He nods solemnly. “Do you wanna sit with me? I’ll take the blue beanbag and you can take the green.”
He ambles over and sits down. I’m gonna count this as a victory. I haul my beanbag a little closer and plop down next to him. “I’m glad you’re here, Lev. I’ve missed you.”
“Me?”
“Are you kidding? Of course. You’re my only friend here.”
He blinks slowly, staring at me with those huge eyes of his. “I don’t have any friends.”
“Well, now, you do. I’m your friend.”
“I have a friend…” he whispers softly to himself as he wraps his long arms around his body. “I have a friend… I have a friend… I can tell Polly…”
“Polly? Who’s that?”
His head jerks up and his eyes bulge. “I-I-I… wasn’t supposed to say her name.”
My body goes cold. Does Uri have another woman up there? Has he already replaced me? Is that why I’m relegated to the basement for good now?
He did tell me the truth—he doesn’t care about me. He was using me. It was just sex for him. Oh, God. How could I be so damn blind? So damn stupid? So damn naïve?
“Uri’s gonna be mad at me…”
The rocking is back with a vengeance. All the tics are. Fingers, chin, muttering. I push down my own impending freakout in favor of taming his. “Lev,” I whisper calmly, pushing myself off the beanbag so that I can kneel down in front of him. “Lev, take a deep breath and look at me. It’s alright—Uri won’t be mad at you because I would never tell him what you told me.”
I keep repeating that until he starts to listen. He even lets me rest my hand on his knee. Little by little, the tremors ease.
When the rocking stops, I give him a smile. “You trust me, right?”
He offers me a tiny half-nod.
“I’ll take it.” I rub his calf gently. “Uri’s not gonna know a thing. This is our little secret.”
Lev nods more confidently now. “Our secret,” he repeats. “Because we’re friends.” Clearing his throat, he says, “Polly is my sister.”
The moment he says it, I recall one of our first conversations ages ago. He mentioned a sister at one point, hadn’t he? In fact, now that I think about it, he had mentioned another brother, too. But Uri never did.
Polly is their sister.
There’s a distinct and undeniable sense of relief. But I wonder how rational it is. This information changes nothing at the end of the day. I’m still nothing more than a sex toy to him. A dirty little secret he wants to keep hidden away from the people he cares about.
I fall back on my butt and wrap my hands around my knees. “What’s she like? Your sister?”
Lev shrugs. “I dunno.”
“Come on, there must be something you can tell me about her.”
“She likes to give me hugs,” he says with a full-body shudder.
I smile. “It sounds like she loves you.”
“I don’t love her.”
The words fly out of his mouth so fast that I can’t quite believe them. “What do you mean? Of course you do.”
He shakes his head. “No. She makes me sad.”
For a moment, I’m worried that maybe this sister is not so nice to him. But considering he just told me that she tries to hug him all the time, I’m less than sure. “Can you explain that to me?”
He drops his chin to his chest. “Her… her eyes. Her eyes make me sad.”
I have no clue what to make of that. So instead, I try something different. “Tell me, is she kind to you?”
He nods.
“Does she try to talk to you?”
He nods again.
“Does she play video games with you?”
Another nod.
“Well, it sounds like she’s a pretty awesome sister. One who really cares about you.” Lev doesn’t really respond to that, except to keep rocking back and forth and muttering under his breath. “I had a sister once and she was my best friend. But then she died.”
The rocking stops. “She died?”
“Yeah. A long time ago now.”
“My parents died, too.”
“I know. I’m so sorry.”
He blinks apathetically. “Does it make you sad that your sister died?”
“All the time.”
“Oh.”
“You’re so lucky to have your sister around, Lev. Trust me. Make use of the time you have with her. And more importantly, be kind to her, too.”
“How did your sister die?”
“She got sick.”
His eyes go wide. “That’s bad luck.”
Funnily enough, that’s exactly how I felt when Ziva was diagnosed. Of all the people on this planet, why did she have to get cancer? At sixteen! How is that possible? How is that fair?
It felt like the most incredible, awful, unbelievable bad luck.
“I know. It was bad luck. Just like what happened to you and your parents. Do you… remember the accident?”
He flinches and I immediately regret the question, but he answers anyway. “I only remember one thing.”
I don’t press him to continue. I figure if he just wants to leave this conversation here, I’ll let it go.
But then, after a very long silence, he continues. “Mama’s eyes. Hazel eyes with small brown spots in them. They were open. They were staring at me. But she wasn’t talking or blinking or smiling. She was just staring at me. For hours.”
My stomach curls. She died with her eyes open.
“Lev, can I take your hand?”
He considers it for a moment.
Then he nods.
49
URI
It feels good to set things on fire.
Watching things burn is the best way to temper rage. And I have enough rage in me to ignite a thousand different blazes.
The screams of Sobakin’s men keep piercing the skies, tinging the orange plumes of smoke with their pain. It’s fucking music to my ears. It’s also helping to crowd out all the other unwelcome thoughts I’ve been grappling with the last few days.
“Boss?”
I look towards Artem, who’s got blood splattered across his shirt. He’s also got a Sobakin man by the collar. The bastard is bleeding from the gut, his hands desperately trying to holding together the gaping gash that will take his life sooner rather than later. “Do you want any alive?”
The man’s eyes go wide. “No, please! Please don’t. I have a family—”
“Don’t we all,” I snarl without the slightest bit of feeling. “I want information, Artem. If they have none to give, then what good are they?”
In one swift move, Artem slices the knife in his hand across the man’s throat like he’s carving meat. More blood spills, mingling with all the rest, as one screaming voice silences itself forever.
This is the third of Sobakin’s safehouses we’ve come down on like a plague in the last three days. It’s the clearest message I can think of to send.
I’m not playing around anymore.
More screams surround me as I walk through the burning house, hot embers biting at my skin. Another few minutes and we’ll need to move out. I can already smell cooking meat. You’d think that human flesh would have a distinctive smell, but no. It smells like anything else.