She Played Sweet for Her Boyfriend, He Learned Who She Really Was novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Nobody Is That Calm

Luka finds Nika standing over two armed men; she tries her sweet voice and fails, then the harbor crew's gunmen arrive for him and she ends it, and he orders her into the car.

"Luka!" I said, and my voice came out bright and high, as it always did for him.

"Oh, thank goodness. I don't know what happened here."

He didn't answer.

He came up the stairs one step at a time, with his right hand inside his jacket.

I had the stranger's pistol in my hand. I set it on the stair between us, gently, and held my palms out.

"I came to see a friend," I said. "These two were already on the floor when I got here. I think they fell."

"They fell."

"I think so."

"Nika." He crouched by the man I'd shot in the thigh and turned his face toward the light.

"This man carried my bags at my mother's funeral. I've known him since I was twelve."

"Is he all right?"

"He has three holes in him." Luka looked up at me. "In a line, a hand apart. Do you want to try again?"

I did not want to try again.

His eyes moved over my braid, my buttoned cardigan, my small clean hands.

There was no blood on me. There never was.

"You were in the kitchen," he said slowly. "My aunt said you went out for pills."

"I did."

"You don't take pills."

"I should have said it better."

"Nobody is that calm," Luka said, to himself more than to me. "You look like you're waiting for a bus."

Behind the flat door, the lock turned.

Pavel Orlin's face appeared in the gap, gray and sweating, with his round glasses crooked. He saw Luka, and the color left him completely.

"That's Viktor's son," he whispered.

"He's with me, Mr. Orlin," I said.

"Is he?" Luka asked. He had not looked away from me. "Am I?"

"We can do this in the car."

"We'll do it right now."

Downstairs, the bell over the laundromat door rang.

It rang a second time, and then a third.

I tracked the footsteps under the dryers. Four men, maybe five, moving slowly and not talking.

Luka heard them too.

He got up, and I saw him decide that I should be behind him.

He actually took half a step to put his shoulder in front of mine.

It was almost sweet.

"Stay on the landing," he said. "Nika-love, I'm serious. Stay."

"Okay," I said.

The first man came around the bottom of the stairs with a rifle at his hip.

He had an anchor tattooed on the back of his hand. Luka saw it in the same moment I did.

"Harbor crew," Luka said, flat with surprise. "What are they doing in my father's laundromat?"

The rifle came up.

I hit Luka in the back of the knees with my whole arm, and he went down across the landing and swore at me.

The first burst of fire cut a line across the wall where his head had been.

I took the pistol off the stair.

The man with the anchor on his hand fell, because I shot him in the knee and then the chest.

The second man had followed him up.

I didn't shoot him, because there was not room.

I stepped inside the barrel of his rifle and turned it toward the ceiling.

Then I drove my elbow into his throat until he sat down on the stairs and stopped moving.

A third man jumped the banister and landed on the landing, shouting.

I put him against the wall with my forearm and broke his wrist.

"Stay down, love," I told Luka, in the cheerful voice.

I don't know why. It was the voice I used when I picked up his dry cleaning.

"Nika," Luka said from the floor.

The fourth man was already running.

He didn't make it down the stairs.

He made it to the laundromat door.

I shot him from the landing, through the glass, once in the back of the shoulder.

He went out into the street on his hands.

Then there was no more noise except the dryers.

I looked down at myself. Dust on my sleeve, and the hem of my dress was torn.

That was all.

"Is it over?" Pavel Orlin whispered from his door.

"For tonight," I said. "Get your coat."

He went in without a word.

I turned back to the landing, and Luka was sitting against the wall with his hand clamped to his upper arm.

Blood ran out between his fingers and down to his wrist.

"You're hit," I said.

My voice was my own for a moment, low and quick.

I dropped to my knees in front of him and pulled his hand away.

The round had gone through the outside of the arm.

There was a clean tear in the sleeve and a worse one in the skin.

"It missed the bone," I said. "You'll need stitches. Press here."

I put his hand back, harder.

He didn't look at his arm. He was looking at my face.

He looked at it for a long time.

"Four men," he said.

"Yes."

"With rifles."

"They were slow."

"You broke a man's wrist for me," Luka said, "and told me to stay down like I was a child."

"Sorry about that."

"Don't apologize." He shut his eyes and opened them again. His jaw was working. "Don't you dare say sorry in that voice."

"I'm not sure which voice you want."

He laughed once, a short, cracked sound with no humor in it, and then he stopped.

The old man came out with a coat over his arm and a canvas bag held to his chest.

Luka watched him cross the landing without moving, and then turned his head toward the bodies on the stairs.

"Two of them are my father's," he said, almost under his breath.

"And four are the harbor crew's. And one of them was here for me."

I hadn't thought of that.

I had thought of Pavel, only Pavel.

But the rifle had come up toward Luka's chest, and the man with the anchor had known whose son was standing on that landing.

Luka put his good hand on the wall and stood.

He was a big man, and he swayed, and I saw him lock his knees until it passed.

"My car's outside," he said. "Mr. Orlin goes in the back. You get in the front."

"Luka, I can drive. You're losing blood."

"Get in the car, Nika."

It was not the voice he used on me at home.

I picked up my purse, and the pistol, and followed him down the stairs.

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