Page 9 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“No,” he says. “It wasn’t meant to scare you.” He swings the door the rest of the way open. “It was meant to spare us both a week of you pretending there’s a door in this city I haven’t already put a man on. Spend the seven days getting used to my face instead of running from it. You’ll lose the run. You strike me as a woman who loses very little, so I’d rather not watch you lose that.”

“You’ll make somebody a catastrophic husband. Truly. They’ll write case studies.”

“I’ll make you the husband this particular problem requires,” he says, and there’s not a degree of heat in it, just a man reading a fact off the wall, and it lands harder than anything he pulled out of that coat. He steps into the hall. “Sleep, Vasilisa. You’ve got children counting on you in a few hours and I don’t want you dull tomorrow on my account. Be sharp for them. Be sharp for me some other day. You’ll have the chances.”

He draws the door shut, and the ancient lock settles into its groove, and his boots go back down the stairs at the identical pace they climbed, a man who has never once in his life had to hurry, because everything he’s ever wanted has learned to still be there when he arrives.

I do the one thing I know how to do when the ground’s been lifted clean out from under me. I count. Not seconds this time.

Days. Seven of them.

4

Lev

“Get in the car, Vasilisa, and spare us both the scene. You spend your days with six-year-olds. You know exactly how a scene ends, and it never ends with the small furious one getting her way.”

She stops at the top of the school ramp, hands loose on her rims, breath smoking white off her mouth in the cold. Kids pour past her toward the buses, a fistful of them hollering miss Plaksin, miss Plaksin, mittens in the air, and she hands each one a warm smile, then kills the warmth the second her eyes swing back to me. That switch is the most useful thing I’ve learned all week, and the most inconvenient. She keeps the warm part of herself in a drawer she locks, and she issues keys to a chosen few. I already know I don’t make the list.

“You’re in the bus lane,” she says.

“I can see that.”

“There is a nun who works this corner on Thursdays who has buried bigger men than you under a laminated sign and a look. For your sake I’d get the car moving.”

“Let her come.”

“I’d sell tickets. I’d stand on that sidewalk and scalp them to the PTA. But not today.” She rolls to a halt three feet off my door, near enough to talk, far enough to run, if running were on the menu her life currently offers, which we both know it isn’t, and she rolls right up to that line to make me watch her pick the spot to stop. “You said seven days. It’s day three. I’d half convinced myself you’d gone and found yourself a bride with a smaller mouth and a shorter memory.”

“No such bride would hold my interest past the appetizer.”

Danil already has the ramp out at the trunk, because I told him she runs a manual chair and he read up instead of guessing. She takes in the ramp, then me, and her jaw sets in the hard little line I’ve started keeping an eye out for.

“I can get into a car by myself, Lev.”

“I never said otherwise.”

“Then what’s with the road crew.”

“It’s cold, and the faster you’re inside, the faster you stop doing theater for the crossing guard.” I open the rear door, hold it. “You move yourself. Danil takes the chair down. Not a finger goes near you or your handles. He’s been warned not to touch you. He’d hand over the finger first.”

She transfers into the back seat in one clean pull, the whole weight of it moving through her shoulders, and she’s breathing harder when she lands than when she started. I get in beside her. Danil folds the chair into the trunk.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“Home.”

“That’s a sentence handed down, not an address.”

“Manhattan. The floors over the club.” I tell Danil to drive, and I leave the partition down, because I want him hearing all of it, so he’ll quit aiming that look at the back of my skull he’s been aiming since I announced I’m getting married. “You’ll have your own room, your door, your own bolt on the inside of it if a bolt is what buys you sleep. You don’t share a bed with me until the day you decide you want to, and before that mouth of yours opens, I know the day you’re planning is never, and I’ve made my peace with sleeping down a hall from a woman who’d choke me out with my own belt and call it a good night’s work.”

“I wasn’t going to say never.” She turns to the window, and Brooklyn runs gold and rust across her face. “I was going to ask what you’ve done with my father.”

Three days to sit alone with everything I’ve taken from her, and that’s the first door she reaches for. Not the apartment I’ve pulled her out of, not the classroom, not the bed she’s refusing, not me. The man who pushed her across a card table like a stack of chips he was tired of holding, and her opening question in the back of my car is whether his heart’s still beating. She loves the man who sold her, she hates that the love survived the selling, and she’ll ask after him anyway.

“He’s alive,” I say. “Brighton Beach, under my eye, working the interest off with his hands since he can’t cover it with cash. You don’t have to lay eyes on him again. You don’t have to spend a single thought in his direction. Take that as a service rendered.”

“I didn’t ask you to stand between my own father and me.”