Page 35 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

Then I turn it back up, because I owe him the whole of it, I owe him at least the honesty, and I say it to him the way I couldn’t say it to Danil, in the room with no one in it but the two of us and nineteen years.

“I’m going to take his chair,” I tell the picture. “That part is still on. But I have to tell you about the girl, because she wasn’t in the plan, and she’s in everything now.”

Matvei doesn’t answer. He’s ink and paper and forty years old forever. But I sit there with the coffee going cold that Danil brought me, and I understand that the vow I made in a fish house off Emmons Avenue at fifteen has grown a complication I never accounted for, that revenge was supposed to be a cold clean thing I did to a dead man, and instead it’s got warm hands and a scalpel tongue and it counts seconds on parallel bars, and it fell asleep last night with its face in my shoulder trusting me not to be what I actually am.

The intercom on the desk lights. It’s the kitchen upstairs, the camera. I don’t answer it, I just look at the little screen, and there she is, out of my bed, in my hall, in the traffic-cone robe, making two coffees.

She’s made enough for two.

I sit three floors down in my dead father’s shadow and watch my dead father’s murderer’s granddaughter turn a mug handle toward a spot at the island where she thinks I’ll come and sit, and I understand, the way you understand a shot’s already been fired and there’s nothing left to do but find out where it lands, that the house I built around her stopped being a cage some night I wasn’t paying attention, and I’m the thing living in it now.

I turn the picture face down for good this time.

“I’ll explain it to you when it’s done,” I tell him, and I go upstairs to drink the coffee she made me.

15

Vasilisa

“Fourteen. You want to stop at fourteen, or you want to bleed for the last two?”

Natasha’s at the end of the bars with the timer she’s not using today because today isn’t seconds, today is steps, and I’m eleven steps into a thing I’ve never done, and my arms are two ropes fraying, and my legs are lit up and screaming, and I have never in my life felt this good and this destroyed at once.

“Sixteen,” I get out. “I want sixteen.”

“You’ve done twelve. Once.”

“Then sixteen’s a record, and you can write it with the red pen.” I drag the right foot through, which is the hard one, Eliza’s been at that hip for three weeks, and it answers now where it used to sit there like luggage, and it comes through, and that’s twelve, tied, and my whole body wants to fold. “Don’t you dare catch me.”

“I never catch you.” Natasha’s hands hover, the way they always hover, close enough to matter but never touching. “You’ll catch yourself, or you’ll go down, and I’ll write down that you went down and you’ll come back Thursday and beat it. That’s the deal. That’s always been the deal.”

Thirteen. My arms are shaking so hard the bars ring with it. Fourteen, and there’s sweat in my eyes and the fused place in my back has become a single struck match, and I’m breathing the way I breathe when the fire wins. But I don’t let it win, I put the left foot through, fifteen, and I hear a sound come out of me I don’t recognize. I drag the right through the mud one more time and that’s sixteen and I stand there at the end of eight feet of steel I’ve climbed like the tallest mountain on earth, and I’m crying, I’m actually crying, which I never do, tears are a budget line and I’m overdrawn, except apparently not today, today the account’s got sixteen steps in it.

I turn to find Natasha’s face.

And Lev’s in the doorway.

He’s in the doorway of the clinic in his black coat, and he’s been there, I understand all at once, he’s been there the whole time, and not just today. Two weeks. The shape of him at the edge of the room on Tuesdays and Thursdays that I’d half-clocked and told myself was Danil, the black coat I’d catch and lose in the parking lot, the sense, some sessions, that the room had one more person breathing in it than it should. He’s been coming to watch me count my seconds and now my steps, silent, standing where he thought I couldn’t see him, and he’s here now with sixteen steps hanging in the air between us, and his face.

His face is the face of a man shot somewhere he can’t put a hand over.

I should yell at him. That’s the whole catalogue of how I greet this man, I yell, he lets me, neither of us backs down. He came to my sanctuary uninvited, again. He watched the most private war I fight, again. He’s standing in the one room that was mine before it was anything, and every rule I’ve got says I take his skin off for it.

I smile at him instead.

I don’t decide to. It’s just on my face, sixteen steps and tears and Lev in the doorway, and I smile at him across the clinic like he’s one of the people I keep the warm part for, the drawer I lock, the keys I hand to almost no one, and I watch him take the smile like a round to the chest. His jaw twitches. The gray drops out of his eyes. He doesn’t come toward me, he doesn’t say a word, he just stands there in his coat looking like a building deciding whether to come down, and Natasha glances between us and very wisely finds something to write on her clipboard.

And that’s the moment. That’s the exact moment, and I’d give a lot to be able to say it snuck up on me, but it doesn’t sneak, it arrives like the bell over a first-grade room, loud and impossible to ignore.

I’m glad he was here to see it.

Not tolerant. Not resigned. Glad. Out of everyone on this earth I could’ve turned and found in that doorway, Poppy and the ghost of a mother I never met, the one I wanted, the one whose face made sixteen worth twice sixteen, was the killer in the black coat who bought me at a card table and put a knife through a man’s hand over the veal.

I’m in love with him.

There it is. No fight left in me to keep it out, wrung too empty by sixteen steps to slam the door I’ve kept slammed since the corridor, and it just walks in and sits down like it’s been renting the place for weeks. I love him. I love a Bratva pakhan-in-waiting who oils my wheels at three in the morning and reads my pain in my breath before I say a word and counts my freckles when he thinks I’m asleep. I’ve been performing okay-ness about him the way I perform okay-ness about everything, and the performance just cracked all the way through on the end of a set of parallel bars, and underneath it is this, plain and terrifying and mine.

“Sixteen,” he says, from the doorway, low.