Page 110 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Shut up."

"I'm simply reporting. That man is a stone, and he has gone completely to pieces, and it's the best thing I've seen all year."

Ilya is at the end of it in a black suit with his hands behind his back, and he is, in fact, in pieces, and doesn't appear to have any interest in hiding it.

Sergei is beside him with the rings on a cushion, standing at attention like a very small honor guard, and he hasn't had a single attack all day. He hasn't had one in six weeks. He has spent the entire morning telling anybody who would listen about a boat.

There is a moment where Logan hands me over.

It is entirely wordless, and it takes about a second and a half — an FBI agent and the Pakhan of a Bratva family, looking at each other across a woman in a white dress on a terrace above the Pacific.

Logan nods.

Ilya nods back.

And then Logan says, quietly, "Take care of her," and Ilya says, "Yes," and that is the entire conversation, and I could kill both of them.

The vows are four sentences long because Ilya asked if he could write his own and then produced four.

I am not going to write them all down.

The third one is: You came back down the hill, and I have been unable to look at anything else since.

The kiss goes on considerably longer than is appropriate in front of a ten-year-old and four crime families. Somewhere behind us, Yeremey starts a round of applause specifically to embarrass us, and it works.

The rest of it is the strangest afternoon of my life.

Victor Rozovsky brings his wife, two children, and a bottle of something from 1974. He spends forty minutes in a corner with Ilya talking about ports, and at the end of it stands up and shakes his hand in a way that I understand, from eleven feet away, is about something considerably larger than ports.

Alex is heavily pregnant, hijacks my chair for most of the afternoon, and is very funny about it.

Basili and Chloe Cierro arrive last and leave first, which I gather is a Basili thing. Chloe hugs me for slightly too long. Emmanuel is fourteen now and spends the entire reception being magnificently bored, right up until Sergei — who has never in his life had a conversation with another child — approaches him with the direct, unembarrassed courage of a boy who doesn't know that this is difficult, and asks him a question about a boat.

Twenty minutes later they are both on the steps with their jackets off, arguing.

I watch Ilya watch that happen. He has to turn around and look at the ocean for a moment.

Maya and Stefano stay the latest.

At around nine, Ilya and Stefano Severese walk down to the bottom of the garden together and stand under a tree for close to half an hour.

I do not go down there, and neither does Maya, and the two of us end up sitting on the terrace steps with our shoes off, watching two extremely dangerous men have a conversation neither of us can hear.

"What do you think they're saying?" Maya asks.

"Numbers."

"They're absolutely saying numbers."

They come back up together. Stefano has his hands in his pockets and looks like a man who has won an argument he has been having for two years.

Ilya comes and stands beside me and doesn't sit down.

"Well?"

"Two years," he says. "Miami takes the four things that cannot easily stop, at a valuation that is an insult, and Stefano has spent thirty minutes enjoying himself enormously about it."

"And the rest?"