"Nothing," I say, and the word is hard because I prefer her to hear me first.
At noon, a driver brings a sealed bag from a downtown office I trust with small items that don't belong on a server. Inside is a single photograph printed on glossy stock. Aleksandr in profile again, now beside a phone booth that doesn't work, hand cupped to his mouth as if he were in a movie about better men. The caption Misha wrote in the margin reads,He is calling no one. He wants watchers to believe he calls.I smile because pride is free intelligence.
The knock at my door comes later, measured and swift. I open the door.
Valentina stands on the threshold with her hair down and her coat unfastened, the corridor's warmth still on the wool. Her face is pale from a night that did not take her, fury held tight enough to look like control. She holds the note between two fingers as if it were a match that has not decided whether to burn her.
"Why was Aleksandr followed?" she asks. Her voice is soft, but it cuts.
10
VALYA
Are you really marrying him? lands on my screen like a coin tossed into a well no one believes in anymore and still cannot help listening for the splash. I stare at Aleksandr's name until the letters stop meaning sound and go back to being shapes. The little green bubble glows against the dark, soft as deceit. I don't answer. I don't delete it. My thumb hovers, and my mind runs.
Another bubble appears. He writes in that coaxing register he saves for mirrors and soft rooms.Your wolf trails me from parish to tram stop, kitten, from Tremont to the harbor. I'm harmless. I only want you to know the truth.He adds a pout in syllables, a smile made of vowels. He says he feels eyes on his back and virtue in his pocket. He says Dmitri is turning the city into glass and asks if I enjoy watching men follow the wrong man. I let the words sit. I don't feed his performance with mine.
How would he know?
The answer arrives in pieces I have set aside all day like teacups I don't want to break. The man downstairs with his face neatly corrected by a wall. My father's rage turned cold enough to set the room. Dmitri's steadiness at the cafe while his phone lit and he fed patience to the flame. A word escapes a door in this house, and it grows a body and a price before the incense fades.
Aleksandr would know because someone wanted him to. He would know because someone in a service corridor mistook a sacrament for gossip and carried it to a name outside of family. Wolves don't open gates. Hands do.
Heat climbs my neck. I press the cold of the window to my forehead and take it away before my grandmother would scold me about marks. The room is too warm. The city is too quiet. The house breathes the way it does when it has made a decision.
A sound at the door. Paper whispers, the polite scrape of an envelope finding its way under the threshold like a fox under a fence. I don't need to bend. I'm already on my knees because I drop faster when I'm angry. The paper is thick and clean. The handwriting is not elegant. It is exact. One line. No signature. No plea.
I don't ask for love. Only your truth.
I don't put it down. I fold it once and carry it in my palm like a live coal, the paper warming until I can feel my pulse through the crease. He is order with a cross under his shirt. I saw the traitor bound at my father's feet, my father, the Pakhan, keeping vigil, and the room holds Dmitri's order, no spectacle, only truth. He is also the hand that corrected a Moscow import on the terrace without turning my nameinto a spectacle. He will call this protection. He will call my anger weather. I slide the folded line beneath the band of my sleeve, against the small bone of my wrist where my grandmother's red thread used to sit, and I tell the walls to stay out of my face.
I don't wait. I don't rehearse. I go.
The corridor light is chapel-dim. The carpet catches my steps and keeps them. I knock once because courtesy is a choice I'm still willing to make. He opens on the second heartbeat. Warm hall air lifts the ends of my hair. I have not slept, and it shows. My skin feels thin, my eyes ache, and old tea sits on my tongue. I carry his line like a coal in my sleeve, and I'm torn between truth and the fables my grandmother taught me to survive.
"Why was Aleksandr followed?" I ask. My voice is soft and exact. The kind of soft that cuts.
He doesn't deny it.
We are two quiet animals in a room full of maps. He says words like vow, honor, protection as if they are planks laid across a river. I don't step on them yet. He says he will not let my name be eaten by a man who treats promises like currency, that shadow is not the same thing as control, that dignity has a distance and he intends to keep it. He doesn't say the word love. He doesn't have to. The note under my sleeve stings like a truth I have not confessed yet.
"I'm not a vassal," I say. "I don't need a leash to be safe."
"You need a roof when it snows," he answers, and it is infuriating how calm his mouth stays when he is telling me the world will not change because I want it to. We go in circlesthat are not circles. They are a spiral around a center neither of us will touch. I leave before my pride learns his voice. The paper burns against my pulse the whole way back to my room.
In the morning, the city forgives us both by snowing. We wear civility like coats. The pretense is charity. We go to the North End for the auction our center is running, in a borrowed hall over a bakery where the floor tilts like an old deck. It is the kind of place where the stage needs nails every other week, where Reza catalogs donations by smell because labels lie, where strings of lights make even hard faces look kind.
I tell Dmitri he cannot wear the coat that makes him look like a verdict. He lifts an eyebrow and puts on a navy overcoat with a collar that says banker instead of soldier. I pretend not to see the way the fabric still understands the shape of a holster.
Inside the hall, tables wear checkered cloths, lot cards are hand-lettered, and a raffle drum clicks like a small engine. Reza posts bid sheets with clothespins. Toma ferries boxes from the stairwell. The parish ladies stack paper plates beside a tray of arancini that fogs the panes.
Paper snowflakes hang over folding tables labeled with marker,Books,Toys,Winter Gear. People nod because my name sits on pantry lists and coat drives, not on gala cards. A child in a knitted hat sells paper stars for two dollars to fund her school's heater. Dmitri buys five and folds them into my pocket without looking like a man who can be sweet. I make him hold a paper boat of arancini so hot the steam fogs his breath. The first bite burns his tongue, and hebites back a laugh like it is a secret he is not allowed to have. I catch it anyway.
"It is good to watch you pretend to be human," I say.
"I'm never pretending," he says, which would be funny if he did not mean it.
We stand under a string of lights that flickers with the obstinacy of old wiring. I hand him my glove so I can tuck a strand of hair back into the ribbon. He holds it like it belongs to a ritual he respects. Later, I will forget to take it back. That will be my excuse for walking into his room without knocking.
