Page 97 of Ivory Ashes

“Playing house with Viviana won’t bring them back, either!” I roar. My words echo off the marble floor and the high ceilings. I drag a hand through my hair, instantly regretting the outburst. “Fuck.”

“I’ll say so,” Anatoly mumbles. “This shit is heavy, brother. You don’t have to carry all of it alone.”

Raoul claps a hand on my shoulder. “We won’t let you. I can’t change the past, but I can push you towards the future you deserve.”

“A quick death and a Viking’s funeral?”

Nat laughs, but Raoul just shakes his head. “I can push you to open up that black heart of yours, Mikhail. No matter how much it pisses you off.”

35

VIVIANA

“Mama, you hide and I’ll count to sixty-seven!” Dante slaps his hands over his eyes and turns to the nearest tree.

I laugh and groan simultaneously. “I thought we were on a walk.”

Hands still over his eyes, he turns to face me. “Walks are boring. I want to play hide-and-seek!”

Considering this is the first walk Dante and I have taken on a weekday while the sun is still up, I don’t find it boring at all.

Mikhail didn’t come into the office at all today, but he texted me at quarter to four. No more business today. Head home.

Calling the mansion “home” felt like a slap in the face at first—a reminder of our shouting match this morning. Then Pyotr pulled down the drive towards the mansion and I realized… I like it here.

And I mean, yeah, of course I do. What kind of person is upset when they come home to a personal chef making five-star dinners and enough clean toilets for a whole football team? Mikhail lives in a kind of luxury that I didn’t even have growing up. My father was don of the Giordano mafia family, but he wasn’t God. Which is almost who you have to be to live the way Mikhail does.

But it’s more than the luxury. It’s also the ancient oaks and the sprawling lawn. The stone trail that winds through meticulously landscaped gardens. It’s the vines that twine around the bars of the wrought-iron fence and the birds that flit from post to post.

It’s the fact that my son greeted me at the door the moment I walked in, his arms around my legs and a smile on his face.

“Let’s go for a walk!” he declared.

Five minutes later, here we are.

The guards trailing a respectable distance behind us at all times are a bit of a dark cloud on the otherwise beautiful day, but hey, nothing can be completely perfect, right?

“Mama!” Dante has pulled his hands away from his eyes and is blinking at the brightness. “You’re supposed to go hide!”

“Fine, but sixty-seven is kind of a big number. What if we do fifteen?”

He shakes his head, his hair flopping over his forehead. “I can count high now. Today, I counted to sixty-seven. Mrs. Steinman said it was a big im-poo-ver-ment.” He sounds the word out slowly and shakes his head. “What’s that word?”

“Improvement.”

He beams. “Yeah, it’s a big improvement. So I’ll count and you hide, okay?”

Two weeks ago, he couldn’t count past fifteen. His teacher kept sending me passive-aggressive emails to work with him at home since “he should be able to count to twenty-five by now.”

“Okay,” I agree. “I’ll hide.”

Dante turns back to the tree and starts counting like it’s a race to sixty-seven. I stand and listen as he flies right past fifteen like it’s nothing. It’s incredible. I want to cheer him on, but there isn’t time. I jog down the path and duck down behind a bush that is way too small.

I keep expecting him to bring up our conversation at breakfast this morning. The way Mikhail snapped at him. About wanting to go back to his old school and see his old friends. But Dante seems… fine.

He’s learning a lot, we have more time together, and he’s safe. These are all good things… So why does it still feel wrong?

Dante pops his head over the bush. “Found you!”

---