Page 60 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

Boris makes his way toward the worktable, slowly, his stick finding the floor. He stops on the other side of it and looks at the panel. Whatever he was expecting to find in this room, I don’t think it was this. He looks at it for longer than I’d anticipate from a man who doesn’t call ahead and carries a loaded gun to art studios.

“What is this?” he asks.

“Fifteenth-century Italian. A Madonna. She was part of a triptych once. Unfortunately, the other panels are gone.” I keep my eyes on the gold leaf border, the gilder’s tip poised. “Someone made a mess of her. I’m trying to undo it.”

I feel him look at me when I say that.

I won’t give him anything in return.

“You’ve left the manor,” he says.

“You noticed? I’m touched.”

“The optics are poor.” His voice is measured. Dispassionate. The voice of a man presenting a case he’s already decided the conclusion of. “You understand that, I imagine. This alliance is being watched, not just by people with a vested interest in its success, but also by people who are very interested in its failure. Your absence reads as a fracture. A fracture invites pressure. That will not do.”

“I grew up in a Bratva family,” I say. “The mechanics of perception management aren’t new to me. If the optics concern you, I’d start with the man who created the circumstances for my absence.”

Boris makes a sound, deep in his throat. It sounds like a growl. It’s an oddly graceless sound for a relatively regal-looking man. “My nephew is difficult.”

“No,” I say. “He’s worse.”

I’m working on a section of lifted gold leaf in the upper border, where the original adhesive has failed, and the leaf is threatening to separate entirely from the ground beneath it. It requires a consolidant applied with a brush no wider than two hairs, then the breath held, then the waiting. I apply it now.

I hold my breath.

Boris fills up the slot of quiet I’ve left open for him, certain he’ll get around to the real point of his being here sooner or later. Give him room to speak, and he’ll talk and talk. Give him enough rope, and he’ll hang himself with it. Though maybe that’s wishful thinking.”

“He lost a wife,” he says. “His first wife. Irina.”

My hands are perfectly still. They have to be.

“Yes. I know about Irina,” I say.

“You know about the rumors. You know very little. He doesn’t talk about her; we all know this.” He doesn’t say this unkindly. But there’s a gleam in his eyes I don’t trust one bit. “She was the love of his life. He was a different man before losing her—younger, certainly, but more prone to taking bigger swings. He was less conversant in his approaches.” A pause. “She died in a way that wasn’t simple. A pregnancy had complications no one knew about until it was too late to know. He was there for all of it. And then the child—a girl, but still—she didn’t make it either.” His voice doesn’t change its register. That, somehow, makes it worse.

I exhale slowly, so it doesn’t disturb the leaf.

All that’s disturbed is me. Every word Boris conspiratorially divulges to me then proceeds to lodge itself in the tender place I’ve been keeping padded and protected all week, and it stays there, where I fear it will remain and be rotting when I wake up tomorrow. Alone, again.

I duck my head, not wanting him to catch a glimpse of whatever emotions my face betrays. I’m not keen to give any Zakharov any part of me.

“I’m telling you this,” Boris continues, “because you should understand what you’re dealing with. This arrangement between you has its benefits, evidently. The alliance has held. He functions better.” Something almost dry enters his voice. “His mother is apparently insufferably pleased. But what happened in that office—his reaction—that isn’t a man who doesn’t care. That’s a man who was terrified. And in men like my nephew, terror comes out as distance. As silence. As exactly what you experienced.”

He stops.

The raking light hums its low electrical hum. The Madonna looks at the space where her child used to be.

I set down the gilder’s tip.

I take off my magnification glasses.

I look at Boris Zakharov across the worktable, across five centuries of survived damage and bad decisions and irreversible carelessness, and I think about what it means that he’s here. Whether it’s manipulation or genuine concern or both at once, I can’t entirely parse. Probably both. Boris is not a man with simple motives, and I’ve never been a woman foolish enough to take a simple reading of a complicated person.

But he’s said the thing. Whether he meant it to matter or only meant it to move me, it matters.

Irina was the love of his life.

I reach for my brush.