Page 1 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

1

Lev

“Give me one more hand. One. I’m good for it.”

Gavril Plaksin says this across a table where he has already lost three hundred and forty thousand dollars he never had. His wedding ring spins around a finger gone thin enough to lose it.

The basement under VOLNA holds nine men, one card table and the ventilation system I paid a Georgian engineer a stupid amount to run without a sound. A man hears his own heartbeat better in a quiet room, and a man who hears his own heartbeat makes worse decisions.

Every set of eyes down here has watched a fool talk himself past the exit. Gavril went past his an hour ago.

“You’re not good for what’s on the table,” I tell him. “You want me to lend you the next thing you don’t own so you can lose that too.”

“I’ll turn it around. You’ve seen me turn my luck around at the very last minute.”

“I’ve seen you sit down rich and stand up borrowed every time for years. You don’t play cards, Gavril. You come here to be talked out of the last thing you own, and some nights a kinder man than me does it. Not tonight. You’re done. Go home. Tell whoever is waiting on that rent that you’re a bigger man than you are, and then don’t let me catch your smell in this borough again.”

“I have collateral.”

“You have a suit with another man’s tailoring in the collar and a liver filing suit against you.”

The bar laughs. Gavril doesn’t.

He wets his lips, reaches inside the stolen gray jacket and brings out a photograph worn velvet at the corners from years inside a wallet. He sets it facedown on the table and pushes it toward me with two fingers as though it is the ace he has been sitting on all night.

“My daughter.”

His voice drops, confidential now, as if we have become partners.

“Vasilisa. She’s worth something to a man in your position. Clean girl, good girl, no debts, no bad habits. Teaches first grade in Brooklyn. Twenty-six. Take her for what I owe. She’s the best thing I’ve got left.”

The room drops a few degrees.

Even Danil’s folded hands come apart at his belt. Men have slid plenty across this table to keep the bones in their legs where God put them. Cars. Wives. The deed to a bakery. Once, a boat that turned out to belong to a bank in Jersey.

No man has ever sold me a daughter.

I have done this long enough to see most of the ugly things men keep folded behind their sternums, but Gavril has managed to pull out something new.

“Say the rest of it,” I tell him.

“There’s no rest. That’s the whole offer.”

“You placed a woman on my table in front of nine witnesses and called her the best thing you own. Finish it. Say it aloud so you can’t lie to your reflection later.”

I do not raise my voice. A calm tone makes a noisy room shift in your favor.

“What do you think you’re offering me?”

His eyes refuse to land anywhere. They skate past the table, my mouth and the photograph, searching for the distant place where cowards hide their conscience.

“Leverage,” he says. “A beautiful girl who owes a man her entire life is worth more than anything I could gather in this room. No one cares about my body. Everyone wants her. That’s the pure truth. You understand it better than anyone else here.”

“I know the market.”

I let him hear that I am not disputing his economics. It frightens him more than a raised hand would. Sweat starts at his hairline as though the room has suddenly closed around him.

“What you’ve got wrong is the buyer. You don’t hand a person to a man like me and climb those stairs believing you came out ahead. That story doesn’t have that ending. Whatever you think you’re trading her for, the cost is becoming the man who did it. Every window you catch yourself in. Every mirror. Every night until you die.”