Page 56 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

“Did you tell him that?” she asks.

I open my mouth. Close it. “I told him other things,” I say finally.

She listens the way good doctors listen, and good sisters listen, and when I’m done, she’s quiet for a moment before she says, “Maybe he’s scared?”

“Oh, and I’m not?” I demand.

“I’ll bet you are,” she says. “But one doesn’t cancel out the other. Which, by the way, isn’t me making an excuse for him, sweetie. It sounds like he was horrible about it.”

Horrible is a small word. But it isn’t like I’ve got better ones.

Still, I think about what she says for a long time after she leaves. I sit in the small sitting room with the ancient loveseat and the afternoon light going amber through the curtains, and I think about Anton’s face in that moment before he spoke—the shock, and then the door behind his eyes closing—and I try to find the scared man behind the closed door. I try, and mostly I manage it, and sometimes I can’t, because the hurt keeps getting in the way.

I still don’t call him. I can’t.

But that night, in my childhood bedroom with its window seat and its particular darkness, I lie awake for a long time before sleep takes me.

And what I can’t stop myself from thinking about are all the times I’ve made him laugh. The times a smile has broken across his face like something he hadn’t planned on, sudden, real, a little abashed. I think about the first time I saw him, across a ballroom, standing alone in the middle of a crowd, and how even then, before I knew him, before I had any reason to, I’d thought he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

I’d walked right up to him.

In spite of everything, I’d walked right up to him.

Do I regret it now? Can I, with everything that’s happened since? Would I take all of it back if I could?

Sleep, when it comes, is what I look forward to, no matter how fitful it is. My dreams are the closest I can get to him now.

Chapter 20 - Anton

My own bedroom has become hell to me. I can’t stand to be in there anymore, not when Darya’s mark is all over every surface and every smell and every hour of the night I once spent alone in it—and Darya herself has been reduced to a memory and the compulsive, subsequent pang in my chest. The study isn’t half as awful to seal myself away in as that. No matter how many aftermaths of tragedies have been ridden out within its walls. At least her perfume doesn’t haunt me here.

I’ve slept here the past three nights, squashing my body onto the chesterfield in the corner that’s much too short to accommodate my frame. My feet hang off the end, like a body that doesn’t fit inside its own coffin.

Then again, I don’t sleep so much as I lose consciousness for intervals at a time, before I surface again, gasping, skin glossed in cold sweat. Each time, the ceiling greets me. The same ceiling. The same office. The same silence she left behind her like a bruise on the air.

What else is there to do but fucking work? The mole is still out there. Somehow, even when my world is on fucking fire, there’s another fire elsewhere that needs to be put out.

But that’s how it is. That’s life.

Work is what I do. It’s what I’ve always done when the alternative is unbearable—I put my head down and I work, because the Bratva doesn’t pause for grief or stupidity, and I’ve managed to produce a great deal of both in the span of a single evening.

I have the mole to find. I have routes to secure and men to vet and a roster of brigadiers to run blind tests on, so I can see whose information turns up in the wrong hands. I have correspondence from three separate factions that’s been sitting unread for the better part of a week. I have my father’s voice in the back of my head in the form of a letter I haven’t opened yet, because I suspect what it says, and I don’t have the patience for the abuse.

I have to keep my head down and do the work.

Except I can’t.

That’s the truth of it, the one I won’t say aloud to Anastasia or my mother or anyone who knocks on that door and gets nothing in return. I sit behind this desk, and I stare at the papers in front of me. I don’t see any of it, not really. What I see instead is her face. The way it had contorted in agonized wrath, the moment before she smashed the glass. But it was the disbelief it had been laced with that undoes me anew, every time it flashes in my mind. In spite of how I’d clearly wounded her deeply, the upturn at the beginning of her shriek was born of hoping that I would not do what I was clearly about to do.

I saw it. I saw it, and I did it anyway.

You are a failure as a man.

She’s right. I know she’s right. I’ve sat here for three nights knowing it, and the knowing doesn’t ease into anything useful. It just sits on my sternum like a Sisyphean boulder I can’t roll off.

My hands won’t stop. That’s the other truth. It started the night she left—the checking, the rechecking, each compulsion cycling through before the last one’s finished, my hands moving through the motions of a ritual that gives my body something to do while my mind refuses to settle. I’ve checked the lock on the door four times this morning already. I’ve straightened the items on my desk with a precision that has no bearing on anything at all. I’m aware of what it is. I’m aware that it worsens with stress, that it’s been better these past weeks—better in a way I hadn’t named until it stopped being better—and the naming of that, too, costs me something I don’t have the reserves for.

I force my hands flat on the desk. Count the wood grain. Start over.