Page 97 of Oh, Flutz!

“Why would I?”

“To spend Christmas with your own family.” She must notice the dark look that passes over my face, because she hastily corrects herself. “With Sasha. Or the others. I don’t know, what do you usually do?”

Christmas is…complicated. I used to love it. It used to be the highlight of the crazy, hectic winter months, when I could go home and take a week off before heading back out to the tail end of the season. It used to be so much fun, with the town dressed up for the holidays, the tourist rush temporarily slowing and everyone letting out a collective sigh of relief that we could finally have the slopes back to ourselves, at least until the new year.

Me and Ollie used to spike a thermos of cocoa and go hit said slopes while the girls went on one last round of gift shopping, trying not to fall out of the ski lift (which we failed to do so often that the guys at the front desk started sticking the big pink stickers they give the little kids on the backs of our jackets to warn the lifties to put the child lock on the guardrail.) Then we’d get everyone together to head over to the Kwans’ for dinner, which was both the traditional Christmas stuff and all the Korean holiday food: kimchi, mung bean pancakes, pan-fried everything, Grandma Yung’s rice cake soup with the dumplings that I literally could eat every day. Then we’d all sit down and watch Home Alone (all three movies) while drinking cider and eating butter cookies from the blue tin with the Kwans’ cat snuggled in my lap. And then I’d conk out in Oliver’s room and head to my parents’ in the morning, to hang out with my sister.

When I was a little kid, every year, me, Alex, and my dad would go out to Mirror Lake at the crack of dawn Christmas Day with our sticks and pucks and play hockey with the whole place to ourselves. Baby Alex would shriek and try to catch the puck, my dad racing circles around the both of us and making us so in awe with his tricks that we’d stand there, mouths gaping. We wouldn’t even complain about having to wait to open presents. The Christmas “game” was the part we loved most. Mom would have hot chocolate ready when we got back, and we’d flick marshmallows at each other across the table, pretending the salt shakers were little goalposts, and whoever made the most goals got to open a present first. Dad would always let us win.

And then there was the accident. So none of that lasted very long.

It’s still managed to be pretty fun sometimes. Recently, though, it just feels like such a drag. These last couple years, I’ve usually managed to be home instead of traveling—I haven’t qualified for anything that would demand otherwise—but I can’t be in the same room as my mom and dad for longer than a few hours, and even that’s enough to usually get me to storm out and/or hide in the kitchen by the end of it, as Katya now knows. I usually just beg Alexandra to come with me to the Kwans,’ so I don’t feel even worse about skipping out on her.

“Not a whole lot,” I finally answer. “Definitely less this year.”

“So…you’re coming?” Katya asks, a little uncertainly. I’d say almost a littlehopefullyif the idea weren’t so impossible to fathom.

I crack another smile. “Oh, you’re so going to regret inviting me, Andreyeva.”

She grimaces. “I already am.”

Chapter Thirty

BRYAN

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA

“My grandfather's a psychopath,my mother is a fiend, and they will both eat you alive if you get scared, sodon’tget scared,” Katya stresses, and I just look down at her, squinting.

“That’s your advice?” I ask in disbelief, and she looks at me, like,oops?

“I’m going to kill you one of these days,” I tell her, and she smirks.

“You can try.”

She’s right. She’d rip my head off before I even came close. I sigh, reaching over to pick up her suitcase from the baggage claim—pink luggage tag, her name scribbled on it in Cyrillic and English—and planting it down for her. “You think they’ll like me?”

She glances at me. “Yes, of course.” That’s it. No hesitation. It makes me feel oddly gratified.

“Man, I can’t wait to hear all the stories of you terrorizing everyone as a little kid,” I tease, and she cracks a grin.

“Trust me, I was anextremelyirritating child.”

“I have no trouble believing you on that.”

“Hey!” she protests, attempting to smack me, but I grab her arm before she can and tackle her, wrapping my arms around her waist and pulling her close to me, trying to catch our breaths as she tries in vain to fix her wild hair, not really able to move her arms from where they’re trapped against my chest.

“Let go,” she yells, laughing, nearly tripping over her suitcase. All the people around us are giving us weird looks, but then Katya looks up at me, eyes meeting mine, and that’s when I notice that they’re not fully grey like I thought they were this whole time. Not just like rain clouds right before a storm, like they look from far away. Here, up close, you can just see a glimpse of the blue sky behind them.

“You should really say please,” I say breathlessly, and she smiles.

“Come on. They’re waiting for us.”

Dr. Dmitriy Andreyev is,hands down, the most terrifying man I’ve ever met, and that’s counting my dad and Wally, my sadist of an ex-coach.

I mean, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise, considering he was a nuclear scientist and maybe, possibly, a secret agent; plus I’ve heard plenty of stories from Katya. Still, nothing could have prepared me for coming face-to-face with the man. It’s pretty clear where my partner gets her icy glare from. Seriously. Even if looks can’t kill, I was on the verge of cardiac arrest before he finally gave a nod of approval after sizing me up in silence for a solid fifty seconds.

But hey, at least I got the nod.

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