Page 54 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“You were gentle with me,” she says.

“I was honest with you,” I say. “And you were honest with me.”

“It’s a good place to start,” she says.

“It’s the only place to start,” I say, then I sigh. “Yefim called at six. You were still sleeping.”

“Of course he did. Does that man even sleep? He must be running on spite and pickled herring.” She doesn’t lift her head. “Say it.”

“Three weeks from Sunday. The whole organization sits down and confirms Krutov, and after that it’s finished, because a man who’s been raised up by the room can’t be pulled down by it without a war nobody wants.” My hand’s in her hair, and I keep it there. “It’s at your grandfather’s house. Sea Breeze Avenue, closed up eight months, the same room where he did every piece of business he ever did.”

That gets her up onto her elbow.

“I’ve never seen it.”

“You’ve never been in the borough it’s in without a car around you.” I sit up against the headboard because this is a conversation I want my spine straight for. “Here’s the plan as it stands. I walk in as the man married to the last of his blood, I put six captains in my pocket with what’s in Grisha’s shoebox, and I outbid Krutov in front of a room that’s already stood up for you twice. You don’t have to be in the building.”

“No.”

“Vasilisa.”

“No, and I want you to hear the whole thing before you go granite on me.” She pulls the sheet up around her and sits, hair a catastrophe, both hands in her lap. “You’d walk in holding my name like a receipt. That’s you carrying me in a folder, Lev, that’s the file with the long lens all over again in a nicer suit. Those old men didn’t stand up in that restaurant for your marriage certificate. Yefim didn’t hand a cane over a rail for you.”

“They stood up for a bloodline.”

“They stood up for my mother’s face, and I’m the one wearing it.” Her chin comes up. “So I go in. Not as your wife. As Milyena Ustinovna’s daughter, in my own name, on the day her father’s chair gets handed to the man who spent ten years burying everyone who shares her blood, and I let that entire room look at me while it happens.”

Nothing in my chest is behaving. I put both hands on my own knees to keep them still.

“You’d be bait,” I say.

“I’ve been bait since I was born, and nobody consulted me about it. A man sold me across a table for nine thousand six hundred dollars, and I exiled him for it.” She doesn’t raise her voice at all. “The difference this time is I pick the hook. That’s the only part that’s ever been mine to pick.”

“He’ll move on you.”

“He’ll have to. That’s the point, that’s the whole trap, isn’t it? He can’t touch me in that room; nobody draws in the room. You told me that yourself over the veal, God rest Malenko’s hand. So he has to do it before, in the open, on a clock, and a man in a hurry makes exactly the kind of mess you’ve been waiting your entire life to hold up in front of witnesses.”

She’s sitting in my bed with paint on her hands, taking apart a succession she learned about a couple of months ago, and I understand I’ve been outworked by a woman who spent this morning laughing with her mouth against my throat.

“I’ll say no,” I tell her.

“You can say it. You’ll say no, and then you’ll spend three weeks building the room around my yes anyway, because you’re not actually an idiot, you’re just a man who wants everything nailed down, and I’m the one thing on earth that won’t hold a nail.” She reaches over and puts her hand flat on my sternum, over the pocket where her photograph rode for six days in December. “You can’t take this one off me. You knew that at the altar. You’ve known it since you got down on your own floor and made me say the words out loud.”

I put my hand over hers and hold it there.

“There’s a chair in that room,” I say. “Green leather, brass on the arms. He signed my father’s name on a piece of paper sitting in it.”

“I know. You’ve been climbing nineteen years to sit in it.” She turns her hand over under mine and laces her fingers through. “So here’s what happens instead. I’m going to hand it to you. In front of every one of them, out of the blood that signed the order, into the hands of the son. You don’t get to take it, Lev. You get to be given it, and I want you to sit with how much worse that is for you.”

“It’s worse.”

“It’s so much worse,” she agrees. “I’ve thought about nothing else since you told me about it.”

I don’t have an answer for that. My throat’s doing a thing I’ve got no vocabulary for, and she watches me not have one, and she has the mercy not to make a joke, which from her is a gift with a receipt in it.

“Three weeks,” she says finally. “I want to do the doorway standing. Not the room, the doorway, six or seven steps on the cane and then I sit, and every man in that house watches Milyena’s daughter come in on her own feet.”

“Ask Natasha.”