Page 14 of Captured By the Pakhan

Sergei's room is at the end of the corridor and Andrei knocks — actually knocks, and waits — before he opens it.

"Sergei. Remember Raven? She works here now."

The boy is sitting cross-legged on the floor with a half-built model in front of him, and he looks up, and his whole face reorganises itself. "You're the new nanny?"

"I'm the new bodyguard."

"Papa calls them nannies." He says with a scrunched nose.

"Sounds like he’s being polite. I've got a gun and no idea how to make a sandwich, so let's not oversell it."

He laughs. It's a startled, unpractised noise, and behind me I feel Andrei become very still.

"Do you want to see my room?" Sergei asks.

"That's why I'm here, kid." I say with a smile. “Give me the tour, would ya?”

It's a solid room and a strange one. Models everywhere — ships, mostly, a couple of aircraft — all of them built with more patience than I had at any age. Books in Russian and English. A window seat with a cushion worn down in one specific spot, which tells me where he spends his afternoons and exactly what angle he watches the driveway from.

And a shelf.

I clock it about ninety seconds in because it's the only thing in the room with dust on it. Four framed photographs, a hairbrush, a small ceramic dish with two rings in it, and a folded silk scarf, arranged with care that no ten-year-old should ever apply to anything.

The woman in the photographs is dark-haired and beautiful. But she isn’t smiling in any of them.

"That's my mother," Sergei says, from behind me.

"She's lovely."

"Don’t touch it. Ok? Nobody's allowed to move it. Not even Karina." A beat. "I did it myself."

"Deal. I won’t touch any of it. Eyes only ok?"

He seems satisfied with that. Nodding, before he goes back to the model and starts explaining the rigging to me in the exhaustive, uninterruptible way children explain things. I sit down on the floor because standing over him feels wrong, and the next few minutes he hands me various pieces, telling me to hold it steady while he attaches others.

"You're doing it wrong," he finally says with mild frustration.

"I'm holding a stick."

"You're holding it at an angle. It has to be at ninety degrees or the whole thing⁠—"

"It's ninety degrees."

"It's eighty-five."

"Sergei, I swear, if you—" I stop dead. Laughing through my own frustration. "—if you. Correct me. One more time."

I’ve never been that great with kids.

There's an audible pause about a foot behind my left shoulder that has weight in the room, and I straighten, clearing my throat.

Sergei is delightedly amused. "You almost said a bad word."

"I did not."

"You nearly did."

"I nearly do a lot of things. I nearly punched a man at breakfast." I don't turn around. "Nobody in this room is counting."