Page 8 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

He doesn’t give me a single one.

He takes in the chair, the sunflower rims, my legs, my hands riding the wheels, and his face declines the whole menu, refusing to give me the slightest clue of what he’s thinking. He looks at me like he’s looking at the water stain, and then his eyes come back up to mine and stay. My stomach drops on the swing of it, a heat where there’s no business being one, and I shove it down a flight of stairs and slam the door on it, because that reaction does not get to exist, not tonight, not aimed at a coat that came here over a card game.

I keep my hands soft on the rims and my chin level. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

“Lev Etush. Your father lost you to me across a table last night. I came tell you what that means, since he doesn’t own the spine, and I don’t care for my property being unclear on where it stands.”

He says property in the middle of my warm bright room like a man setting a loaded thing on a child’s table, and I laugh, because the laugh is the oldest armor I own and it’s the only piece that’s never once needed altering to fit.

“Big word to carry over in the middle of the night. I work with people who bite when they’re frustrated, Mr. Etush, so believe me, I speak toddler at a native level.” I tip my head at him. “You want to run that by me again like a grown man, or should I put out a juice box and a nap mat and we regroup after?”

He doesn’t sit. There’s not an inch of my apartment built to a scale that would hold him, so he stands in the middle of my whole life like he’s measuring the walls for a crate.

“Your father stole three hundred and forty thousand dollars from men who hold the deed to his knees, then lost it at my table. When the money ran out he put you on the table. As collateral. A body I could hold until a debt I both own and set the interest on came clear, which is to say forever.” He lays it out with no spit on it, no showman in him anywhere, reading me my own chart in a voice for delivering bad bloodwork. “I declined the terms he offered and set my own. I don’t want a hostage. I want a wife. The debt’s gone, all of it, cleared tonight. In exchange you and I are married inside the week, in a church in front of witnesses.”

The room pitches. Not the chair, I trust the chair, it’s the floor of the entire night tilting sideways, and I flatten my palm against my own thigh and press until the muscle answers with the deep ache still banked there from the bars, because pain tells the truth when nothing else in the room will, and I need one true thing to hold.

“No,” I say.

“Vasilisa.”

“No. Whole sentence, subject implied, my favorite grammar there is. I say it to twenty-six people a day who want the glue and every one of them takes it better than you’re about to.” I roll two feet forward into the hard light. “I’m not a debt. Not collateral, not a wife, not property, not the chips your table and my father shoved to the middle like I was theirs to shove. I’m a woman with a lease, a class list, and a physical therapist who will raise me from the dead just to kill me again if I get myself murdered before our Thursday session. So you’ll get out of my apartment, and you’ll find my father, and you’ll tell him what he lost was never his, and he can settle up in the one currency he’s ever been any good at, which is disappearing.”

He lets me say my entire speech. Doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t rock his weight from one foot to the other, doesn’t do anything but stand there and let me throw the words against him wave after wave until I’ve got nothing left in the tank, and then he takes out his phone, and every muscle I’ve got left goes to iron. He turns the screen to me, sets it on the arm of the couch inside my reach, and steps back to leave me room to see it on my own.

I don’t want to see it. My whole life I’ve looked anyway. It’s the flaw that made me a teacher and the flaw that keeps forgiving my father, and it’s the flaw that drops my eyes to the couch now.

My brain stalls for a beat, sight shoving the thing back out the door before it agrees to let it in, and then it’s through, and my stomach comes up the back of my throat. A man. The leftovers of one. Down on a concrete floor, and everything that made him somebody’s son is exactly what’s been taken away, and I’ve never in my life seen the inside of a person arranged on the outside.

“He owed me a smaller number than your father managed,” Lev says. “He had the same clever idea about running. I’m not showing you this to frighten you. I don’t do threats. A threat is a thing that hasn’t happened and might not. This is a receipt.”

I turn the phone face down on the cushion. My hand doesn’t shake. I could kiss my own hand, it’s out here lying like a professional, giving him a flat nothing while the rest of me tallies a sum I’d pay good money not to see the bottom of.

“You came all this way to show a woman in a wheelchair a mutilated body at three in the morning as a proposal.” I keep the fire-drill register bolted down. “I want you to hear that sentence from where I’m sitting. This is the worst proposal in recorded history, and I’m including the ones that happen on jumbotrons.”

His eyes are the gray the sky goes right before it quits on you, and they haven’t left my face since they came up off the chair, and there’s a freight to them that isn’t pity and isn’t hunger, and my pulse speeds up, and I’d sooner go back to the worst pain day of my life than let my throat tell him about it.

“Careful,” I say. “That was nearly an expression. Word gets around, people will think you’re approachable.”

“You use enough words for both of us,” he says. “I’d only be in your way.”

“That is the meanest nice thing anyone’s ever said to me, and I once had a six-year-old inform me my haircut makes my face look like it’s trying its best.”

He doesn’t react at all, but he doesn’t leave either, and a man like this doesn’t stay in a room a second past its usefulness.

“A week.” He’s already turning for the door, already handling my entire burning speech like a form I filled out in the wrong color that he’ll have redone and initialed by Friday. “Marry me and the debt dies at the altar. You keep your job, the apartment, your bars on Tuesday and Thursday. Refuse me and I collect the other way, and your father’s the smallest line on the bill.”

“You don’t know the first thing about my Tuesdays.”

He stops in the doorframe. He has to bring his head down to fit inside it, and he turns just far enough to lay one gray eye on me, the white seam in his brow catching the hall light.

“Forty-one seconds,” he says. “One better than the week before.”

The floor goes a second time, and this one’s worse, because that number sleeps in three places in this entire world and no more, the inside of my own skull, a line on Natasha’s chart, and a text I wrote to Poppy with three exclamation points. He looked into me before he came over.

“That’s the part meant to scare me. My own numbers in your mouth.” My voice holds, held together with spit, spite, and the stubbornness my mother apparently died still full of. “It doesn’t. I don’t fold, Mr. Etush. I have never folded once. You want a reference, go ask my PT, she’ll tell you I’m the worst loser she’s ever met.”

I watch him take in the color climbing my neck, and I watch him decide, out of what I can only call cruelty, not to say one word about it.