All simple and clean. So why did it feel as if pieces of jagged glass were being pulled from my heart?
Luka walked over to me and told the guards to give him a minute. They waited a respectful distance away, still watching out for snipers but looking a little less jumpy than before. Now that the guns and Vasiliy—the two big targets for any rivals—had departed, things felt slightly safer.
“Are you okay?” asked Luka, taking my hand in an oddly old-fashioned gesture. His hand completely covered my much smaller one. “You”—he searched for the right word for threw up—”You unwelled.”
Despite everything, that made me smile. “I’m okay now. I just…” I shook my head. “I wasn’t ready for that.” I could feel my face going pale again. “Jesus, Luka, you’re going to flood the market.”
He gave me a strange look, and I realized I’d spoken with too much authority. I didn’t sound like a tourist. I tried to brazen it out. “I took some business classes,” I said. “And that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Flooding the market. Thousands of cheap guns. So that your competitors look expensive and you force them out, and you control everything.”
He slowly nodded. “Exactly.”
“But it’s guns. So many guns. Just one of those could be used in a robbery or a murder and you’re talking about thousands.”
“Hundreds of thousands, over the next decade.” He put his hands on my shoulders. The touch would have been warm and comforting any other time, but it wasn’t working now. “But I don’t control what people do with them.”
At that, I lost it. Hot anger bubbled up from right down in my chest. “That old excuse?”
He stared at me and I could see his own anger growing, too. “It’s just business, Arianna. I’m taking the violence out of it. Once we control the whole market, there’ll be no more fighting with rival gangs. Much better than if bastards like Olaf Ralavich control it. The deals, the smuggling—it can all be clean and bloodless.”
“But it’s guns! It’s never bloodless! You’re ignoring what happens when the guns get to where they’re going!”
His eyes narrowed. “I didn’t make your criminals want to kill each other. I didn’t even make them demand guns. I’m just filling the demand.”
“What about kids?” I said savagely. And, at that, I saw him hesitate and almost wince. For a second, those hard eyes softened. “What about kids of fourteen, fifteen—even younger, who get mixed up with street gangs and shot with one of the new, cheap guns? What about them?”#p#分页标题#e#
He glanced away, not meeting my eyes. “That is unfortunate.”
“But you could do something about it! Once you control the supply, you could set conditions! Threaten to cut off their guns if they hand them out to teenagers.”
He held my gaze for a split second, his eyes widening in surprise. And something else. Respect. But then he shook his head and looked away. “Arianna, you don’t know this world. I couldn’t do that. It shows weakness. Besides, my father would never support it.”
“You have to!” I blurted. And then realized I’d said far too much already. What was rattling around my head was, you have to, because if you’re really this cold then I don’t know if there’s any hope for you.
His lips pressed together in a tight line and he loomed at me. “I don’t have to do anything,” he said sharply. But then he stared at me for another beat, half furious and half...something else. “You’re not, are you?” he muttered.
“Not what?”
“Not scared of me. No one ever stands up to me.”
“I am scared of you,” I said in a low voice. “I just...say stuff anyway.”
He held my gaze a second longer and then he glanced off down the road. There was nothing in sight, but I knew what he was thinking. He was gazing at the point where his dad’s car had vanished into the distance. Reminding himself that he and I could never work. He sighed. “Come,” he said. “We should go.”
The trip back to Moscow would be much quicker than the outward one. Now that we’d got rid of the guns and didn’t have to dodge the coastguard, Luka explained, we could take a more direct route. Five hours on the yacht, a flight and we’d be home.
Luka spent most of the time on the bridge with the captain. Given that there wasn’t anything to see except for the featureless gray ocean, I knew he was avoiding me. And I knew why. He was debating breaking up with me.