Page 57 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

They come open at both ends of the hall at the same moment, which nobody does by accident, and the men who come through them aren’t guests. They’re the estate’s own, the house security, twelve of them in gray, the men who’ve kept this building for months since my grandfather died with no heir. I understand in the length of one breath that they’ve been Krutov’s since the day of the funeral and that we walked through his gate, up his drive, and into his house.

“Lock it,” Krutov says, pleasant as a man ordering coffee. “Nobody leaves. The lady’s had a long walk, let her sit.”

Lev’s hand comes down flat on the table beside me, and that’s all, but it’s the loudest thing in the room.

“You’re in a house full of witnesses,” he says.

“I’m in my house, in front of my men, with a woman who’s just accused me of nine murders.” Krutov’s smile doesn’t move at all now, and the grandfather goes out of him like a coat coming off. “You brought her here to hand her the chair. In front of everyone. Do you have any idea, boy, what I’ve spent ten years on, so that some Brighton club owner could roll a schoolteacher through my door on a Sunday?”

“Eleven murders,” I say. “You’re forgetting Ruslan Zavgorodny and Dennis Kilroy, and one of those was your own man, so you should really keep better track.”

“Take her,” Krutov says.

Yefim’s nephew, four seats down, comes up with a pistol out from under the table, and one of the gray men shoots him where he stands, and then, the entire hall detonates.

Two hundred men go for the floor and the tables and each other, chandeliers coming apart overhead, glass in the air, the fire roaring in that enormous hearth. Lev has one hand under my arm and is dragging my chair back off the table with the other, both of us moving toward the wall, and then the gray suits close between us in a line four deep. He’s on one side of them, and I’m on the other, and I hear him say my name in a voice I have never heard out of that man in my life.

24

Lev

“Doors. Both ends. I don’t care what it costs.”

Danil goes without answering, which is why he’s lived to thirty in this business, and the hall comes apart behind him. Two hundred men leave their chairs at once, and the sound of it is worse than the shooting, wood on marble, glass going down in sheets, a chandelier taking a burst and raining its whole load across the table in front of me.

The gray suits are four deep between me and my wife.

That’s the only thing in this building worth a thought. Krutov’s house men came in through both doors and made themselves a wall across the head of the table. My wife is on the far side of it with the hearth at her back, and I’m on this side with a hundred and forty pounds of Ustin Filatov’s dining table between me and her.

So I go over the table.

The first one gets a decanter across the bridge of the nose, and while his hands are up I take the pistol out from under his arm and put two into the man behind him, low, through the hip, because a man on the ground clogs the floor for the three coming behind him. Nineteen years I’ve paid other people to do this. It comes back the way a language comes back, all at once, ugly, in the accent I learned it in.

The old guard is up now. That’s Krutov’s real error, and it starts here, not with her. He built the house security, and he never once asked what forty years of Ustin’s men were carrying in their coats out of habit, and Yefim’s four rows have gone through the gray line from behind like a wave against a seawall. A man of seventy in a suit from 1988 has a gray suit down on the marble and is using a candlestick on him, and he isn’t stopping, and nobody in this room is going to make him.

The fire in the hearth is throwing everything it has, and the whole hall keeps going orange and dark, orange and dark.

I can’t see her.

I put a shoulder into the wall of them at the seam. There’s a slab of a man in front of me who takes the first two shots into his vest, and while he’s working out that he’s still alive, I get inside his arms and put my elbow through his throat. He goes down with a choking sound, and I take his knees to get past him. My father boxed. He taught me the only useful thing anybody ever taught me in that kitchen, which is that the fight is over at the range where a man can’t set his feet, so live there.

I live there for nine seconds, and I get four feet closer to her.

Then Danil comes across the hearth end of the room with a fire iron.

He’s got the doors done, both, which means somewhere in the last minute he crossed two hundred feet of open floor twice, and now he’s coming up the flank with three feet of Victorian wrought iron in his fist and a face on him I have never once seen but will be paying for out of my own pocket forever. The first man he takes at the knee and the second one across the jaw. He doesn’t stop moving through either of them, and the gray line comes apart at the end because a line only holds while both ends hold.

“Timur’s down,” he says, going past me.

“Where is she?”

“Behind me. Sitting.” He’s already moving. “Go.”

I go, and I take the round seven feet from her.

It comes in under the right arm through the ribs, but it doesn’t feel like anything at all for one whole step, which is the part nobody believes until it happens to them. Then it feels like a horse. My legs stop taking instruction, the marble comes up and hits my shoulder. The pistol goes out of my hand and skates off into the wreckage under the table with a sound I’d know anywhere.

I get a hand under me. I get about four inches off the floor before the ribs quit and put me back down. The blood comes out of me fast enough that I can feel the warmth of it going down my hip and pooling at my belt.