Page 37 of Kings of Cruelty

I grimace. “It’s not my fault?—”

“Enough!” Konstantin interrupts. “It is hardly monogamous if there are four of us, in any case. The rest doesn’t matter. We are here for Sierra.”

“Yeah, and with each other when she decides she wants that,” I retort, my cheeks flushing as I remember what it had felt to fuck Yuri. I guess we’ve been far from monogamy, but they expect us to stay in this… what? What is this even called?

Arrangement?

“Again, I didn’t force you,” Sierra says, her voice testy. “I’m the one who didn’t get a say in what happened to their body, so I’d fucking appreciate it if you’d stop acting like we made you do it.”

I grit my teeth, trying not to snap at her. “Anyway,” I say, stressing the word, “the point is that I haven’t been with anyone else since before Sierra. Why are we even talking about this?”

“Because you three don’t want to tell me what’s been going on, so you derailed with all this talk of cheating and monogamy,” Sierra says.

Konstantin chuckles and finally goes to sit in his armchair again. “True. You do not need to worry about what we were talking about. We will sort that issue. But you can tell us about your classes, and what you actually wanted to talk about when you came our way.”

Sierra pouts, but she nods. “Fine. I thought you’d want to know that I figured out how many weapons my dad squirreled away. As long as nobody else got to them first… we’re looking at at least a hundred guns.”

I inhale sharply. “How the fuck did he keep that many hidden from the FBI?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. The hiding place has to be good. I was thinking, Kotya, about what you said when I mentioned the apartment building?—”

She keeps talking, but I stop paying attention.

I have to help somehow. This one shipment of arms will help to stall Igor Voronkov, but it won’t delay him forever. We have to figure out something else, and it shouldn’t all be on Konstantin’s shoulders.

I just have to figure out how I can help.

TEN

Sierra

If I had knownI’d be spending all this time around Russians, I would have signed up for a Russian elective last semester. It’s too late to join any classes now, but the library has textbooks available.

Yuri looks at the books skeptically. “Can you actually learn a language with only books?”

I open the book to the first chapter and shrug. “Better than I can without a book.”

“I could teach you,” Yuri says. He slides his chair closer to mine and peers at the first chapter. “Oh, that’s the alphabet.”

Right, Russian uses Cyrillic, so I’m going to have to learn an entirely new script. At least the book includes romanizations next to the Cyrillic.

“How old were you when you started learning English?” I ask, pulling out a pen and paper so I can start practicing the letters. The book is focusing on five for now, which seems like a decent amount to start with.

Yuri makes a thoughtful sound. “I guess it was fifth grade? That’s when they taught it at school. I was mad and didn’tunderstand why English had to have a brand new alphabet. I still think it’s dumb that you pronounce the letter ‘Er’ as a P sound.”

“I wish I’d learned another language when I was younger,” I tell him, staring down at the letters on the page. “It would probably make learning this one easier.” I frown. “Maybe. The whole new alphabet would still be a thing.” I eye him curiously. “Do you know anything other than Russian and English?”

I realize I know so little about him, and that’s something I find myself wanting to rectify.

“Nah. I wasn’t that good at school. I wasn’t one of the smart kids.” Yuri takes the pen from my hand and draws the Cyrillic letters I’m trying to learn. They don’t look much neater than my version of them, but he wrote them a lot faster.

“You don’t have to be good in school to be smart,” I point out. “It’s a completely different skill set from real life.” I draw the first letter again, then repeat the sound it makes.

Yuri corrects me. “More of anah.”

I glare at him. “Ah.”

He shakes his head. “No, you’re still…” He repeats the sound, and I can’t tell the difference between what he said and what I said. I decide that it’s good enough for now and move on to the next letters.

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