My father lifts his glass again. This time, it almost slips. Dmitri's hand moves an inch, then stops because I'm already there with my own, straightening the stem, making the gesture look like a daughter fussing with presentation, not a daughter guarding a man's dignity. Our fingers brush. Dmitri pulls back immediately. I keep mine steady.
Servants bring second plates. The roast is carved and served with a relish that gleams. I take one bite. It tastes of rosemary and effort. Voices descend into small caucuses. Chicago's elder speaks to the steward. The Montreal cousins tilt a wrist to the light, admiring a thin, old-gold watch while their free hands hover over the sturgeon and dill. Under the talk, I hear my father's breathing roughen. He sets down his fork and slips his ring around his finger, once, twice, as if testing its balance. He never plays with that ring.
I start to panic in the place of my body that used to be a child. The room narrows around my father's pallor and around Dmitri's stillness, which feels less like anger and more like a wall a man builds because he believes walls are safer than truth. The chair is suddenly a throne and a hospital bed. I have the ridiculous urge to knock over the candelabra and yell at the elders to stop pretending we have not all seen an empire limp.
Instead, I turn my head the tiniest bit and study Dmitri's profile. The scar near his jaw that another woman might have romanticized looks like survival carved into bone. His cross rests under his shirt, the chain line faint through white cotton. He swallows once, then sets his napkin in precisesquare folds on his lap. I try to remember the last time he laughed. Was it in the North End with arancini in paper boats?
Dessert is served. Poppyseed roll with raisins, honey plums, a tower of meringues that look like snow shaped by careful hands. Someone begins a toast to Saint Basil for the new year. I raise my glass of water. I press my fingers to the scar on my palm from lighting vigil candles like my grandmother.
Chicago's elder lays his hand on the table, fingers spread, and speaks into the room. "Legacy must learn the languages of the living," he says. He glances at my father as if he is offering him a bench, not a chair. "Anatoly, your house is strong. If you bless a transition in January, markets will read confidence."
My father smiles. He looks older than he did at the start of this meal. "Markets don't read Russian," he says. "They read money. And Boston's money prefers its saints standing." He sets his glass down and presses his index finger to the stem to still the tremor. The silver of his cross flashes at his throat when he tips his head back. I feel something in me tip toward prayer.
Dmitri speaks once more. He says Sergei looks large because he spends money like it grows in the pockets of men he will later betray. By spring, the accounts will be empty. Men like that are always shocked when Easter comes. The line is a warning, not a joke.
The dinner thins into aftertalk and the small courtesies of coats and cars. In the corridor, the staff gather plates and scrape bones into deep pans. Someone in the vestibule hascome in with snow on their shoulders. It drips as if the building has begun to cry. I stand with my hands folded and feel like a relic waiting to be placed in a reliquary or smashed. Dmitri passes me once as he escorts Chicago's elder toward the foyer. He gives me a short look that says I'm not a stranger and that he is not ready to speak. I take the look like bread. I don't ask for more.
By the time I reach my corridor, my head rings like the tower in winter. The carpet muffles the steps behind me. I count doors. I smell lamp oil and beeswax and roast, all commingling into a perfume that smells like a family pretending it is not a company and a company pretending it is not a family. I rest my hand on my doorknob and stand there for a moment. I don't want to open a room that will be only mine again.
The lamps are low. The bed is turned down. I sit on the edge and untie the ribbon from my hair. The red looks almost black in the lamplight. I hold it in my palm and think of the thread Father Gavril looped around our wrists. I whisper the vow line out of order as if I can rearrange fate by rearranging clauses.To bind my fate to his.
I wash the paint from my face and watch a woman emerge who looks like a girl in photographs from a winter long ago when her father still threw her into drifts and her mother still wore lipstick. I look at myself hard. Pride keeps my spine. Love unsettles everything I thought discipline could hold. I don't know how to reconcile a man who can make a chapel feel like a country and a room where he could not look at me because pain had taken his face hostage.
A soft knock lands on my door. Not a servant's double tap.Not Dmitri's single firm call. A rhythm I know from a childhood when knocks were codes and warmth was a prize.
"Come," I say and rise.
Anatoly enters. He has shed the jacket that carried him through dinner. Without it, he looks thinner, proportions slightly off, like a statue moved to a different plinth. He closes the door behind him with the care of a man who doesn't want to startle the room. He pauses as if parsing what posture will hurt least, then crosses to me and sits in the chair that has my grandmother's needlework in a pattern of vines and crosses. He doesn't look at the mirror. He looks only at me.
"You must finish the vows, Valya," he says, voice low and precise, the kind of tone he uses when there is no room for argument. "The moment I fall, they will come for you."
25
DMITRI
The clinic smells of boiled linen and lemon. A framed diploma tilts a fraction left, tired of holding everyone's certainties. I don't sit. Men who ask for chairs admit they came to negotiate.
The doctor is smaller without the coat, cardigan buttoned to the throat, eyes trained by years of giving good or bad news. Katya told me her name and that she is competent. Katya knows because she is a surgeon when she chooses, a systems analyst when I need one, and my sister always.
I came alone. Fear moves faster when it senses a committee. "Doctor," I say and set a card on the blotter. Our seal hardens in red wax. "Someone pulled a file from your system. You will confirm it now."
She glances at the seal, then at me. "You could have called."
"I don't call about sacraments," I answer. "I come."
Her fingers move to the keyboard. The screen throws pale light across her face. I keep my eyes on the doctor's righthand. It trembles once, then obeys. I say nothing while she types. In the hallway, a child coughs. A nurse laughs too loudly.
"Here," she says, turning the monitor two fingers toward me. She has removed names and dates, anything that would turn this into gossip. I don't need the identifiers. I need the pattern.
"Two logins," she says. The tremor has vanished. She has her mask back on. "One legitimate at the time of visit. One fourteen hours later. It came through a hidden return address, a network built to hide where the visitor sits."
"Show the second path," I say.
She brings up the trail. To most men, it would look like rain. To me, it looks like alleyways I know by smell. Incoming connection, a counterfeit staff pass accepted, file viewed, file duplicated, file exported. The log ends with a line of numbers.
"That is as far as I can go."
"It is far enough," I say. "The breach exists. It is not yours."
