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She leans into it.

Her eyes close, and for one second, her whole weight rests against my palm like she's been holding herself up all day and has finally found somewhere to rest.

She opens her eyes. Then she reaches up and takes my hand away from her face. She steps forward toward Volkov, and he spits at her feet.

“The thing with men like you, Stepan, is that you can’t ever see what’s right in front of you. You’re too blinded by the old ways. So blinded, that you didn’t see me for what I really am. Even after my little demonstration this morning.”

“Arinochka—”

“No,” she cuts him off and gestures to Timur and Kolya, who immediately know she wants Volkov on his knees and oblige by kicking him in the back of his knees. “You don’t get to call me that in a bid to belittle and undermine me, Stepan. I think we all know what needs to happen here.”

“But…but…your father…” Volkov stammers in a bid to save his skin.

“Would have done exactly this,” she says, pulling the knife from her boot. “You are going to die knowing it was your own stupid arrogance that made this happen.”

She swipes her father’s knife across Volkov’s neck and stands still as the blood spurts from the gash, partially hitting her.

She waits until the life drains out of him, and he slumps from Timur and Kolya’s grip onto the concrete yard.

“Deposit him with Rusakov,” she says, then looks down at herself. The black dress looks no different apart from a swathe of it, along with her black coat, being a little shinier in the floodlights. “I really liked this dress,” she says with resignation, then looks at Andrei who has managed to sit up on the wet concrete and gravel. “Come on, let’s get him to a doctor.”

Misha helps me half carry, half drag Andrei to my car, telling him in a low voice that he's going to be fine, that he did good.

Arina glances over him and says, “I want to go with him.”

She pulls her coat tight around herself. Then she walks toward my car without waiting for me, her boots splashing through the puddles, her spine straight, her chin up.

I don't argue.

I follow her through the rain, and for the first time in six years, I let myself think she might actually be mine.

Arina

Andrei needs eleven stitches across his eyebrow, four in his lip, and a cast on his wrist.

He also needs, according to Dr. Petrenko, to stop trying to get off the examination table every time I walk into the room.

“Sit down,” I tell him for the third time. “If you stand up again, I'll have Dr. Petrenko sedate you.”

Dr. Petrenko, who has been stitching up Maximov men since before I was born and once took a bullet out of Papa's shoulder on our kitchen table, doesn't even look up from the tray of instruments. “I'd be happy to.”

Andrei sits.

His face is swollen and purple and sewn together like a quilt, and he's looking at me like he isn’t sure what to say. It makes my throat ache. He's twenty-four years old and he knelt in the rain with his hands tied rather than open a gate for men who didn't belong to us.

I squeeze his shoulder. “Thank you.”

“I didn't do anything.”

“You didn't open the gate.”

“It wasn't theirs to open.” He says it simply, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Then he glances at my coat, and his good eye widens slightly.

I look down.

Under the clinic's fluorescent lights, the shiny patch across the front of my coat isn't shiny anymore. It's dark red, almost brown, and stiff where it's starting to dry.

I knew it was there. I felt it hit me. Warm, then cold. I just haven't looked at it since.