Page 55 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“I did. She said no.” She’s already reaching for the robe. “So I’m going to spend three weeks making her say maybe.”

23

Vasilisa

“If it goes wrong in there, I want you to know that my last thought is going to be about the fact that Kevin still can’t spell Wednesday.”

I say it to Poppy on the phone from the back of the car with an hour of the Hutchinson River Parkway still to run, and she doesn’t laugh, which is how I know she’s been crying, which is how I know she’s read exactly as much of this situation as I let her have and drawn the right conclusions from it anyway.

“That is the least reassuring thing you have ever said to me, Vasilisa, and I once watched you tell a kid a bee sting was a compliment.”

“It is a compliment. Bees are choosy.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t do the thing.” She blows her nose somewhere in Bay Ridge. “You come back, and I’ll take your bus duty for a month.”

“Two months.”

“One month and I’ll do Sir Nibbles’s cage.”

“Deal. Poppy?”

“Yeah?”

“If somebody has to call somebody, it’ll be Danil, and he’ll do it in person, and he won’t do the voice. He’ll just say it. That’s a mercy, so don’t take his head off for it.”

She hangs up on me, which in Poppy’s language is love.

Lev’s beside me with the shoebox on his knees and a black tie done in a knot I watched him tie four times this morning before it satisfied him, and he hasn’t said sixty words since the bridge. Three weeks of him building a room around a yes he never once said out loud. Three weeks of Natasha moving from no to absolutely not to a written list of the seven ways this would end badly, and then, last Thursday, after I did twenty-two steps and threw up in her clinic sink, a very long silence and one sentence: bring the cane, sit down the second the leg talks to you, and I want it on record that I said maybe and not yes.

Twenty-two steps. The gap from the doors to the head of that table is thirty, by Danil’s pacing.

“You’ve checked the cane twice,” Lev says.

“I’ve checked the cane four times, you’ve only caught two.” I’ve got it across my lap, Yefim’s, the brass head gone smooth on one side from fifty years of a bad hip, and he pressed it on me on Tuesday in his kitchen and refused every objection in two languages. “He’s going to want it back.”

“He’s going to want to be in the room when you hand it back.”

The estate comes up out of the trees like something that lost a war. Stone, forty rooms, a gate with a man on either side, and the driveway packed with black cars the whole quarter mile. Ustin Filatov bought it in 1994 and shut himself in it for thirty years. My mother was nineteen when she went out a window of it in the middle of the night with a suitcase and a boy waiting on the road. I’ve spent my whole life building her out of four objects, and here’s the fifth, and it’s a fortress.

She ran from this. I keep it with me as I go up the drive.

The great hall is a room built to make men feel small and full of men who came anyway. Two hundred at least, dark suits and old faces, ink up throats, three chandeliers going and a fire in a hearth I could park my car in. The table runs the length of it. At the far end, under a window with the light behind him, stands Semyon Krutov in a gray suit and a cardigan under it, silver hair combed back, holding a glass and telling a story that has nine men laughing on cue.

The doors close behind us, and the room turns.

Danil sets my brakes. My hair’s down. I’m in oxblood because I know what it does to a room, and because it’s the dress I wore the night forty murderers stood up and gave me my mother back, and I want the ones who were there to feel the date on it.

Lev doesn’t touch the handles. He never has, not once, not since a hallway in December when I told him what happens to men who do.

“Thirty feet,” he says at my shoulder.

“I can count, I teach counting.”

“Vasilisa.” He’s got his hand out where I can see it but nowhere near me. “You go down, I’m picking you up in front of all of them, and you can be angry about it in the car.”

“You go anywhere near me before I’m sat down and I’ll bite you in a room full of your own captains.”

“Understood,” he says, and there’s a millimeter at the corner of his mouth that nobody in this hall gets to see but me.