Page 45 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

I have apologized to a limb hundreds of times. Every apology went to the wrong address.

My leg did not fail me.

Dennis Kilroy sat at the mouth of Vandeveer with his lights off and waited for a twenty-four-year-old first-grade teacher to come around a curve she had driven since she was seventeen. He put eighty thousand dollars against the wheel, came at me off-line because he was too drunk to strike square, and then ran before he could see the woman he was paid to kill pulled from the wreckage alive.

“Danil.”

“Yeah.”

“Does Lev know about the recording?”

“Not yet.”

“You brought it to me first.”

“That was the agreement.”

“And if I told you not to give it to him?”

“I’d give you enough time to get home before I broke the agreement.”

“Very principled.”

“I cut four hundred name tags for you. I have nothing left to prove.”

I close the folder and place both hands over it.

“I’ll tell him.”

“Tonight.”

“That sounded suspiciously like an instruction.”

“It was.”

“God, I miss when you were pretending to be a janitor.”

“I was never pretending. Your supply closet was a disgrace.”

He takes his phone and opens the classroom door with his hip.

Ruslan waits at the bottom of the ramp beside the car, a paper cup in one fist, sunflower-seed shells dropping into it one at a time. He has been assigned to me for eight days. He learned the children’s names in four.

He calls me Miss Plaksin with the same two beats the six-year-olds give it, first syllable rising, and I have never corrected him.

“Miss Plaksin. Cold today.”

“It’s forty-eight degrees, Ruslan. In Italy this would be a beach.”

“You are not Italian.”

“I’m whatever gets me out of small talk about the weather.”

I lock the brakes beside the open car door, put one hand on the frame and begin the transfer. Half my weight is riding through my shoulders when the school’s brick starts coming apart above my head.

There is no bang at first.

That is the thing nobody tells you.