Page 116 of Kingmakers, Graduation

“You saw how she lost her temper over nothing. What if something really pisses her off? She could get us in serious shit.”

I turn and face Jasper, filling the hallway with my shoulders, blocking his path. Letting him know I’m fucking serious.

“Sabrina is a tiger. One of a kind, nothing else like her. And no, a tiger can’t be tamed—who would want it to be? All its power comes from the fact that it’s wild. You can’t cage a tiger. You can only try to be its master. Nobody wants a tiger that’s a shell of itself. You want the most powerful fucking tiger you can get. And that comes with dangers. If you have a German shepherd, that dog will lay down its life for you. With a tiger, if you don’t feed it, and you don’t respect it, it will eat you.”

Jasper considers this, eyes narrowed, hands stuffed in his pockets. At last he says, “Am I the dog in this metaphor?”

“I don’t know,” I reply. “But I can tell you, the tiger doesn’t ask what it is in the metaphor. It already knows what it is.”

Jasper smiles thinly, accepting the reproof.

He may not like me taking a slap at him, but he can’t deny that Sabrina is valuable. She already proved her worth. The hybrid drugs were her idea. Hakim helped with the execution, but the formulas were her creation. She was the one bold or reckless enough to experiment on herself. She’s the one who knows how to create an experience.

The pills are selling beyond our wildest dreams, and Sabrina’s branding makes them recognizable and highly covetable in the open market. Imitators pop up every day, but the packaging is distinctive enough that the devotees will only accept the real deal.Molniya, Elixsir,andOpusare becoming as legendary asOrange Sunshinein the ’60s.

I have to keep my focus on the mob of rivals jealous of our success.

Jasper and Sabrina will keep working together. It’s good for both of them—they’ll realize that soon enough.

29

SABRINA

Jasper and I are waiting for another shipment in the asscrack of nowhere. This time the product is coming up the Moskva river. We’re waiting in a shack two hours east of the city so we can waylay the goods before they fall under the purview of the port authority.

This wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s cold as hell in our little hidey-hole—no heating whatsoever, and cracks in the walls as wide as a finger. The wind blows through in whistling gusts, stirring the old newspaper scattered across the floorboards.

More incessant than the wind is Zigor’s endless chatter. He can’t stand a two-minute stretch without anyone talking. Since his companions are the perpetually silent Bookends, the sulky skeleton Jasper, and me—currently wondering if I could stuff my ears with bits of newspaper without Zigor noticing—he’s got an uphill battle keeping conversation going.

He keeps disappearing to answer the “call of nature,” returning a few minutes later sniffing and rubbing his nose, twice as talkative as ever. I assume he’s taking bumps in private not for Jasper’s and my benefit, but to avoid the Bookends whose job is surely to report on him to his father as much as to protect him.

It must enrage Lev Zakharov having a son this stupid. Adrik told me that Lev clawed his way up from abject poverty, selling stolen goods out of a briefcase in Rostov-on-Don, eventually opening his own pawn shop, then a whole chain of them, and finally expanding into the world of black-market goods.

Lev is notoriously cheap, a ferocious bargainer, ancient and wrinkled as a grasshopper. When he was sixty-two, he made the one frivolous decision of his life and married a nineteen-year-old waitress. Zigor was the result. According to Adrik, the waitress soon realized she had not secured the life of luxury she hoped—Lev was so stingy that he counted the squares of toilet paper she used and forced her to run hot water through the same coffee grounds three times in a row before she could grind more. The waitress fled to Azov, leaving Zakharov with a chubby toddler to raise.

Of course, this is all legend and rumor, so who knows how much of it is true. I could ask Zigor, but then I’d have to talk to him.

Jasper has commandeered one of the only chairs in the shack. Zigor has the other, but he keeps hopping up to pace around the room, or take another stroll down to the empty dock to “look for the boatman.”

The two Bookends have seated themselves on upturned buckets. The buckets are so low that their knees jut up around their chests. They look like a pair of crouching spiders, especially with those ridiculous sunglasses they refuse to take off even indoors.

I’m sitting on a rickety three-legged table. As long as I sit cross-legged right in the middle, I don’t tumble off.

“We should have waited in the car,” Jasper complains, blowing on his hands. “It’d be warmer.”

“You need eat more!” Zigor tells him, slapping his own stomach. “I never cold.”

“Yeah, but then I’d look like you,” Jasper says.

“Is good for man to be big. Bigger the better, yes?” Zigor waggles his eyebrows at me suggestively.

“Yeah,” I say, in a bored tone. “Whenever I enter a room, I look at who’s tallest and then I fuck that person immediately.”

I pretend to scan the room, squinting at each of the men in turn.

“Looks like Tweedledee wins,” I say, nodding to the left Bookend. “Better luck next time, Zigor.”

“Ho ho! Time to get busy, Georgiy!” Zigor chortles.

---