Page 58 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

“And do fucking what?” I ask. “Blow up everything I’ve built in the past two months to satisfy a man who hasn’t been in this country in eleven years, except to attend his bastard’s wedding, but not mine, and to mourn at his mistress’ bedside before she finally fucking died?”

“To protect what you’ve built over a lifetime,” Boris corrects. “Before one infernal fucking woman undoes it.”

The accusation is calm. Clinical. I think that’s what makes it so easy to answer.

“She isn’t undoing anything.” I lean back in my chair and look at him steadily. “I am the one who nearly did. Four days ago, in this office, I was handed the best possible news, and I met it like a man who deserves nothing, which is approximately what I am right now. That’s on me. Not on her. Not on this alliance.” I pause. “And not on you, Uncle. Which is why I’m going to say this once, and I’m going to say it with all the respect I have for you, which is considerable: your role here has always been contingent on your loyalty to my judgment. My trust in you is a privilege I’ve extended. It is not a mechanism for my father’s will. It is not puppet strings. And it will not be used as either.”

Boris stares at me.

There’s something in his face I don’t often see there. It isn’t anger, exactly. It’s the look of a man recalibrating—deciding which version of this conversation he wants to have.

“She has you bound up in puppet strings, and you don’t even see it. You’re pussy-whipped, nothing more than that. But you can’t set your legacy on fire over it. You can control her, instead of letting her control you.”

“If she wanted to use anything against me,” I say, “she’d use the baby. That’s leverage. That’s power. That’s the kind of move a person makes when they want to win.” I think of her. The way she’d said, You can have the evening to be surprised, when she told me she was pregnant—calm, and measured, and giving me the dignity of a reaction she had no obligation to offer. “Instead, she left. She took herself out of the equation entirely. She walked away from leverage she didn’t choose to use.” I hold my uncle’s gaze. “A woman running a game doesn’t do that.”

Boris is quiet.

“The alliance isn’t fracturing,” I continue. “My wife is at her family’s home because I gave her a very good reason to be there, and I’m going to fix that. My father’s questions will receive my usual answer: the Zakharov Bratva is mine to run, and I run it as I see fit. If that’s ever insufficient for him, he knows where to reach me.”

I watch my uncle absorb this. His jaw works once, like he’s chewing on a response he’s decided not to give.

“You think she wouldn’t use the child? What do you think Milena did? She used Viktor to keep her hooks in Sergei. And look what havoc it’s wrought,” he says finally. “Don’t be naïve, Anton. You are smarter than that, usually.”

“Yes,” I admit. There’s no point in denying it. “But what the fuck has that ever done for me? Look at me. Am I everything my father hoped I would be? What you want me to be?”

He looks at me for a long time. Then he picks up his stick and pushes himself to his feet with the deliberate effort of a man who won’t let you see the effort it costs him. He straightens.

He’s still formidable, my uncle. He always has been. “Your father won’t let this go,” he says at the door.

“My father never lets anything go,” I say. “I’ll be sure not to lose my beauty sleep over it.”

When Boris shuts the door behind him, he slams it with more force than I’d thought he was capable of. My hands find the desk again. The grain of the wood. I count it and then stop counting it, deliberately, which is its own kind of work. I’ve been doing this for four days. The management of my own mind, the shepherding of thoughts from one corridor to another, closing doors on the rooms I can’t afford to stand in for too long.

Chapter 21 - Darya

As if the universe—or Gloriana, since she’s the one who brought me the project—brings me a gift for my perseverance, in the form of an altarpiece that makes my breath catch in my lungs at first sight.

The piece is a 15th-century Italian panel, composed of tempera and gold leaf on poplar wood, with a lone surviving wing of what would have been a triptych. The other panels are gone, separated by centuries and probably several dishonest dealers. What remains is a Madonna, her face tipped downward toward a child who no longer exists on any surviving surface. Just her, and the suggestion of an absence beside her, and gold leaf that’s lifting in a dozen places along the border where a previous restorer—several previous restorers, from the look of it—made choices I find genuinely abhorrent.

Today, I’m working on the gold leaf. That means I have no reason to move and get to breathe through every atom of my attention being focused on a gilded border the width of my thumb, because gold leaf applied over a damaged surface requires a touch so delicate that it doesn’t allow for any unnecessary distractions. To be careful with this relic of a time long ago, I have to set aside the impetuous grief that’s been consuming me and devote myself to the preservation of something extraordinary. I get to act as its keeper.

There’s a sacredness to this conversation between the gold, the breath I’m holding, and my careful but steady hands.

I’m so lost in the process that it nearly knocks me off my stool when I feel someone behind me. Irate, I look over my shoulder. Filip idles in the doorway. He looks too hesitant for me to snap over the interruption.

I sigh. “Whatever it is, can it wait?”

The disgruntled glance he darts in peripheral view is answer enough for me. Whatever it is, apparently, absolutely cannot wait.

I set down the gilder’s tip.

“Someone’s here,” Filip says.

I shake my head, disagreeing. “I have no appointments today.”

“Yes.” A beat. “I told him that.”

Now I look up.