Polly opens her mouth to say something but Dimiv grabs her arm and shakes his head. She falls silent while Nikolai grabs one of the cloth napkins off the cake table and grimly wipes away some of the blood on his face.
It smears it around more than it cleans anything. But that’s life these days—we try to clean it, to make things work, and s**t just gets messier and messier and bloodier and bloodier. It’s a bit too on the nose, as far as metaphors go, actually.
He drops the napkin in disgust and turns his gaze back on me. “You want to have this conversation now, like this? Fine. There was a time when I was angry and bitter about it. But the moment I took my ego out of it, I was able to see that you were the right choice for pahkan and I wasn’t. I could have challenged you; I could have cal
