Page 183 of Kingmakers, Graduation

The more vodka Vlad drinks, the more he wants to sing along. His voice is low and gruff, but not unpleasant.

“Go ahead,” Jaromira encourages him. “It keeps me entertained.”

Chief peppers Jaromira with questions about the internal mechanisms of the tattoo gun.

“I didn’t build it,” she laughs. “I just use it.”

“How you holding up?” Adrik asks me. He’s sitting directly across from me, backwards on his chair with his arms folded over the seat rest. His hair is dark and shaggy around his face, his blue eyes bright under the skylight. Now that summer is coming, his tan is deepening again.

“I can barely feel it,” I say, though in truth it’s starting to sting now that Jaromira has finished the line work and moved on to the shading. Each pass of the needle bites a little deeper.

I haven’t looked at her work. I already know what the tattoo will look like. It’s staring at me from six muscular arms all around me—a black wolf, its mouth half-open in a snarl. I could probably draw it in my sleep from all the times I’ve traced Adrik’s tattoo with my finger.

When Jaromira finally finishes, the Wolfpack crowds around to see.

“It’s official,” Jasper grins.

I try to feel excitement as Jaromira positions me in front of the mirror, wiping the soap off my arm with a soft cloth.

As the rag swipes down, it reveals not a black wolf, but an orange tiger. The tiger prowls up my arm, long and sleek and graceful. Like the wolf, its teeth are bared in a furious snarl.

The Wolfpack laughs at the look on my face, Adrik more than anyone.

“Do you like it?” he says.

“I … I love it.”

I really do.

Adrik tilts my chin up and kisses me.

“You’re one of us,” he says. “But you’re still you. You don’t have to give up your identity—just be with me.”

“Always.” I kiss him back.

“Enough of that,” Andrei says. “Let’s go celebrate.”

Adrik

2 Years Later

One of thefirst things I did after I got Sabrina back was call Ivan on the phone and ask him how I could make sure I didn’t fuck it all up again.

I asked him who was ultimately in charge of his business—him, or Sloane?

Ivan didn’t hesitate.

“Both of us.”

“But who makes the decisions?”

“Sometimes me, sometimes her. She probably makes sixty percent, even seventy. She’s smarter than me, you know.”

I laughed. “I’m afraid that might be true of Sabrina. It’s not so easy though. I don’t know how to put someone else’s judgment over my own. I never have.”

Ivan grunted on the other end of the line—a sympathetic sound.

“The best thing is to make your decisions together.”

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