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"Two years," I repeat. "That's when he came back."

"Yes."

Zhenya would make a terrifying lawyer. She would also make a terrifying serial killer. Papa used to say the only reason she hadn't become either was that she couldn't decide which one paid better.

"Is there a photo?" I ask.

She hesitates which is worse than anything she's told me so far.

"One," she says. "From somebody's phone at a fight. It's not very good."

She clicks it open.

It's grainy and dark, taken from the back of a crowd with somebody's raised fist blurring half the frame. A ring made of rope and pallets. Floodlights that don’t belong. And in the middle of it, a man the size of a door, turned half away from the camera. Bare back. Dark ink across his shoulders that I can't make out. His knuckles are wrapped in tape that's gone black at the edges.

There's another man at his feet. That one isn't moving.

I can't see his face. I can see the line of his jaw, and that's somehow enough.

"Close it," I say.

The image disappears from her screen.

For a second, neither of us speaks. Downstairs, I can hear Milana singing along to something on the radio, badly, and Galana telling her to stop, then a cupboard door banging. Normal sounds. The kitchen still smells like the pastries that arrived this morning from Garick Lazovski, for Galana, apparently. Arina pretended not to care and ate three.

Everyone in this house is losing their minds in a different direction.

"You don't have to go," Zhenya says quietly. "I told Viktor the trust could go to hell. My husband is a secondary concern." She snaps the laptop shut. "I'm going to break it, Eva. There's precedent. There's always precedent. Give me three weeks and none of us will have to marry anybody."

"And if you can't?" I swallow hard.

She doesn't answer. She looks at the window instead, where the rain is starting up again across Papa's garden.

That's the thing about Zhenya. She'll tell you every terrible fact in the world in a perfectly level voice. The only things she won't say out loud are the things she's afraid of.

I pick up the black sweater.

"I'm going," I say.

"Why?" She sounds desperate. Like everything is slipping away from her faster than she can grab onto it.

Because Arina is out somewhere doing God knows what with Garick Lazovski, Galana can't stop crying, and Milana is twenty years old and still sings in the kitchen. Because somebody in this family has to walk into a room with one of Papa's men and find out what we're dealing with. And it's not going to be Zhenya, who still hasn't let Viktor tell her a single thing about the man Papa chose for her apart from his name.

"Because I'm not losing our family home to a trust," I say, "just because some man has a scary nickname."

Zhenya studies me for a long moment.

She stands and kisses the top of my head, which she hasn't done since I was about eleven, and walks out without another word, leaving the door open behind her.

I put on the black sweater. I put on jeans, then take them off and put on a skirt, then take that off and put the jeans back on, because I am not dressing up for a man who may or may not have killed somebody in a warehouse in Indiana.

Viktor's office called just after lunch to say Mr. Nevolin would like to meet at five. A text came through from an unknown number twenty minutes later. An address, the time, and nothing else.

I looked up the address. Then I looked it up again, because the first time I assumed I'd typed it wrong.

It isn't a restaurant.

It's a gym. A boxing gym under the train tracks on the edge of Pilsen, with a hand-painted sign and bars on the windows and a review online that just says good bags, terrible coffee, don't park out front.