Page 127 of Cruel Kiss

I arch an amused brow. "Is that so? Well, if he said it, it must be true."

Mercer scowls, but I think she can't even pretend to hold onto her anger. I wouldn't call Ronan an "innocent man," but he's not guilty of the crimes she barged into our lives accusing him of. She recognizes that now.

"I dropped the firm subpoena," she adds.

"Oh?"

She shrugs. "It was going nowhere. Crosby's story was too clean, and the higher-ups were happy to accept it wholesale. So that's that then. Akov Firm is back in the good graces of the law."

"That must be a special kind of aggravating for you."

"You have no idea." But there's something in the corner of her mouth, just a shade shy of a smile. "For what it's worth, the thing you built saved your neck. And his. That doesn't happen often, in my experience. People with tools like that usually just get themselves in deeper."

"I'm particular about what I do with mine."

She looks at me for a long moment. "Yeah," she says. "I've noticed."

She finishes the coffee. Then she stands up, pushes the stool in, and says, "Take care of those kids, Ms. Meadows."

"That's exactly what I intend to do, Agent Mercer."

At the door, she pauses. "Your husband's cousin," she says. "Navi. He's recovering, I hear?"

I have to turn away to hide my grin. "He is. Back to rare form. I'll tell him you asked about him."

"Hm." And then she's gone, around the corner and into the world, no car, the way she always leaves.

Which brings me to Navi.

We've checked in on him quite a bit, but when I'm in the neighborhood one day for a work thing, I swing by his hospital room. We talk business for a while, he complains about his doctors and an overly aggressive nurse who keeps threatening him with a catheter if he sasses her back. It's good to see his spirits returning, little by little.

Somehow, the conversation turns to Ronan. Navi starts telling me stories, and I clear my afternoon just so I can sit and listen to him.

He tells me about Ronan at twenty, a young man full of sharp edges and rage, and how he used to start fights in bars just to have somewhere to blow off steam. He tells me about the day Ronan first walked him through the plan for the Anna House, how he thought his cousin had gone soft in the head and then watched him build the whole thing anyway.

He tells me, propped up in a hospital bed with tubes still taped to his arm, about warning Ronan that I'd never be able to tell the difference between him and Todd.

"I was wrong," he says. "Which, frankly, pisses me off. I'm never wrong."

"You're only a little wrong," I allow. "You were right that he built a cage."

"But you didn't stay in it."

"Actually, I did," I say. "But I stayed on my own terms."

He grins at me, and I see, suddenly, why Ronan would take a bullet for this man, and why this man took two of them. "That's the only good way to do it, I think," he says. "You know what? You're all right, Calista Meadows. You have my stamp of approval."

I smile shyly as he pats me on the hand. It's a good thing to have a Navi in your life. A friend who sees you for what you are and loves you all the more for it. I lost the last one I had, and it turned out she'd been sleeping in my bed the whole time.

This one took two bullets for a person I love.

That's a different kind of data point.

Pyotr goes home.

I don't get the details, nor do I ask for them. But Ronan tells me out of the blue one day that the old man is in Brighton Beach, with his daughter and his grandchildren, the second one born now, healthy. There's Bratva protection on the whole family. Lifelong, Ronan says. Nobody will touch them, ever, for the rest of their lives.

"Your father used to say there's no leaving the Bratva," I tell him. He'd told me that, one of the nights on the stoop.