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The tension isthick during the car ride home. Adrik drives slowly through the snow, the puffy flakes driving relentlessly toward the windshield, the wipers parting the snow like a curtain and sweeping it to both sides.
Jasper and Hakim sit in the back. Hakim rolls the window down an inch and sticks his nose out for a breath of fresh air, because he drank too much and now he’s carsick.
“Can you close that?” Jasper says, waspishly. “The snow’s blowing all over me.”
“If you want me to puke,” Hakim groans.
“If you even think about puking in this car, you’re walking home,” Adrik warns him.
Dark trees pass by my window, branches weighed down with inches of heavy snow, some bent low enough to almost touch the ground.
“Jasper agrees with me,” I say.
I’m still looking out the window, but I can feel Adrik’s eyes on the side of my face.
“Jasper knows Krystiyan is a piece of shit.”
“He’d still rather have the product.”
Jasper is silent in the backseat. His silence is concurrence—he’d contradict me otherwise.
Adrik doesn’t care if Jasper agrees or not. His anger is all pointed at me.
“You don’t know the players and you don’t know the history,” he snarls. “And you don’t have the clout to keep someone like Krystiyan in line.”
“You think he’d try to take advantage of me.”
“I know he would.”
“That’s the real truth,” I turn to glare at him. “You don’t trust me to handle him.”
“You seemed pretty sucked into his bullshit at the wedding.”
“I can read people just like you can! I can do what needs to be done.”
“In Chicago, maybe,” Adrik says, sourly.
He’s in a black mood, probably because I disappeared the whole second half of the reception, sitting alone in the powder room, lost in my own thoughts. Now his face is darker than I’ve ever seen it, and he grips the steering wheel with unnecessary ferocity.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means this isn’t fucking Chicago.”
“Enlighten me.”
The windshield wipers make a repetitive swish and clunk that’s agitating in the small space of the car, like the ticking of a clock.
Low and challenging, Adrik says, “You’d kill a man if you had to?”
“Yes.”
“What about his wife and kids?”
I shoot him a look, trying to gauge if he’s serious with this asinine line of questioning.
“This is Russia—if your enemies even suspect you won’t go after the family, you might as well paint a target on your back. You exterminate everyone, that’s the rule, that’s table stakes. You snuff out the dynasty so they don’t rise up in the next generation. The Griffins and the Gallos would not still both exist in Russia two hundred years later, because one of those families would have put the boot on the baby that became your grandmother.”
I’ve never heard him talk like this. He’s staring straight ahead, knuckles white on the wheel, face black and bitter.
