Page 42 of Pageant

Elyah points his utensil at me. “Do not. That woman is fucking slippery and we will all be poisoned to death.”

“What with, ground pepper?”

“She would find a way,” he mutters, forking pasta into his mouth.

“Shut up about the food, Kirill. Who is your favorite so far?” Kostya asks.

“Are you kidding? Number Eleven, no contest,” I tell him. “She’s the only one who has a fucking personality, but I’m grading on a different scale to you.”

“And she’s not on my list,” Kostya reminds me.

I shrug. “Number Ten might suit you for a wife. Not too skinny. Childbearing hips. I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell.”

“I liked Number Six,” Kostya muses. “At first.”

“Number Six is a fucking idiot,” Elyah mutters.

I have to agree with him. Number Six offered to betray the other women to ingratiate herself with us the first chance she got. “She would throw her own mother under a bus. She would do the same to you the first chance she got.”

“Loyalty is fucking rare,” Elyah says.

“That’s why I’m happy I have you two,” Konstantin replies.

Elyah stops eating and looks up at him. “We have your back, always. If none of these women are good enough for you, we’ll do this all over again. And I promise you this.” He looks hard at ourPakhan. “Kirill and I will make sure that what happened with that devious bitch never happens to you again.”

Anger unfurls in my chest as I remember how everything blew up in all our faces just eight months ago. If it hadn’t been for Elyah, things would have been so much worse. Kostya would be dead, and I would have no one. No purpose. No one who gave a shit whether I lived or died.

A sour taste fills my mouth as I recall the older sibling I once called brother. You can’t choose the family you’re born into, but when you find your true brothers you will know what it means to be alive. Mine are sitting beside me right at this moment.

I cup the napes of their necks and look between the two men, swearing, “That disaster? Never fucking again.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Kostya says, holding up his glass, and we toast each other.

“What’s next for our little jewels?” I ask.

Kostya settles back in his chair, rolling the vodka around in his glass. “We thin the herd.”

A smile spreads over my face.

“How?” Elyah asks.

“I’m going to test their integrity.”

Elyah gives a humorless bark of laughter and pours more vodka into all our glasses. “Here is to weeding out the liars.”

As I pick up my glass, I accidentally knock it against the saltshaker. It topples over and the cap comes off, spilling salt onto the table.

Elyah hisses through his teeth and scoops the salt back into the shaker and screws the cap back on. There are some grains left on the table and he takes a pinch and throws it over his shoulder. Then he mutters the Rosary and makes the sign of the cross on his chest.

“What did you do that for?” I ask.

He throws me an angry look. “You want to invite the devil here? You think we are so blessed that bad luck cannot touch us?”

I shake my head and drink my vodka. “You’re such an old woman sometimes, Elyah.”

* * *

“I’m telling the truth,”Number Four sobs. She’s strapped into a chair, her wrists bound to the armrests and electrodes stuck to her upper arms. A machine on the table next to her buzzes, and she’s zapped with an electric shock.

---