sort of laugh.
“Are the baby animals still up there? In that secret cubby?”
“You know about the baby animals?”
“I lived there, remember?”
Another jerk of her chest. Laughing, crying. It sort of doesn’t matter. She won’t remember any of this tomorrow, that’s the idea I’m getting. “The happy baby animals,” she says. “Yeah. Their faces are lit by the sun. But only in the winter.”
The shock of the memory goes through me—the sun illuminating those stupid painted faces in the dead of winter. I’d forgotten about that.
“Sunny faces. But then you ruined happy baby animals for me,” she says. “Aleksio—I feel like I’m spinning.”
“I’ve got you.” I hold her tighter. It’s bad what I’m doing—I might as well be fucking her now, because I’m violating her emotionally, yanking out her memories. “And the Chris-Craft? That big old boat. Remember?”
“Picnics in the Chris-Craft,” she mumbles.
“What did the engine sound like? Do you remember?”
She’s gone quiet. I shake her. “Tell me, Mira. The Chris-Craft.”
“Gargly. Gargles.” She lowers her voice, sounding drunk. “Burgh-burgh-burgh.”
“That’s pretty good.” I fucking loved that big, powerful Chris-Craft engine. I loved those baby animal paintings too.
Until the end.
Until Konstantin held me inside that little cubby with his cigar-scented vise-grip of a hand clapped over my mouth to keep me from screaming, holding me tight as Nikolla slaughtered my parents while my baby brothers screamed. I saw it all in the window reflection. The fast way Nikolla moved against my parents, who’d been made sluggish with drugs. Darting for my mom. A dog going for a throat.
The baby animals are where I kept my gaze in the hour after the screams died out.
It was in the wine, Konstantin told me later. Konstantin had been drugged, too. An unarmed hit man past his prime, veteran of the Kosovo war, too drugged up to fight a killer like Nikolla and a twenty-year-old Lazarus. Konstantin did the only thing he could—he grabbed me and hid me in a child-sized cubby Nikolla wouldn’t know about, a nook in the wall, an accident of architecture made functional for kids.
Looking back, I sometimes marvel that Konstantin was able to keep hold of me for so many hours with the way I squirmed. I wanted to get to them. My mom and dad were right out there. They’d taken my brothers away in a sack, but Mom and Dad were right there. Motionless. I couldn’t see them any longer in the window reflection, but I knew they were there.
It was the dead of night when we finally stole out of there. The first day of my new life of being shaped into a machine of pure revenge and violence.
She begins to sob, silently now.
“Shhh,” I say, stroking her hair. “It’s okay, baby. You’re okay now.”
I never cried for my own parents much. Old Konstantin would hit me when I did. It wasn’t malicious, really, he just wanted me to channel all of that emotion into training and revenge. He was doing the best he could.
When I’m sure she’s sleeping, I untangle myself from her and get off the bed, disgusted by myself.
Fucking happy baby animals. Fuck them.
I text Konstantin to send over pictures of Lazarus’s people, then I get myself a vodka in the kitchen. Viktor and I have been rubbing off on each other in the past year since we hooked back up. Or more like corrupting each other.
So it’s vodka for me now.
He’s at the table with Currie. “You get the intel?”
“Yup. Konstantin is sending pictures.” I slam it back. “I’m glad I blew up that fucking house. I hated that house.”
“We leave in ten minutes,” he says. “Tito drops you. Currie stays with Mira. I’m out there circulating with my team. The minute you get a lead, you send word and we’re on it. Okay?”
“You see what she did?” I tip my head toward the lawn.
“Yeah, I saw what she did, brat.”
“Fuck. With that gun?” I limp over to the table.
“For fuck’s sake, Aleksio,” Currie says. “You need X-rays.”
“Just wrap it up.”
“You need real attention. Don’t blow it off—you’re screwed for life if it doesn’t heal right.”
I start pulling off my sock. The thing is so swollen, it looks like something from outer space. “All I need is for you to get it stabilized.”
“You really want to let your ankle heal wrong?” Currie demands. “Is that what you want? Because keeping yourself messed up is a bullshit way to atone for Kiro.”
I push him against the wall. “Are you suddenly a psychoanalyst? Because here all this time I thought you were a fucking EMT who has a Mustang and a second house instead of being six feet under.” Which is where he’d be without our help on his gambling bills.
He’s looking at me scared. I’m dimly aware of Viktor trying to talk me down.
“Answer! Are you our EMT or what?”
“I’m your EMT.”
“Then don’t you be fucking psychoanalyzing me. Or else I’ll rip off your face. Will I need to atone for that?”
“Chill the fuck out,” Viktor says, pulling me off.
“And Kiro’s alive!” I tell him. Then I get in Viktor’s face, put him against the wall instead.
“Save the anger,” Viktor says.
I sit. “Wrap it enough to get me through, then I’ll think about the X-ray.” Currie starts on the wrap, being his professional, diligent self.
“Sorry,” I say.
“I get it,” he says. “I understand.”
The guys come with the finger and the blood. It’s from an older woman, and it’s frozen. It doesn’t look right until Currie puts it in the microwave with a bowl of water to hydrate it. I make a mental note never to use that microwave again. We’ll sell the house eventually.
I watch the clock while Viktor and his guys seal the finger in a plastic baggie with some blood they got from who knows where. They nestle it in an eyeglass case with the ring on top.
Konstantin comes through with instructions for Viktor’s men. They’re to go into the restaurant ahead of me and take pictures, and he’ll vet the patrons himself. I get on the phone with him and thank him. He’s not happy about any of this.