Page 60 of Emerald

“Have you read all these?” I ask him.

“No,” he says honestly. “Only half.”

Half is still a shit-ton of books.

I’m supposed to be going over to the computer on his desk, but I’m distracted by all these beautiful, orderly spines, neatly arranged by topic and type.

“What are your favorites?” I ask him.

“Biographies,” Ivan says promptly. “Churchill. Roosevelt. Even Steve Jobs. I like to read about extraordinary people.”

“My dad liked Churchill,” I tell him. “He used to say ‘It’s hard to fail—‘“

“‘But it’s worse never to have tried to succeed’,” Ivan finishes.

“Right,” I grin at him.

“My father didn’t try at much. It was my mother who had the brains and the ambition.”

He’s looking at me in that way he has, that makes me feel stripped down, opened up, examined to my core.

“Unequal marriages lead to unhappiness,” Ivan says.

“It seems like a lot of marriages lead to unhappiness,” I reply, keeping my eyes on the books on the shelf.

That was certainly true of my parents. Ivan’s as well, it sounds like.

“Do you think it has to be that way?” Ivan asks.

I glance back over at him.

His arms look harder than steel, folded across his broad chest. His expression is so determined, that I can’t imagine Ivan failing at anything, ever.

“No,” I say at last. “I guess I’m on team ‘it’s better to try.’”

I want to kiss him again. That’s all I want to do, whenever we’re in a room alone together.

“What’s it like growing up in a mafia family?” I ask him.

“Strange,” Ivan says. “I went to a normal school, with the children of teachers and lawyers and bankers, and a few other Bratva. As soon as anyone hears your name, they think they already know everything about you. And in some ways, they’re right. I’ve always fulfilled what was expected of me.”

“Did you ever want to do anything else?” I say.

“Sure,” Ivan nods. He lists them off on his fingers: “Rugby star. Actor. Astronaut. They were only childish fantasies, though. I was Bratva. And I never wanted anything else. Until . . . very recently.”

I can feel my skin burning.

I know exactly what it feels like to think you’re content, that you don’t need anything. And then to realize there’s something you need so badly that you can’t think how you ever lived without it . . .

I’m not ready to admit to that just yet, however.

So, I sit down at Ivan’s desk, sinking into his leather chair, smelling the intoxicating scent of his cologne that has permeated the material.

I open up his laptop and remote into my encrypted server, which is disguised as a website about birdwatching. I access my files and find Zima’s IP address, which, after a little more digging, I connect to an actual street address in Tsentralny.

Ivan is watching my fingers fly around on the keyboard with an expression of amazement.

“Where did you learn to do all that?” he asks.

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