Page 76 of Cruel Kiss

"For now," Grigor says. "That's the whole point of the picture. He's alive, and he's Lev's. That's what the men see."

I hand the phone back. "Anatoly's crew is how many?"

"Nine."

Nine men. Gone in a weekend, over a photograph of an old man I let live.

I think about what my father would say.You should have put him in the ground, boy. There is no leaving. You knew that and you let him walk. Now, look.

He'd be right. That's the worst part, the part that keeps me up at night more than any of the rest of it. Every soft thing I've ever done has a receipt, and Lev is out there collecting them.

"They'll come back," Sergei says. "When Lev can't pay triple past the first month."

"Some of them," Grigor argues. "Some of them don't come back from that. Once a man walks, walking gets easy."

"Grigor's right," I say. "Don't count on them coming back." I look around the short table. "You all stayed. I won't forget it. I've said that before and it turned out to be true. It'll turn out to be true again."

Grigor finally drinks his tea. That's something.

The meeting breaks up not long after. There's not much to decide. Lev has made his move and I've made mine. We're circling each other, waiting for something to bleed.

Before he leaves, Grigor puts a hand on the back of a chair and looks at me.

"Semyon's daughter's getting married," he says. "You heard?"

I nod.

"The whole family's going. Everybody who's still family." He lets it hang there so I understand exactly what he means by it. "It'd be noticed if the pakhan didn't come. It'd be noticed more if he came alone."

"I understand, Grigor."

"Bring your wife," he says, just to underscore the point. "Let them see there's a family worth staying for. Half these men, they don't stay for money. They stay because they want to be part of something that isn't going to leave them out in the cold. You show them a table with real people at it? That's worth more than triple pay."

Every part of me that's spent a month keeping Cali as far from this world as I can wants to tell him no. But a wedding is the chance to fight back publicly, and the pakhan who skips it might as well hand Lev the crown across the buffet table.

"I'll be there," I say. "With my wife."

Grigor nods, satisfied, and goes.

I call Navi from the car. It rings out. I frown and call again. It rings out again, then goes to the recorded voice that isn't his, the generic one that means the phone is off, or somewhere it can't be answered.

Navi's gone dark.

Odd.

It's the second time. The first was before the last meeting: a lead to run down, he said, offering no details.

I sit in the parked Land Rover a block from the fish place and I feel my unwavering belief in him flex. Just a little. Just enough to notice.

After all, someone fluent in the Bratva tongue issued the stand-down order the night the man came up Cali's stairs. Only the family knows those codes. Three people know the story of the scale. Me. Her.

And Navi.

I dismissed it then, so I dismiss it now, out loud, alone in the car, like saying it will make it stick. Navi has bled for me. He's buried things for me that I'll answer for at the gates of heaven, if there are any. He put a hand on my shoulder in an empty apartment once and told me my old man never could've done what I'm doing, and he meant it.

But Navi's gone dark, twice, with no explanation, in the exact weeks the ground started sliding out from under me.

I don't want the mole to be Navi. But in order to believe that, I need a good reason. The loudest reason of all is that I love him.