Page 70 of Cruel Kiss

"Nobody's asking you to apologize," Grigor says. "We're asking you to pay us before you pay them."

I sit there for a second in my father's chair with six men looking at me, and I understand exactly how thin the ice is. Two of them are already gone. I can see it. Sergei's gone, and Anatoly's most of the way there, halfway out the door with one foot still being polite about it. Two men wavering is two men Lev only has to reach a little further to take under his wing. And once they go, others follow, and then one morning, I wake up and there's no operation left to run and no chair worth sitting in.

I think about what my father would do. He'd stand up. He'd break something. He'd get loud and terrible and he'd remind them what happens to men who waver. Half of them would fall back in line out of fear and the other half would start planning how to kill him.

I don't stand up.

"Here's what's going to happen," I say. Quiet. So they have to lean in. "Payroll gets made whole by the end of the week. All of it. Back pay included. It comes out of me, personally, not out of the operation, so nobody has to wonder where it came from."

I'm not sure how I manage, but I'll do what it takes to ensure my guarantee comes true by Friday, even if I have to sell a boat to do it.The Other Yachtcan go. I don't need two.

Sergei's foot comes back in the door a little.

"And Lev," I go on, "can tell whatever story he likes. He can tell you I've gone soft. He can tell you I feed orphans. He can tell you I turned rat, which is the one falsehood that ought to insult every man at this table. Lev's telling you these stories because he wants the crown, not because he cares whether your men eat. Ask yourselves—when Lev ran with my father, didyourmen eat? Or did they get put in the ground for less than being three weeks short?"

Grigor growls in his chest. He remembers. He was there. He knows exactly how it went.

"I'm not my father," I say. "I know some of you think that's a weakness. Maybe it is. But my father would've had two of you dragged out back tonight for talking to me the way you've talked to me, and you'd have spent the drive home wondering if you were next. I'd rather you go home to your families and think it over like men. So think it over. And get paid Friday. And decide for yourselves whether the old ways were so good for the men who lived inside them."

Silence.

Then Grigor lifts his tea, an inch off the table, a small thing, an old man's toast. "Friday," he says.

It's not a win. It's a stay of execution.

But I'll take it, because it's the only thing on offer.

The house is dark when I get back. The kids are down. Cali's door is shut. Under it leaks a thin line of light, so she's awake, but shedoesn't come out and I don't knock, because it's not two in the morning and those aren't the rules.

I go to the guest room. I don't sleep. I never do these days.

Around one, I get up and take my briefcase down to the kitchen and sit at the table where I make the pancakes. I take out a legal pad, because a lawyer always has a legal pad, and I start to write.

Calista.

I look at it for a long time. Then I keep going.

If you're reading this, then something went wrong, and I'm not there to explain it to you in person, which means I got exactly what I deserved and you got something you didn't. I'm sorry for that.

There are things you already know. You found most of them yourself. You know what I am. You know what the firm is. You know I took your company and dressed the theft up as a rescue mission and stood in your kitchen and let you think Todd did it. You know I planted a woman in your house to watch your children. You know all of that, and you kept the napkin anyway, for a while. I will never understand why, but I will be grateful for it until I stop being anything at all.

Here are the things you don't know.

Every dollar that isn't yours anymore is coming back to you. It's in the folder marked with your maiden name, which Navi has, and which he'll give you, because Navi does what I tell him even when he thinks I'm a fool (and, just for the record, he thinks I'm a fool about you specifically. He's probably right.) The company is yours. It was always yours. Don't let anyonetell you different, and if they try, run them through your own machine and watch them fall apart.

The house upstate is in a trust now. Hayden and Isabella's names are on it, not yours, so nobody can freeze it or touch it or use it against you. Take them there in the summer. Let Hayden catch the fish. Let Isabella put the caterpillar on the dock. There's enough money in the trust that you'll never have to make yourself small for anyone again. That was the only thing I ever actually wanted for you, from the very first night, before I knew your name.

I stop and breathe until I feel ready to continue.

You asked me once, in my office, if there was a version of all this where I came out ahead no matter which of you I stood next to. I said, not in any way you'd understand. I want to correct the record, because you understand everything—you just didn't have all the data.

There was never a version where I came out ahead.

There was only ever the version where you did, and I stood close enough to make sure of it, for as long as you'd let me.

I write for a while about the practical things. Who to trust. Who not to. What Mercer is and isn't. That Navi will look after her if I can't, that Navi is the one clean thing my father's world ever gave me and she can lean on him with her whole heart.

Then I get to the last part. The part I've never said out loud. Not to Navi, who was there. Not to a priest, because I don't have one. Not to my mother's grave, though I've stood over it enough times with the words in my mouth.