Rafael slowly rubbed the side of his face and turned his gaze to Sasha. “There was no attempt to interfere with our shipments?”
Sasha’s face was completely unreadable. Then his gaze darted to me briefly in a brief, assessing glance, as though he was recalibrating something.
“No.”
“And no intention of restricting access to the south docks.”
“That would be a no, too.”
The realization dawned slowly, like two freight trains racing towards each other, only to discover they were in fact on parallel tracks.
“Oh,” Rafael muttered.
“Yeah,” I said sympathetically. “Oh.”
Realizing you almost started a war over the wrong problem probably deserved a moment. There was another long pause until Rafael turned to face Sasha.
“We miscalculated.”
Sasha studied him carefully; the tension in his posture was still evident, but it was no longer explosive. Rafael extended his hand then, and for just a moment I thought Sasha might reject the gesture out of principle alone.
But then he took it, and Kyrill exhaled quietly behind me. “How anticlimactic.”
“Today is not at all going the way I thought it would.” Rafael shook his head slowly.
Elena scoffed and jabbed her brother in the chest. “So what? We just solved all your problems. You’re welcome, by the way.”
I nodded in agreement.
Rafael and Sasha shared a long, meaningful look, suddenly unified in their exasperation.
Kyrill snickered. “I see we’ve moved onto support group portion of today.”
And just like that, the tension in the warehouse shifted. We were a long way from anything akin to friendship, but there was a kind of reluctant understanding forming between men who had both realized sometimes their way wasn’t the only way.
I glanced around the room. “Soooo … no war?”
Sasha slowly turned his head to face me and replied dryly, “No war.”
“Oh good,” I said with relief. “I’d really like the rest of my day to be significantly less eventful.”
My body finally caught up with that information, the tension draining out of me in uneven waves now that my brain had officially downgraded the situation from “imminent death” to “mildly traumatic incident.”
Kyrill tilted his head. “Statistically unlikely.”
Rafael laughed, a short and startled sound that seemed to surprise even him.
Sasha, however, was still looking at me with such intensity, it made my stomach flip.
“You solved it.”
I shrugged. “You were both reacting to the wrong problem.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He stepped closer and the warehouse suddenly felt smaller. “I was prepared for bloodshed tonight.”
“I gathered that.”
His hand lifted slowly, brushing a stray strand of hair away from my face with surprising gentleness. The same hands that had just put bullets into people now touching me like I might fracture under the pressure.