Page 29 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“So that’s the fiancé,” she says.

“Husband,” Lev corrects.

Poppy’s eyebrows leave her face. She turns to me very slowly. “Husband.”

“I was going to tell you at lunch.”

“What the actual fuck, Vasilisa.” But she’s not looking at me, she’s looking at Lev, doing the full Poppy scan, the one that took the measure of every terrible boyfriend I ever had and was right about all of them. “You made Kevin stop running with scissors on the first ask. My janitor’s your janitor. You’ve got glitter on you that will outlive us both. And you married my best friend and didn’t invite me.”

“That last one was her choice,” Lev says.

“It really was,” I admit.

Poppy points a finger at him, the exact finger she points at children who bite. “I’m watching you. I want that on the record. I have zero filter and a long memory, and if you make her cry, I will find where you keep your feelings, and I will run them over with her chair.”

“Understood,” Lev says, and there’s a thing at the corner of his mouth that only I can see, because I’m the only one in this conversation who’s spent enough days studying that face to catch a millimeter, but Poppy squints at him like she almost caught it too.

They leave through the fire door with the rock still propping it, which Lev pauses to remove and set inside, and Danil’s already got the photo up on his screen again, grinning down at it, and I sit alone in my glitter-storm classroom with my heart doing the jumps I swore I’d never let anyone watch me do.

Winning hand.

The bastard.

12

Lev

“You’ll sit at my right, you’ll eat what’s put in front of you, and you’ll let them look. That’s the whole job.”

Vasilisa’s beside me in the back of the car, oxblood dress again because she knows what it does in a room, and honey hair down.

“You said that last time. Then a man in a cardigan tried to threaten me over fish.”

“Krutov won’t be at this one. These are the loyal ones and the ones who want to look loyal. A dinner. Captains, their wives, the whole show.” I watch Brighton Beach run past the glass, the train roaring on its stilts. “There’ll be knives under the tablecloth. There always are. But nobody draws one at a dinner. It’s the one rule these animals keep.”

“Comforting. I’ll pack light.”

The restaurant is one of mine, back room, thirty at a long table under a low gold ceiling, and when Danil wheels her in, the men stand the way they always stand now, and the wives look at her the way wives look at a woman whose name outranks their husbands. She takes it the way she’s learned to take it, chin level, warm to the ones who earn it, and she puts a hand on old Yefim’s arm when he lowers himself down beside her, and the whole table watches the last Filatov touch a loyal old soldier like she was raised to it.

The food comes in waves. Vodka comes in more waves than food. I keep my glass full and my mouth empty, and I let the table talk over me because a man who says little at his own table gets reported as dangerous, and dangerous is cheaper than liked.

Vasilisa holds the room. She tells the wife across from her about the class hamster, about the kid with the marker snorkel, and the woman laughs, delighted, and two captains lean in to hear the punchline about the glue, and for a stretch it’s almost a dinner, almost people, and I sit at the head of it with my dead father’s watch on my wrist and let her make my table human for the length of a story.

Then Pyotr Malenko opens his mouth.

He’s mid-tier, Coney Island, a man who runs three chop shops and thinks it’s an empire, and he’s four glasses past his judgment and climbing. He’s been building to something all night; I’ve watched him build to it, the little laughs he throws down the table to see who’ll catch them, and now he’s got the vodka and the crowd, and he thinks he’s got the moment.

“Etush.” He says it loud, down the length of the table, and the talk thins to let him through. “I have to ask. The whole borough is asking.” He grins, wet, pleased with himself. “You married the Filatov girl, God bless, a real coup, everyone says so. But.” He lets the but sit, milks it, looks around to make sure they’re all with him. “A man marries a woman like that, a beautiful woman, and she can’t. You know.” He gestures, vague, cruel, at the chair, at her, at all of it. “So what did you actually buy, eh? Half a wife? Does the merchandise even work, or did you pay full price for a name and a nice pair of eyes?”

The table laughs.

It’s a nervous laugh, the laugh of thirty people who know a line’s been crossed and are betting on the crowd to make it safe, and it ripples down the gold room and dies about two feet from my chair, because it hits the cold coming off me and it freezes.

I look at Vasilisa first. I don’t decide to. Her face has gone very still, the warmth packed away, and there’s a flush climbing her neck, but it’s not the flush I’ve spent three weeks watching for. It’s rage, banked and silent, and she’s got her hand flat on her own thigh, pressing down, the way she does when she needs something to hold, and she’s about to open her mouth and take Malenko’s skin off with the scalpel she keeps in it, because she fights her own fights, she’s told me so, she runs over feet.

But I don’t let her have this one.

Not because she can’t. Because a woman defending herself at this table is a woman who can be insulted, and a woman who can be insulted is a woman someone insults again next month with a knife instead of a joke. This one doesn’t get answered by her. This one gets answered, so the answer travels.