Page 146 of Ivory Ashes

Anatoly holds up his hands in surrender. “Too true, little man.”

The entire meal is stiff and awkward except when Dante quizzes us with everything Mrs. Steinman has been teaching him during his tutoring sessions. He asks Raoul if he knows The Muffin Man and almost falls out of his seat in delighted shock when Raoul sings the song along with him.

Seeing my usually-somber second-in-command sing children’s nursery rhymes should be enough to break me out of any funk, but it doesn’t so much as touch the dark cloud over my head tonight. Mostly because Viviana hasn’t so much as touched her dinner.

I interrupt the third round of singing by pushing Viviana’s plate closer to her. “You need to eat.”

She juts her chin out but doesn’t look at me. “I’m not hungry.”

“Considering you haven’t eaten all day, I don’t think that’s possible.”

“She had some lunch,” Anatoly offers in her defense. But he closes his mouth when I glare at him.

“Eat,” I demand.

Slowly, she turns to me. Her cheeks look sunken-in. I didn’t think that was possible after only a few days, but Viviana looks gaunt, skeletal.

I did that. This is my fault.

Without breaking eye contact, Viviana lifts her fork to her mouth and takes a bite. She chews slowly and I swear I can see her turning green. It takes visible effort for her to swallow.

“How’s that?” she asks coolly.

“A good start. You need to keep your strength up. We don’t know what is coming for us.”

“Something is coming?” Dante looks up at me, a purple juice mustache on his upper lip.

Viviana smooths down his hair. Her nails are bitten down to the skin. “Nothing is coming, bud. Mikhail is just talking silly. You have nothing to worry about.”

“He does,” I counter. I bend down to Dante’s level. “We all do. There are people out there who want to hurt us and we have to be ready.”

“Mikhail!” Viviana hisses at the same time Anatoly knocks my knee under the table.

“He deserves to know what is going on,” I tell them both. “He needs to understand why I have to send him away.”

All at once, the air sucks out of the room. I can hear my own heart beating in my ears.

“I’m going away?” Dante’s voice wavers.

It’s better for him to be upset now than to be unprepared. I’m doing him a favor. “You wanted to go back to school, didn’t you? That’s where I’m sending you. To school.”

Viviana gasps. “But I thought you didn’t want to?—”

“In Russia.”

Viviana moves so fast I almost don’t see her. In a second, she’s out of her chair with a protective arm wrapped around Dante’s chest.

“Like hell you are!” she hisses. “Stay away from him. You aren’t sending him anywhere.”

Raoul shoves away from the table, poised to take action wherever it might be necessary. Anatoly just looks exhausted.

“He isn’t safe here,” I tell her as calmly as I can. “He needs to get out of the city. No one knows about him yet. If I send him away, we can keep him anonymous until I’ve cleared up?—”

“This will never be ‘cleared up’! There will always be danger!” she cries out. “It’s why I didn’t want to come back here in the first place. Now, you expect me to stay trapped in this house while you send him halfway around the world? Absolutely not. No!”

“We can talk about this like adults,” Anatoly suggests, rising out of his chair. “We should all sit down and think this through—after Dante goes to bed.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Viviana growls at him. “You can’t take my son away from me.”

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