I will come to you with no secrets between us.
The sentence is blunt and luminous and not a suggestion. My stomach tightens again, not with nausea this time, but with clarity. I'm carrying a small truth that wants to be born into light. I'm also carrying a fear that if I speak it now, Dmitri will stand with me because he is honorable, not because he has chosen me. I don't know whether the difference matters when it is snowing and enemies have learned our doors.
The worst thought is the gentlest. What if he does choose me and still feels bound by obligation, not by desire, and I cannot tell the difference because duty and love wear the same coat in this house? My grandmother would say love is not a coat. It is a stove. It warms, or it burns. If you tend itwell, it gives both steady warmth and sometimes, a clean, honest burn.
I read, "To bind my fate to his." The words fall like a bell, binding me to a man who keeps vows like bone, to a house that doubts my father, and to a future that asks more than a face. I turn the page. "I come to you without secrets between us."
"I will," I tell the room and my life. "I will. Soon."
The question that has been gnawing at the root of my sleep tightens like a hand. If my father's roof is being pulled down, if the council whispers rust, and if the men who trade favors for headlines decide our vows are theater, who protects my child if not the old lion who made Boston hold its tongue when he entered a room?Dmitri will, my bones answer.The Bratva will, my fear argues, until the ledger says there is more profit in forgetting us.
Snow brightens. The day goes blue. I set the book down because my eyes burn. I walk into the dressing room to find a shawl. There is a sweetness that is almost soap, almost sorrow, the ghost of a flower that used to live in my grandmother's hair on feast days. My chest stutters. I don't want to look where my nose says to look. I do anyway.
My fingers go cold from the inside out.The Book of Vowson the chair in the next room is open to the line about secrets. The house is so quiet that I can hear the small click of the radiator. My body remembers the corridor, the blood, Dmitri's hands, and the way he shielded my name and skipped my say.
It sits centered on the dressing table as if the room itself arranged it—a single gardenia, heavy-headed andimpossibly white, opening in a silver bud vase that belonged to my mother, the little dent still on one side where a mover's cuff met it a decade ago. No card. No note. The thing itself is the signature.
20
DMITRI
Chicago's cologne clings to the courtyard long after the men are gone, sharp musk threaded with ash, the kind that tries to overwrite candle smoke and cold stone and misses by a hair. I step from the cloister into the thin winter and read the stone the way other men read paper. I had watched from the cloister arch until the coats cleared the gate, counting cadence and vowels through stone while Misha held the perimeter, because a Pakhan speaks alone and a vor keeps the knives sheathed until the talk ends.
Boot marks pause where the chapel door throws its little shadow, a heel turns, a toe points toward the gate. The yew hedge has one clean break where a body leaned and listened, small and careful. I file it. Wind presses its face to the glass. The lamps in the nave burn like patient teeth. I lower my gaze. The house keeps its prayers.
A guard on the lower landing lifts his eyes to my shoulder the way I taught him. He coughs into his sleeve and says nothing because nothing is safer than almost anything. Ialready know what was said. Councilmen carry two weapons into old houses. The first is numbers, and the second is the word "modern" spoken like a cure. They will call vows theater, call fear prudence, parade optics, and pretend the market has a conscience. They came to tell Anatoly to put the altar in storage.
Misha slips out of the service corridor with a folder that looks like a grocery list and is not, jerks his chin toward the back office, and keeps his voice in that low register he reserves for rooms with icons. He lifts the folder a fraction, eyes steady. "The Bratva councilman pushed optics and modern. The Pakhan answered with roof and vows. No names near the chapel, nothing on tape. The Pakhan wants you in the back office. Two council members. Closed sit-down. No phones." He taps the folder with one finger and steadies his feet.
"Now?" I ask.
"Now," he answers.
The small office behind the long room is older than the estate, a pocket of stone and wood that still remembers when a boy could not buy his way out of winter. Anatoly is already there, standing with his hands behind his back, the cross at his throat a dark line against the white of his shirt. Two council members occupy the chairs like men who are used to better furniture. One has the careful tan of a banker who skis in February. The other wears his coat even with the radiator on. His collar is fur and his smile is all teeth.
"Volkov," the fur says, as if he is greeting a new model of something he intends to purchase. "We were speaking in the abstract. Optics. Continuity. You understand."
"I understand continuity," I say. "I keep it for a living."
The tan spreads his hands a fraction, a gesture that pretends generosity. "Anatoly has built a brand that is almost a relic," he says, mild and deadly. "Museum quality. Donors love museums. Investors don't. There is concern that Christmas crowns and blood vows read as pageantry in a city with cameras."
"Vows read as reliability in a city with knives," I answer. "You are here because this house still holds the vigil on nights when the docks want to shout."
The fur considers me as if testing glass for a flaw. "The families are watching," he says. "Vetrov is adaptive. He hires boys who speak developer. He sponsors youth leagues. He is happy to attend a vigil with a camera if there is an endowment attached."
"Vetrov launders cowardice through novelty," Anatoly says, voice low. His jaw tightens once. "He will not kneel in a church unless the floor has mirrors."
The tan tilts his head in a way that asks for mercy without conceding anything. "Update the picture, not the creed," he says. "It requires optics that reassure a board. It requires a chair that will travel well. You have a daughter who is… luminous. You have a right hand who is efficient. Perhaps you consider a transition that reads as continuity. New back for the chair. Same crest on the door."
Anatoly looks at me as if he is remembering a boy who once stood in this room with scabbed knuckles and a hunger that argued with prayer. He doesn't speak. The choice hangs like a bell and waits to be struck.
"I serve the Pakhan," I say. "The chair is not empty. The roof stands. The Vigil will proceed." I let my gaze rest on fur and then on tan. "If the Council wants to drag a chapel into a boardroom, they can use their own table. This one belongs to a house that still knows how to kneel."
The fur exhales through his nose, a small sound that means irritation held on a leash by calculation. "There is also the matter of Aleksandr," he says, savoring the name the way men savor a wound they don't have to wear. "His presence unsettles donors and soldiers both. He is a complication Vetrov did not have to pay for. Perhaps you should manage that picture as well?"
"I'm managing him," I say.
"With your hands," the tan murmurs, not a question.
