Page 56 of Vasily the Nail

Fuck. I shouldn’t have said that. I should have just let her think I’m a junkie. It would have been better that way, really. She has a kind heart. When she goes home, it’ll be better that she remembers me as a junkie who refuses to clean up than someone inherently broken who can’t be mended. I think she’s the type who would refuse to accept that.

“Never mind. It was a joke. Let’s just go home so I can get fucked up.”

“Vasily,” she says sternly, and it takes everything within me not to snap my attention to her, especially when she grabs my hand and settles it in her lap. “That wasn’t a joke. I know you. I may not know your life story or even your favorite food or—”

“Pierogies.”

She chuckles and brings my hand up to kiss my knuckles before settling it back down. “I suppose I’ll have to ask Igor if his wife has a good pierogi recipe, then. Now tell me what you meant by that. And please don’t lie to me again.”

“Okay. But I need you to drive, okay? Just . . . watch the road.”

She keeps her hand on mine as she hops back onto the sleepy country road. I want to tell her both hands on the wheel, but that touch is everything. “I lost my father and my girlfriend, my . . . the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with six years ago.”

“Brooke?”

“Yeah. I guess you’ve talked to enough people you’ve heard her name. People have been talking about her a lot lately.”

“Because of me?”

“I haven’t dated anyone since I lost her, and most people don’t know the circumstances between us, so they think I’ve moved on. And Artyom pointed out to me that there are some similarities between you. Not anything I was thinking about, but I could see where people might be . . . getting confused about who you are because . . .”

“Because the voices?”

“Da.I know this is going to sound crazy, but I’d never done drugs before then. I always assumed papa was going to be around just short of forever and when he died, Artyom wouldtake over, and he’d have his own family so I’d be taken out of succession.”

“Like Kostya?”

“Just like that, yeah. And I wanted out of Flagstaff. I was going to be the good second son. I was going to do my time in the Bratva. But I was going to business school, too. Just the local community college, but I hoped I’d do well enough the first two years that a good school — maybe even yours — could see past the mess I made of high school. I was working on ways to make our brigade stronger and wealthier so I’d have an excuse to move to a big city and have a corporate office and still contribute. But then papa and Brooke died, and my brain . . . just . . . stopped. I was weak.”

Ana makes a soft, heartfelt sound. I hear the clicking of a blinker and feel the car slow down.

“Fuck, don’t stop.”

But she does. She pulls over onto the side of the road with the hazard lights on, throws the car into park, and then throws her arms around me. When her lashes brush my cheek, they leave a damp trail.

“Fucking hell, don’t cry for me, either.”

“You’re not weak,” she insists. “That would be a nightmare for anyone. And you lost them both but also had to give up on your dreams? That’s horrible!”

When I laugh, it’s a raw, choked sound. I thicken my accent for no good reason other than to cover up the emotion clogging in my throat. “Is fine,zvyozdochka. Is life. Please, let’s get home.”

Her look, her lips turned down, her brow creased, her eyes threatening to spill again, tells me she’s not okay with this, but she gets back in her seat and on the road again.

I cross my arms over my chest and lean back, staring out the moon roof at the cloudless February sky. “I first heard the voice at my father’s funeral. They were lowering his casket into the ground, and this voice — that, just putting it out there, sounds exactly like my mother, who was murdered before we were forced to leave Russia — this voice told me to jump in with him.”

Ana mouthsfuck. I doubt she’s ever moved her lips in that way, let alone uttered it. She reaches for me and, when she finds my hands tucked under my arms, smacks my arm to get me to relinquish it. She grabs my hand in a grip that feels like she’s challenging me to an arm wrestle. She pins our forearms right to the center console, and I wouldn’t dream of even loosening that grip.

“It scared me,” I admit. “But the first time, I thought it was just an errant thought, you know? Just some dumb terrible thing that popped into my head.

“But then it happened again at Brooke’s funeral. Her family decided on cremation, and I was standing next to her casket, and my mother told me to climb in, that no one would notice. I could go with her into the fire, and it would all be over. Please stop crying.”

Ana sniffles. “If I could, I would.”

“It was always the same after that. I’d be walking down the road and the voice would tell me to fall into traffic. My brother’s house — that’s where I was staying because he was worried and Dima wasn’t so reliable then — he had a pool, and she’d tell meto weigh myself down so I’d sink and never come up. Whenever I drove over a bridge, I’d have to lock my arms to keep myself from driving off of it at her insistence. That’s actually why I stopped driving whenever I could get out of it.”

“Oh, Vasya. I made you take me on a drive.”

I grin at her, and yeah, her eyes aren’t the only ones damp. It’s been a long time since I talked to anyone about that. “I like driving with you. Anyway, I kept it to myself. We had work to do. The death of a leader means all the roaches come out. We had to be stronger than ever or else the bikers would have overrun Flagstaff. But I wasn’t sleeping, I was super twitchy, finally Dima called me out. He told me he could cure me. With weed.”

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