"I don't have a good time," I say, and the heat in my voice gains words before I can stop it. "I carry crates. I make lists. Itape boxes. I listen to other people talk about rent. I stay alive by pretending I'm not drowning in chandeliers."
His mouth softens for a fraction. It vanishes almost at once. "You are my daughter," he says quietly. "You are not a social worker. You are not a ghost. You are not a symbol for common people to project fantasies upon. You don't understand how quickly kindness can turn to leverage."
"I do," I say. "I understand the cost of everything in this house." My thumb rubs the crucifix, a reflex whenever my father presses me with his plans.
He studies me. The room stays suspended. He looks at the boxes again and the way I have written in block letters like a schoolteacher. He looks at my braid and the crucifix that is hiding under my sweater but never hides from him. He looks past me as if he can see the chapel as he always does when he needs strength. When he speaks again, his voice has changed, thinner in a way that makes the back of my own throat hurt. "Enough, Valya. You are going to do what I say. No more choices, no more questions. There's a man I've chosen for you."
2
DMITRI
Ileave the elevator, and the last of her clings to the air, cool and light, and then dies before it reaches my face. The doors close behind me with a sound like a decision made. My mind is not where my feet are. It is still in the car with her, measuring the tilt of her chin and the way she asked about the ink on my wrist as if language were something you could touch. Pleasant. Not the kind of rich that forgets how to say thank you. I shake my head. She is still too wild for my taste, the sort of wild that leaves doors ajar and windows unlatched. I prefer bolts that seat cleanly and keys that turn only in my hand.
Order is how I breathe. Knives oiled, laces tied the same way every morning, sheets pulled tight enough to teach the body honesty. I write the day in rows in my head and move through them one at a time—check the cameras, walk the perimeter, and count which men look at the floor when I pass and how many look up. Every room is a problem with an answer if you refuse to let noise pretend to be music.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I glance and keep moving. A contact sends a time and a street that don't belong together. I file it where it goes and don't miss the shadow by the chapel wall. The lamp throws it long and thin across the stone, feet set in like a winter bear ready to turn space into readiness. That silhouette is as familiar as my coat.
Misha, my second-in-command, his coat turned up against the ache of the wind, his beard dusted with gray that comes from staying alive. He doesn't waste words when I step under the arch and let the cold take my face.
"Southie is moving," he says, syllables set like bricks. "L Street and the projects. Vetrov's boys. Likely Grekov's money." I smell it in the cold. His money stinks, perfume for men without honor.
"He is the new breed that wants the underworld run like a corporation," I say through my teeth.
"Appearances fill coffers faster than incense." Misha scratches his beard.
I look at his knuckles. Old Slavonic runes caught in candlelight. "We keep vows, Misha."
"Old ways keep bones straight but slow our feet." Misha grunts. He says our men were pushed off the pier fingers. An unauthorized crate landed on our turf.
"Sasha took a graze and laughed. He will live until I find use for his courage." He wipes snow from his beard, shoulders set like a wall, waiting.
"Sergei picked L Street for a reason," I say. "He likes to make a point in old places." If Sergei wants to drag the city by myankle and call it strategy, that is the kind of insult I answer not with volume but with accuracy.
Sergei Vetrov comes into my mind with the clarity of a problem I have no intention of admiring, a mouth that pronounces tradition as if it were a childhood disease. He mistakes novelty for evolution and calls vows a tourist story to be sold with the souvenirs. He insists that order can be replaced by leverage and fear is a permanent currency.
"Who are the hands?" I ask, because names set the shape of a night.
"Soft-palmed drivers and a Chelsea face I don't enjoy," Misha answers, and he keeps the rest in his eyes, the small reckoning that the docks always demand. The docks tell me Grekov is laundering confidence along with the rifles because this is a song I have heard in three languages.
"We don't like many men from Chelsea," I say. "Bring the car."
We take the covered path into the service hall, let the estate's heat wrap our bones, and move on without tasting it. I prefer stairs that echo less and corridors that have been scrubbed so often they confess lye and salt and the old taste of blood.
The car is a mean black one that squats at the curb like a threat on four wheels, paint so deep it drinks the streetlights. The driver keeps his eyes pinned to the windshield, hands at ten and two, jaw locked, mirror never drifting toward the rear seat where I sit breathing order back into my bones. The city slides under us in a slick ribbon, tires whispering, chassis steady, the whole machine moving like a sled over winter glass.
I think, because I'm obliged to be honest with myself when I wear a cross, that Sergei's timing is not chance. He smells winter in Anatoly's lungs and calculates how many candles remain on the altar of a man who taught me to read a room before I mastered the alphabet.
The club in Dorchester sits behind a tired shutter that pretends to sell used speakers, a lie that must be told loudly to be believed. The back corridor smells of bleach and brine and the clean twang of metal. Its underground vaults keep the accounts no banker will admit exist. I walk into the locked room with the tiled floor that I don't enter unless I must.
I earned more than hallways a long time ago. Anatoly keeps me close and gives me war but not a seat. The young soldiers fear me and tolerate the old man because they still know the color of his hands. Power is a weight I already carry. I don't need a crown to feel it. Still, when the talk dies in a room because I have entered and the map of Southie waits under my palms with pins like small red prayers, something in my chest remembers that I was thirteen when a fixer told me I could be more than a number in a ledger. He was right. He did not say the price would be my voice.
"Here," Misha says, tapping the parish block where the mural of saints watches the wrong kind of worship on summer nights. "He set the line at St. Monica's block and paraded a young soldier under the saint's mural so the mothers would see. Sergei wants tongues to carry his name over breakfast."
"Then he wants them to remember mine when they put children to bed," I answer, because we keep order not to be loved but to be predictable. "We keep it clean," I add. Itmeans no broken windows at the school, no stray rounds disturbing old men who play cards under a heat lamp, no theatrics that make the sinners look like saints.
Sasha comes in with his shoulder taped and a face like a stubborn animal. He is quick to laugh and quicker to bleed. I will have to keep him alive. He is the kind who will not keep himself. He nods at me with the reverence young men save for the idea of a father.
"Vetrov has three cars and a truck," he says. "Black SUV with borrowed plates. Conlon's boys in the kitchens already took pictures. Someone had the bright idea to carry some suspicious crates through the alley. Sergei means to deliver a surprise tonight."
