Page 36 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“Sixteen.” My voice is wrecked. “Four better than twelve, which was the old record, which means I lapped myself, which means Eliza owes me a cookie and you owe me an apology for lurking.”

“I’ll get you the cookie.” He still hasn’t moved. “The lurking stands.”

“I know it does. You’re incapable of shame, it’s one of your three personality traits.” I lower myself into the chair I left exactly where my hand knew to find it, and my arms give out the second I’m down, and I don’t care, I’ve never cared less about anything. “How long?”

“Two weeks.”

“Every session?”

“Every session.” He finally comes into the room, four steps, and he crouches. I let him, because today the crouch isn’t the spaniel crouch, today it’s a man getting down to be level with a woman who just climbed a mountain. “You told me not to coach you. I didn’t. You told me the bars were yours. I didn’t touch them. I only watched. I wanted to see you win one.”

“You could’ve told me you were there.”

“You’d have made it about me. This wasn’t about me.” His eyes are still doing the shot-through thing, and he’s close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off his body. “You made sixteen steps, Vasilisa. This is all you.”

And that, the man acknowledging my own victory and refusing to stand in it, that’s what I fall asleep replaying, warm the whole drive home, warm through dinner, warm in a way I haven’t let myself be about a person since a man packed a bag and taught me warm was a thing that got repossessed.

But it only lasts until eleven at night, which is when I find the file.

I wasn’t looking for it, I was looking for a charger. Mine died, and his study’s got a drawer of them, and he’s downstairs in the club being ominous at somebody, so I roll in without knocking because we’re past knocking, we’re past a lot of things, and I open the wrong drawer looking for a cable, and my hand comes out with a folder instead.

I almost put it back, but then I see the tab with my name on it, my real one, Filatova, in his handwriting.

I open the file.

Telephoto. Long lens, grainy, the compression that means the camera was far away and the man behind it didn’t want to be seen. Me on the school ramp, mid-laugh, a kid’s mitten in my hand. Me transferring into my car in the clinic lot, mid-pull, the whole weight coming through my shoulders. Me on the terrace of an apartment I didn’t live in yet. Pages of me. My school’s address. My PT schedule, Tuesdays and Thursdays, in a hand that isn’t mine. My father’s habits, where he drinks, where he owes, the tracks of a man being walked toward a table.

The floor of the world opens up under my chair.

I turn to the first page and notice the date.

It’s four months before the poker game.

Four months. Before my father ever sat down at his table. Before three hundred and forty thousand dollars, before the gray suit, before the bare hanger and the empty tin. Four months before the night my father supposedly lost me by accident to a man who saw my mother’s eyes in a photograph and improvised a marriage on the spot.

He didn’t find me across a card table. He planned for it. He set my father up.

He found me first, with a long lens, four months out, and then my father lost me to him, and now I’m sitting in his study at eleven at night with the whole beautiful accidental story coming apart in my hands like wet paper. My little victory goes cold in my chest, and the warmth goes out of the day all at once, and I understand that I fell in love this afternoon with a man who has been lying to me since before he ever knocked on my door.

16

Lev

“You’re home late. I looked for a charger, but I found something else instead.”

She speaks to me from the middle of my study as I step out of the elevator, with a folder open on her lap displaying my handwriting on the tab and four months of long-lens photos spread across her knees. I realize before removing my coat that the story I tell her is already complete.

I don’t reach for a lie. That’s the first decision, and it’s an easy one, because I don’t want to withhold and maneuver and move her like a pawn.

“You found the file,” I say.

“I found the file.” Her voice is doing the thing it does when she’s holding a room of twenty-six together through real smoke, level, warm, and underneath it a wire pulled to breaking. “Explain the date to me. That’s all I want. The date on the corner. Four months before my father sat down at your table. You admitted you watched me after you came to my door. You never told me I was already inside your file before I knew your name. Explain how you were photographing me before my father supposedly lost me to you.”

So I tell her. I put the coat on its hook and sit down across from her, because she deserves to have this delivered to her face, not standing over her. I lay it out with the same plain courtesy I use on a man who owes me money, because dressing it up would be one more insult stacked on the pile.

“I found Milyena’s trail eight months ago, when your grandfather died, and the whole organization went looking for heirs. Everyone was looking for sons. I looked for the daughter who ran. It took three months to be sure the girl teaching first grade in Brooklyn was Ustin Filatov’s granddaughter, because your father buried it well, better than he’s ever done anything.” I hold her eyes. She’d carve a canyon into stone before she’d let me look away first, and I owe her the looking. “I had you watched for four months. I found out everything there was to find out about you and your father.”

“And then?”