Kingmakers, Graduation

33. Sabrina

33

SAbrINA

I ’m so fucking frustrated I could scream.

I head to the bathrooms to calm down, but several minutes of pacing the powder room only makes me more agitated. The candy-colored room feels like a padded cell, if Marie Antoinette were in charge of decorating. The gilt mirrors, upholstered walls, and frilled furniture press in on me from all sides, the air heavily perfumed with the scent of overblown lilies.

I feel powerless and hamstrung—tasked with impossible feats, my legs cut out from under me every time I gain traction.

Adrik acts like he’s so rational, but he makes emotional decisions like everyone else. We work with people we don’t like or trust all the time—why is Krystiyan any different? Adrik made us partner with Zigor and look how that turned out.

As I’m silently fuming, washing my hands over and over at the sink, Sloane comes and stands at the mirror next to mine .

I look at our twin reflections: both of us dark-haired, olive-skinned, wearing black gowns with a slit up the thigh. I could be looking at myself thirty years in the future.

Sloane’s eyes meet mine in the mirror.

“Trouble in paradise?” she says.

Ever the spy. She was probably watching Adrik’s and my entire conversation.

Adrik respects Sloane more than almost anyone. Probably more than he respects me. If I were going to be jealous of anything, I should be jealous of that.

“I might have made a mistake coming here.”

“Maybe you did,” Sloane says, evenly.

I turn to face her, anger rising all over again.

“You don’t think I could do what you do?”

Sloane picks up a folded towel, drying her hands with easy grace.

“You haven’t put in the time and you haven’t done the work. You want to be a queen and you don’t even speak the language.”

“I’m learning as fast as I can,” I hiss.

“This isn’t a classroom. There’s no room for mistakes.”

“Yet you’ve made a few of your own,” I snap back at her.

Sloane doesn’t rise to the bait. Her calm is a steady vibration that fills the room, pressing against my ear drums. Her eyes hold mine, bright and clear and hypnotic .

“You think I came to Russia to kill Ivan with guns blazing, pew pew I’m a fuckin’ gangster? When I broke into his monastery, I knew my life was stretched out like a thread across a pair of shears. I made one tiny mistake and the tide turned against me in an instant. If Ivan didn’t happen to have a tiny kernel of humanity inside him, I would have met a horrific end. If you think any of these other men are Ivan, they’re not. They will skin you alive. They don’t care that you’re beautiful, they don’t care that you’re special—you’re nothing to them.”

I lift my chin.

“I’ve never needed anyone to save me yet.”

Sloane looks me up and down. It’s hard not to shrink before that stare, especially when I know she’s seeing every last detail: the dark circles under my eyes, the motor oil under my nails, the little red marks on my arms where I pinch myself when I’m stressed.

Sloane says, “I was a lone wolf once, too. You feel strong when you think you don’t need anybody, but the truth is you just don’t have anybody.”

I’m stripped in front of her. Exposed.

I don’t have my family here. I don’t even have Adrik’s support.

Enemies on all sides, friends who barely tolerate me …

I am alone, and I don’t know how to be any other way.

“Ivan treats you like an equal,” I say. “You’d never put up with less.”

“Actually,” Sloane says, her voice gentler than I’ve heard it before, “I escaped from Ivan the first chance I got. Then I came back to him naked in rain-boots, asking for his help. Our relationship changed when I allowed myself to be vulnerable. ”

This is hard for me to understand. Hard for me to even picture.

“I don’t know how to do that,” I say.

“Then practice,” Sloane says. “While you’re working on your Russian.”

She leaves me in the powder room, the air dull and void without her.

I sink down onto an overstuffed chaise, thinking for a long time before returning to the party.

The tension is thick 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.

“You don’t have to murder people’s kids to be scary, get the fuck out of town. That’s not how you do business.”

“You have no idea what I’d do.”

He’s being an asshole because he doesn’t want to admit we need Krystiyan’s product and we don’t have any other choice .

“You didn’t exterminate the Malina …” I say, quietly. “That’s what you’re really mad about. You’re salty ‘cause they gave you a black eye.”

“ Watch it ,” Adrik growls.

I fall silent, listening to the irritating swish, thunk, swish, thunk.

There’s no need to say anything else.

I’ve already made my decision.