Page 95 of Cruel Kiss

"So if you want to betray me," I say, "then betray me. Go to Lev. But hear this before you push back your chair." I let my voice drop until it comes out cold, colder than I ever knew it could, the coldness that lives in me and always will. "I will not forgive it. I will not forget it. And I will not, under any circumstance you can dream up, change my fucking mind. Once you walk, you've walked. That door only swings the one way. So be sure. Be very, very sure."

The diner is dead quiet except for the hiss of the grill up front and the tinny radio playing a happy little tune from thirty years ago.

Grigor is the one who moves. He lifts his teacup an inch off the saucer, the same little gesture he's given me twice now, the stay-of-execution gesture, and he sets it back down.

"Understood," he says. Which means: we'll see. Which means: not yet.

I'll take it.

Semyon doesn't lift anything. Dima doesn't, either. But they don't get up and leave, and in this business, on this day, that's about as much as a man can hope for.

I stand. The rest of them stand with me, on instinct, the old muscle memory of respect.

"Go home," I tell them. "Kiss your families. Sleep on it, if you can sleep. I'll be in touch."

They file out ahead of me. Grigor claps a hand on my shoulder on his way past and says nothing, which from Grigor is a whole speech. Semyon won't meet my eyes. Dima follows him.

Navi waits for me, like always. We're the last two out.

"You meant all that?" he asks, as we head for the door. "The whole no-forgiveness sermon?"

"Every word."

"Even me?"

I stop. I look at him. My cousin. The idiot I'd take a bullet for. The one man I've told myself, over and over, it can't be, it isn't, I refuse.

"Don't make me put an answer to that out loud, Navi. Don't do that to either of us."

He nods slowly. "C'mon," he says. "Let's get you home before your wife kills me. She's a scary woman, you know."

That startles a laugh out of me. For one second, it's just us, cousins, same way it's always been, and I feel like a paranoid fool for ever thinking otherwise.

Then we step out into the gray afternoon.

The caravan's parked along the curb the way it always is. My car in the middle, a chase car front and back, drivers already turning over engines. Ordinary. A hundred times ordinary.

Except the street's too empty.

I clock it a half-second too late. That's the thing about half-seconds in this line of work. They're the whole world and they cost you everything, and you never feel them until they're already gone.

Two SUVs come off the side streets at once, one from the front and one from the back. They box the caravan in tight, nose to tail, and doors are already flying open before the tires have even settled.

Men pour out. Masks. Long coats. The dull black shapes of rifles coming up.

"Down!" somebody roars—Grigor, I think, still on the sidewalk—and the world detonates into noise.

I don't remember deciding to move. My body decides for me. I'm reaching for the piece under my jacket and turning my shoulder to put the car between me and the muzzle flash. Glass is coming apart above my head in a hard bright rain, and men are shouting in two languages at once.

Then Navi hits me.

It's not a stumble. He hits me full and deliberate, both hands flat on my chest, all his weight behind it, and he drives me sideways and down, off my feet, out from the line I was standing in.

This is betrayal then. He's shoving me into the line of fire, almost literally stabbing me in the back.

Except for?—

Wait.