Page 3 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

He leans closer, hope curdling because I have not thrown the photograph back at him.

“That’s good for me, isn’t it? Money people. Makes the girl worth more. Take her, Mr. Etush. Take her, and you and me are clean.”

Danil is watching me. He knows enough to understand Gavril did not arrive at this table by accident, but not enough to know why I needed the girl offered freely, named by her father and witnessed by the room.

He has the sense not to ask.

I turn my father’s watch once around my wrist and think of Ustin’s study. A chair at the head of the organization has sat empty for eight months, and men in two countries are already circling it with wet knives.

A disputed throne becomes much harder to steal the moment a true Filatov walks out of the dark wearing the old man’s eyes.

Semyon Krutov has spent ten years quietly filling graves with Filatovs to clear his road. Sons folded into car wrecks. A cousin burned in his sleep. A bloodline weeded one tidy funeral at a time.

The old butcher is nearly finished.

But he does not know this one still draws breath.

Vasilisa survived beneath a gambler’s surname because Gavril gave Krutov no first name, no address, and no face to follow. For the last two years, she has been safer still because the wrong people believe Milyena’s daughter died inside a wreck on Vandeveer Place. That safety ends the moment Gavril repeats her mother’s name at another table.

And he will repeat it.

A man who sells the name once for three hundred and forty thousand dollars and a night’s relief will sell it again when the next bill arrives.

“Here’s what happens,” I say.

“Anything. Say it.”

“The debt is called. All of it. Tonight. Closed.”

I lift my finger and slide the photograph back across the felt. His spine softens with relief before I finish the sentence.

“Not against her freedom. Against her hand.”

“Her hand?”

“You heard me. I clear every dollar you owe me and every dollar you’ve buried around this city under other men’s floorboards. Don’t sit there itemizing. I know the number better than you do. In exchange, your daughter marries me. Church. Paper. Witnesses whose names carry. Her surname traded for mine while they watch.”

His face opens and closes around nothing.

“You want to marry her.”

“I want it recorded.”

“But you could simply take her.” He is honestly baffled, and in a better man it would be funny. “I handed her over. There’s no reason a man like you bothers with a priest and a signature. Why put a ring on a girl you could have for free?”

“Because free things get repossessed.”

“She won’t agree to it.”

Gavril laughs, thin and nervous, his relief turning strange in his throat.

“You don’t know this girl. She’s got a tongue that takes skin off. Never once did what she was told. Not as a child, not now. She’ll spit in your eye and mean it. She gets that from her mother, and God be with you for it.”

“Then we’ll want the same thing,” I say. “Something from her she has no intention of handing over.”

Danil shifts behind my shoulder. I know the question sitting behind his teeth because I would be sitting on the same one.

Why a wife?