Page 24 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Tomorrow," Ilya says, "you will teach me how to do that for him. The counting thing."

Then he turns and walks away, leaving me alone in the hallway with nothing more than my thoughts, and the silence around me.

Chapter 7

Ilya

Yaroslav Estate, 7:20 PM

Ihear the raised voices coming from the drive. The irate tone underneath the words, coming out of a lit kitchen window into the dark, and my first thought is that somebody has been shot and my second — arriving about half a second behind it and considerably louder — is that it isn’t Sergei, because one of the voices is a woman's and it is not raised in fear.

I come through the boot room fast enough that Grigor has to step out of my way. The kitchen is at the end of the passage and the door is open and I stop just short of it, because what is happening on the other side of that door is not an emergency.

It is an argument. I’ve been listening to Andrei Dudin argue since I was thirty-one years old, and there are perhaps four people alive he will argue with.

"—it is not an insult." Andrei sounds genuinely baffled. "It is a fact of the situation. There is no one here. Karina is gone. The boy has not eaten."

"Then you cook."

"I don’t know how to cook."

"Neither do I. So we're at an impasse, and here's the part you're going to hate: the impasse is fine. There's bread. There's about nine boxes of cereal. He's ten, he'd eat cereal for a week and consider it the finest hour of his life."

"He has to eat something besides cereal."

"Then make him something."

"I am telling you that I cannot." A pause, and then Andrei says the thing, and he says it the way a man reads out a weather report. "You are the woman in the house."

I stop with my hand on the frame.

Ah. That was a mistake.

There is a silence of about two seconds in which I am aware, with total clarity, of exactly what is about to happen and of the fact that I am not going to be quick enough to prevent it.

"Say that again." Raven’s voice is low, angry.

"You are the woman in the⁠—"

The pan comes out of the rack and across the room at a genuinely impressive velocity.

Andrei catches it. He has caught worse things than a pan and he does it with one hand, almost without looking, and he is still in the process of looking mildly pleased with himself when she crosses the four feet between them and slaps him across the face.

It is not a slap. Let us be accurate. It is delivered open-handed but it is thrown from the hip and it turns his head completely to the side, the sound of it ricochetes down the hallway and hits me in the chest.

And then Andrei has her by the throat and up against the counter.

I am moving instantly.

I don’t reach them quick enough, because Sergei gets there first.

"Stop it!" He screams.

He is standing in the doorway on the far side of the kitchen in socks, with a book still in one hand, and both of them freeze like children caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Andrei lets go instantly. He steps back with his hands open at his sides, and his face — for perhaps a quarter of a second, before it recovers — is the face of a man who has just been reminded of his place.

Raven doesn't touch her throat. That is the detail I notice and cannot stop noticing. There are slight red marks coming up on the side of her neck but she doesn’t put a hand anywhere near them, because to do so would be to acknowledge that something happened.