Rodeo's mood has been strange ever since his baby sister walked into that flea market and blew his world apart. His every waking moment is spent skirting some bizarre line between despair and jubilation, and all of it is starting to unravel him. He guesses if he were still back in Hunstville, that pot-bellied counselor would show him a chart filled with cartoon faces and ask him to identify with one, and he'd have to choose the face with the ambiguous squiggly mouth. His heart just won't fall one way or the other. One second he's ready to crow at the sky in mad glee that his sister is alive and he saw her and he held her little hand in his again, and then the next he's crashing, remembering how she cast him off like yesterday's newspaper the moment he was handed that death sentence. She'd said he was already gone. Her words won't stop coming back to him, chewing through his head again and again and again.
How can he be happy to see her now that he knows how easily she excised her love for him, amputated him like a rotten limb and left him in that cell to die without her?
And yet, how can he not?
Because his love ain't like hers. He can't just fold it up and tuck it down in some drawer in his head like an old shirt, the kind you forget is there 'till you accidentally pull it out and wonder what you were thinking when you wore it in the first place. His love for her could burst him like an overfilled tire. He can't help it. He hopes he never will.
So when Zhenya arrives, she finds a Dog King who is not quite as lively as he usually is. He's sitting at a picnic table not far from the fire, which hasn't been fed for the night yet and still burns low and slow beneath the horizon. He leans back, elbows on the table and legs stretched out on the sandy earth in front of him. He's nursing a bottle of Old Crow and twisting a knife against the surface of the wood on the bench beside him, carving a horse shoe into the wood. His scruffy-furred blond mutt Sweet Melissa sits at his feet, and she perks her head up when Zhenya arrives, her tail giving a few pleased wags before she drops her chin back down on Rodeo's boot.
Rodeo has a similar reaction. He's glad to see her, but the heaviness of his heart drains him. He grins, and his smile is honest, if not as unburdened as it usually is. "What ain't I got for my Krasnaya Volka?" he says, tipping his head back so she can see as much of that charming grin as he manages to muster. He holds out the bottle of bourbon to her, lifting his brows. "You're gonna have to have a drink with me first. That way if you don't like it, I'll be too drunk to tell."