Page 94 of The Mad Don
“Are we?”
I laugh.
“It’ll take work to be Don again,” I say.
“I spread the word that you were the one who wiped out Fabiano and Zaki both,” Kirill says. “The families are being cautious. No one’s touched your routes. Your ammunition channels and your powder batches are sitting exactly where you left them. As far as anyone outside this room knows, you never stopped being Don.”
I smile.
“Then we’re allies first,” I say. “And brothers-in-law next.”
Kirill rolls his eyes and stands.
“Stop playing games and just tell her,” he says. “She likes you, you idiot.”
He leaves.
Soon, two weeks pass.
She spends every day with me. Christov too. Nothing dramatic. We talk. They argue about old Russian cartoons. She tells me about the boy he used to be, and he goes red. I watch the two of them fit back together after fifteen years apart, and I recognize it because it’s the same as Lucia and I made with her.
I’m discharged after a month.
My home is still a wreck; the building stands, but the courtyard and the gardens are rubble, so I stay at Kirill’s. Christov wheelsme into a guest room because I let them keep wheeling me even though I can walk now, so her hands stay on the chair.
“I’ll let you two talk,” Christov says, and he goes.
Yana helps me onto the bed.
I take her hand.
“Yana.” My voice is shaky. “I’m sorry. For all of it. Every part.”
She kisses me. It stops me cold, the hunger in it, her mouth coming to mine like she’d been waiting weeks to do it. She pulls back, reaches into her jacket, and takes out the small red sculpture. The one I had in my pocket the day of the blast.
“I found this on you,” she says. “It’s a sculpture I made.”
She sits on the edge of the bed.
“When did you fall in love with me?”
“The moment I met you,” I say.
“And when did you fall in love with me?” I ask back.
She opens her mouth, and I lean in and kiss her before she can answer, slow, my tongue parting her lips, and when I pull back, I say, “Let me make you fall in love with me. Give me the chance.”
“You don’t need to,” she says. “I already love you.”
“Then I want you to love me harder.”
She leans close to my ear and whispers, “You have to work for it.”
She smiles at my face.
“Get better,” she says, “so you can do something about it.”
I cup her face in both hands.
