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“Apparently more than I gave him credit for,” I muttered and crawled up into the passenger seat next to him before shaking another cigarette out of the pack. Lighting up, I exhaled a stream of smoke through the cracked window.
Eduard blindly reached out with two fingers.
Grumbling, I relinquished my cigarette to him and lit another one.
“So what’s the plan for you two?” Eduard asked, blowing smoke toward his own window.
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged, gesturing aimlessly with the hand that held the cigarette. “Once you get your millions from his parents, what are you going to do?”
“I have no choice but to stay here.”
“You can always disappear. I can help you, you know. New IDs. New passports.”
As tempting as it was, I shook my head. “I can’t ask Roan to live like that. It’s too much.”
“Aren’t you already asking him a lot by living with you now?”
I flicked ash out the window, considering his question for a moment. I was. I knew I was, but selfishly, I couldn’t let him go, either. “He asked me to stop. He wants me to quit what I do.”
Eduard snorted. “Yeah right.”
Taking a drag off the cigarette, I held it before exhaling, watching the smoke curl through the air like it could solve my problems for me.
His head whipped toward me at a red light. “Are you crazy? You can’t quit! Not unless you run and you just said you won’t.”
“I can’t do this forever, either. You said so yourself. I’m getting old.”
“You’re not even forty. Quit whining.”
“It’s not whining. It’s stating a fact. I fucked up my knee a couple weeks ago and it’s still not right. I feel it every time I fight. I’m slowing down, Eduard. There’s going to come a day when I’mtooslow. And where will that leave Roan?”
“Roan? Your primary concern is what will happen to your little bunny if you lose a fight?”
“Not if. When.”
“You should be more concerned about what Sergei is going to do when he finds out. After everything that happened? I don’t think he’ll spare you a second time.”
“I know… And I don’t care about that, as long as he doesn’t go after Roan.”
Eduard sighed, running a hand through his dark hair before scratching the back of his head. “Sergei doesn’t gain anything by killing him. I’m sure Misha will sort him out if something happens to you.”
Rubbing my knee absentmindedly, I flicked ash away before muttering, “I’m not so sure about that.”
“Now you don’t trust Misha? Why? What happened?”
“Nothing. Something Valery said a while back.”
Did I trust Misha? I still didn’t have a good answer to that particular question. Until Valery asked it, I would have said “Yes,” without hesitation. In the wake of Daria’s murder? I couldn’t say the same thing.
The conversation came to a lull, which was fine by me. We smoked in silence the rest of the way until Eduard parked the van behind a rundown factory. Hopping out, we split in different directions: me to the back and Eduard to retrieve his own car from wherever he’d hidden it. I grabbed a can of petrol and doused the interior before tossing the can back inside.
I took one last drag from my cigarette and flicked it into a sizable puddle on the floor of the van and moved backward.
By the time I climbed into Eduard’s car, the van was burning steadily, thick black smoke rolling up into the atmosphere.
Speeding off once more, he turned and grinned at me as something inside the van combusted.
