Page 94 of Cruel Kiss

He's late, which is strange. Navi has many faults, but tardiness is not one of them. The man is early to everything. He was early to his own birth, according to the family lore, arriving on this planet squawling and premature. He hasn't shut the fuck up since—but he's never, ever late.

He shakes off his jacket and drops into the empty chair next to me. I catch myself squinting at him suspiciously, which pisses me off. I watch the people I love hardest of all now. Maybe I'm not quite yet the man I want to be.

"Kind of you to join us," I say.

"Traffic," he replies.

"Out here? In the middle of the day?"

"There was for me. Guess the universe made an exception." He waves the waitress over, orders coffee, and doesn't look at me while he does it.

I want it to be nothing. God, how badly I want it to be nothing. I've known this man my whole life. He's pulled me out of more holes than I can count. He's put bodies in the ground for me and never once asked for thanks. I would take a bullet for him and he'd take one for me.

But there's been a leak in our operation for too long now.

So the question must finally be asked, the question I've been ignoring:

What if it's him?

Three people know the story of the scale. Me. Cali. And Navi.

The stand-down order the night a man came up her stairs was given in the old codes. Codes only family knows.

The hunt for the mole has come up empty for weeks now. What if that's because the man doing the hunting is only pretending to look for himself?

I don't like this fucking game. Receipt-gathering is something Cali did, and it turned Todd into a half-dead zombie. He deserved it, of course, but look at the costshehad to pay for going through that process, too. It nearly killed her. It shredded her trust in men, in humanity.

But the what-if is becoming impossible to turn a blind eye toward.

Semyon asks Dima something and the table turns in that direction. Using that as a smokescreen, I bend closer to Navi and ask, "Where were you?"

"Running down that lead," he says breezily. "The mole. Told you I would, didn't I? I don't say things I don't mean. It's a tragic personality flaw."

"And?"

"And nothing yet. Sorry." He finally looks at me. His eyes are bloodshot and tired, but they look as honest as they ever have. Or am I just seeing what I want to see? "I'm close, Ro. I swear on my mother, and you know I don't invoke that woman lightly. She'd rise up out of Brooklyn to smack me. A few more days is all I need."

"We might not have that long."

"I know." The waitress brings his coffee over and sets it down in front of him. "Believe me, Ro. I know that better than anybody at this table."

I turn back to the table. To the men. To Grigor's grim face and Semyon's cowardice and Dima following it around like a dog.

"Here's what I have to say," I tell them, "and then you can go home and think on it, or you can go home and pack a bag, I don't much care which. Some of you know Lev made an offer. Not to me. To my wife. He wants her, and the software she built, and he gave her seven days to decide. I'll save you the trip to the calendar—today's the seventh."

That gets a reaction. Even Semyon leans in an inch. This is news to most of them, and I let them chew it.

"So you're all sitting there wondering what I'm going to do," I continue. "Give her up? Give myself up instead?"

Nobody breathes.

"I'm not going to do any of that," I say. "And I want this so clear that not one of you can pretend later you misheard me. I will not trade her. Not for the money. Not for the men. Not for my own life. She's my wife, and she chose to stay with me when she had every reason on God's green earth to run screaming into the night. I would rather lose all of it than be the man who handed her over to save his own skin."

I look around the table, at each of them in turn.

Sergei. Yuri. Dima. Semyon. Grigor.

And, last, Navi, at my side.