Page 77 of Cruel Kiss

Which is why I can't trust it.

I put the phone in the cupholder, screen-up, so I'll see it the second it lights. Then I drive home. The whole way I turn it over: the wedding I don't want to go to, the cousin who won't pick up. Underneath all of it, one problem whispers louder than the rest.

How do I ask her?

It's a stupid thing to be afraid of. I've knelt in front of terrified men and made them tell me the truth. I've said things in a low voice that emptied a man's bladder down the front of his pants. There's a photograph of Pyotr going around this city that could end my world, but I'm worried about trying to figure out how to ask my fake wife to a wedding?

Because it's not fake. Hasn't been for a while now. It kept not being fake last night, when she bit my name into my shoulder and I pulled the blanket over both of us and broke the only rule she ever asked me to keep.

So for some reason, this feels important.

If I ask her wrong, she'll hear the ask underneath the ask. True patience is required. I have to ask it like a man who can hear no and live.

I rehearse it in the car, but I hate how it sounds in here. I rehearse it on the stoop and it comes out worse. By the time I get the vault-heavy door open and locked behind me, I've said it eleven different ways in my head and loathed all of them.

Cali is at the kitchen table with her laptop, glasses pushed up into her hair, a pencil between her teeth. The kids are down. She looks up. "You're back late."

"Meeting ran long."

"The good kind or the bad kind?"

"The kind we don't talk about at the table."

She takes the pencil out of her mouth, sets it down, and watches me. "Okay," she says. "So what is it you're standing there not-asking me?"

I open my mouth.

What comes out is: "There's a wedding."

She waits.

"Semyon's daughter. It's a… a family thing. It matters that I'm there. It matters even more that I'm not there alone. There are men deciding right now whether there's anything left in my world worth staying for, and a wedding is where they'll decide it. So it would be… useful. If you came. As my wife. It would help."

She sets her chin on her hand. "Useful," she repeats.

"That's not?—"

"No, no. Go on. It'd be 'useful' if I came. As your wife. To help." There's something moving at the corner of her mouth she's not letting me have yet. "You know, for a man who took the mirrors out of my whole house because you couldn't stand watching me talk down to myself, that was a terrible way to ask a woman to a party."

"I'm aware."

"Was that the ask? Because I want to be sure I heard you right."

"That was about the whole of it, yeah."

"Mm." She leans back and folds her arms, and now I can see that she's enjoying this. She wants to make me squirm. I could almost laugh, if shit wasn't so damn serious. "No, I don't think so. I don't think I can say yes to that one. It was too… What's the word…?"

"Calista."

"Useful. It was too useful." She tips her head at me, and God help me, it's the sand tiger, the look I described to her at the aquarium in the blue light: patient, and without mercy. "Try again."

She's really doing this. She's actually going to make me do it twice. Not because she's cruel, though maybe she is a little bit, and only because I taught her how to be. But also because, for once, she gets to be the one who says do it again, do it right.

So I do it right.

"Calista Meadows." I pull out the chair across from her and sit down, because you don't ask a woman like this from your feet like you're checking off a list. "There's a wedding on Saturday. I'd like you to come with me. I want to walk into a room full ofthe people I come from with you on my arm and let all of them see the thing I actually care about. I've spent a month keeping you out of that world to keep you safe, and I'm disgusted that the only version of you those men know consists of a rumor and a photograph. I want them to meet you. I want to be the man who brought hiswife." I make myself finish it. "You can say no. If you say no, I'll go alone. But that's my problem, not yours. I'm asking. Just asking. That's all this is."

She doesn't answer right away.