Page 3 of Twilight Sins

As I look, he glances down and checks the time on a shining silver watch. Then, as if he can feel me looking at him, he glances right up and into my eyes.

My lips part automatically. It’s crazy to think he can see me—I’m on the other side of dark glass, across a crowded restaurant, tucked halfway into the shadows. There’s no way in hell he’s actually making eye contact.

… Right?

But it sure feels that way. That sense of shared melancholy doubles and triples in an instant. My breath catches in my throat. People always make silly comments about “time standing still,” but that’s how this feels. As if every other patron inside the restaurant, every pedestrian walking past me on the sidewalk—they all screech to a halt and let this moment play out.

I wrench my eyes away before anything else weird can happen. Even still, a full-body shiver ripples through me, a shiver that has nothing to do with the outside temperature.

“You still there?” says a tinny voice in my ear.

I realize with a jolt that I’m still on the phone with Kayla. “Yeah,” I mumble. “Sorry. I just saw…”

“Saw what?”

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I think I—I’m gonna—oh, for God’s sake, I’m going into the restaurant. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

I press End Call just as Kayla is halfway through reminding me that I’m “the moon to her stars,” the same thing she always says whenever we hang up the phone.

I tuck it back in my purse. I square my shoulders. I fix my hair in the reflection in the window and take one last deep breath.

Then I push through the door.

2

YAKOV

I hate this fucking restaurant.

I got a hideous stomach churning feeling when I first walked through the door an hour ago. Three vodkas later, it hasn’t gotten any better.

I hate it mostly because it’s so familiar. I know it like the back of my hand, like the taste of my own tongue. I practically grew up in here. From the time my legs were too short to even reach the ground when I was seated, my family has come here for moments big and small.

When my little brother Nikandr took his first steps, we were here.

The last time I saw my sister Mariya in person, we were here.

On the day those motherfucking Gustev Bratva mudaks stole my father’s life from me, we were here.

But just like the vodkas, the passage of time has done nothing to make it easier to step back through those doors. If anything, it just makes it worse. It makes me remember all the shit I’ve tried so hard to forget.

The server comes flitting back over. She must be new, because I don’t recognize her face, though it’s been five years since Otets died and I was last here, so I suppose some turnover is natural.

Her smile is bright and unconcerned, which is another reason I know she must be new. If she had any idea who I am, what I do, what I’ve done, she wouldn’t be smiling.

She’d be running for the goddamn hills.

“Can I get you anything else? A refill? A menu? You look lonely.”

I clench my jaw. Yeah, definitely new. Someone seasoned would know better than to try prying into my personal life. “No, thank you.”

Let no one say I’m not a gentleman.

She frowns and opens her mouth to reply, then thinks better of it and scuttles off. I have to remind myself it’s not her fault that she’s confused. I’ve spent my whole life learning to keep my face wiped clean of emotion. It all gets locked into a tiny black box deep in my chest and that’s where it stays.

Grief, rage, lust—it all looks the same on the face of Yakov Kulikov, pakhan of the Kulikov Bratva.

That’s how it’s always been.

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