Page 23 of Cruel Kiss

I think I might love him after all.

7

RONAN

Navi finds me in the back office of a diner in Sheepshead Bay at two in the morning.

I've been here for an hour, going over numbers. Not the Bratva's numbers—my own. The ledger of my own life, which is a thing I've never done before, because there was never a reason to.

There's a reason now.

Navi drops into the seat across from me. He looks tired. He's been looking tired for weeks. I did that to him. I did that to a lot of people.

"You want coffee?" I ask him.

"I want to sleep for a week. But coffee will do."

I signal the waitress. She's the only one working the night shift, an older woman with a bad knee, and she brings us two cups without being asked twice. I leave her a hundred on the table when she walks away.

Navi shakes his head when he sees the tip. "You keep splurging like that," he says, "you're going to run out."

"Run out of what?"

"Money. That's a thing that can happen, in case you forgot."

I have not forgotten. That's the whole point of tonight's exercise.

"Give me the rundown," I say.

Navi wraps both hands around his cup. "Payroll's short again. That's the third time this month. Grigor's crew got half. Anatoly's crew got nothing yet. I moved some around, borrowed against the Red Hook building, but it's a hole I can't keep filling. The guns paid for everything, Ro. You know that. You turn the guns off, the money stops, and the money is the only thing these men were ever actually loyal to."

"I know."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

He drinks. I watch the steam come off the top of my own cup, but I don't follow suit. I'm too wired as it is; more caffeine will not solve my problems.

"How many?” I ask.

"How many what?"

"How many are a lost cause?"

Navi pretends to think, but we both know he already knows the answer. "Six have jumped ship I know of. Maybe more that haven't told me yet. They're not defecting, exactly. They're just...not answering as fast. Not showing up. They see the writing on the wall, and they aren't exactly updating their LinkedIn to 'Looking for work,' but it's not far off." He sets the cup down with a thud. "That's how it starts. Not with a knife, but with a phone that doesn't ring back."

I nod. I know this shit as well as anyone. Didn't I quote the scriptures to Pyotr, all those weeks ago?A man doesn't leave the Bratva. That was my father's whole religion. Thereisno such thing as leaving. But that was because, back in his day, leaving meant a grave in the marshes. It never occurred to Igor that a man could leave simply because there was nothing left worth staying for.

"And Lev?" I ask.

Navi's jaw tightens. "Lev is having a very good month."

"That makes one of us."

"He's buying drinks. And with that comes sympathy. He sits down with the fence-sitters, the old guys who miss the old days, and he cries into his vodka about poor old Igor. About how the old man kept order. He never would've let the guns go quiet, never would've let a woman make him soft." Navi looks up at me, free of malice, face full of nothing but blunt honesty. "If you were just being accused of weakness, that's survivable. But the other accusation…" He hesitates, not sure whether my mood can tolerate it being said out loud.

But I can take it on the chest. I have no other choice, really.