Sold to the Bratva King novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Lights on the Cranes

Zoya wiped her face, pulled on black gloves and pointed at her chair.

Matvei sat down in it and rolled up his right sleeve.

The whole party crowded around the chair. The old men stood at the front, closest.

Zoya handed me a sheet of tracing paper and a pen.

I turned my back so nobody could see.

I wrote it in my own square print, every letter separate, the way I'd signed my lease and the board's notepad and the probate court's forms.

Then I folded it and gave it to Zoya.

She opened it. She read it. She looked at me.

Then she grinned so wide her septum ring moved.

She made the stencil and laid it on the inside of his right wrist. The hand he holds mine with, from my right side.

"Don't look," I told him.

"I'm not looking."

The needle buzzed.

He didn't flinch once. He watched my face the whole time instead.

It took twenty minutes. Zoya wiped it clean and sat back.

"Okay," she said. "Read it."

He turned his wrist over.

Five square letters, black and clean, in my handwriting.

RIGHT.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he laughed, low, the real one, and pressed his wrist against his mouth.

"Where I stand," he said.

"Where you stand."

The oldest of the old men leaned in and read it. He frowned.

"It means nothing," he said in English.

"It means everything," Matvei said. "To two people. That's the only reading I wanted."

Parker was convicted in May.

The jury took four hours. Kent testified for two days. Lindsey testified for one.

I didn't go to the sentencing. The widow went, and called me after.

"Life," she said. "I sat on the aisle so he'd see me when they walked him out. He saw me."

We were married in June on the Atwater berth at sunset.

The longshoremen strung the three cranes with lights, boom to rail, a thousand white bulbs on each one.

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