"You should have come through the narthex," I scoff. "Men who enter from the side have learned bad habits."
He tilts his head. His eyes are broken glass that has forgotten how to reflect. "The door was poorly kept. I could not resist a lesson." His men shift by inches, suppressors like black tapers. One mourner kneels, sets a leather case down, and unzips it as if serving liturgy—magazines, cable ties, gauze, a coil of thin chain—they have brought a portable altar for desecration.
Aleksandr takes two steps forward, chin lifted, eyes bright with borrowed courage. He turns counterfeit tenderness toward Valentina. "Valya," he says, honeyed, stealing the old syllables.
"Speak to me, not to her," I snarl. I pull his gaze with the barrel.
Valentina is a stone on the step, eyes like river-found kopeks, bright where the silt has rubbed away. It steadies my aim better than any drug would.
"Ask him what she hides," Aleksandr calls to the audience, twirling around on his shiny boots. "Ask if he knows what she carries." He looks to the elders, to the staff gathered by the door, to the two girls from the kitchens who pressed themselves into a shadow. He turns back to Valentina, his voice falling into that old coaxing shape of the vowels. "You never loved him, not as you name love. You needed a roof and took the nearest hand."
Valentina doesn't look at him. She looks at me and speaks as if this is our kitchen and there is no one else in the world. "The only man who has ever loved me is the one who spoke a vow. He shed blood to keep it."
The church holds its shape. No one screams. Men who brought their mothers hold those women under their arms and lower them into the space between pew and floor with a grace that would make angels take notes. The kitchen maids hold hands. They have learned to do that from women waiting for men to come home from a winter sea. The priest lays the crowns on the cloth and draws the thin veil over gold and garnet, not hurried, not afraid, a small act that tells the room the rite is under guard.
I read the entry like a map, my mind stitching routes at a soldier's pace. The line that fits runs through the side sacristy that touches the crypt. A bought verger three parishes away, a cousin here with a car, a borrowed key. Shooters dressed as mourners walked in under a Vigil for an aunt whose name sits in the registry on a saint's day. It is inference, but the seams align. He pays well, and he trusts the word "memorial" to soften any usher. Men like him live on clerical error.
I return fire at his shoulder and miss him by a breath, chip a pew, ruin a mercenary's sleeve. Misha is already at the left flank, Sasha at the right, two more inside men peeling the black coats back from the aisle like rotten bark. Our choir has broken off mid-phrase. Then one alto keeps a descant fear cannot touch and holds the note. That thin, brave thread keeps the room from breaking. It seals my decision to outlive this hour for it.
Sergei's men lift their arms and show the metal they smuggled under cloth. They fire low for ankles to herd us. We answer high for wrists to stop hands. An usher I trained two years ago breaks a jaw with the brass finial of a candle pole and then kneels to cross himself for the fact of blood on stone. The chandelier near the south aisle drops one prism and shivers. Its chain holds because the man who climbed to test it yesterday loves his job.
A mourner rushes me with a blade dressed as a candle knife. I catch his wrist and twist. The blade clatters. I drive his face into wood, and he slides to the floor in a slow prayer that ends badly. Someone behind me fires. I feel the round comb my coat hem. Misha shouts once, "Left," a muzzle flashes, a man grunts and goes still behind the pillar.Another burst, chalk-white plaster powders from the arch. Chips sting my cheek. A stained-glass saint gains a round hole in the palm and throws rubies and cobalt across the floor. Boots drum. Benches scrape. Someone screams a name in Russian. Someone else answers with a roar that makes the lamps tremble on their chains. My shoulder floods with heat where stitches tear. I clamp the arm to my ribs and keep moving.
Sergei fires twice. Stone spits off the altar rail, and he smiles, amused. The choir stall erupts in splinters as another round walks the wood. Smoke climbs into incense until the nave smells like a forge. I pivot and answer with a round to his lackey's knee. Aleksandr's mouth opens in a shocked "O", then he collapses into hot tears. He crawls behind a pew, dragging a red stripe like a ribbon. He sobs, curses, hears himself doing both, and clamps it shut, teeth bared, pride shaking in his jaw. He fumbles for a pistol and finds only a rosary dropped long ago by the old sacristan. He grips that instead and looks suddenly, painfully young.
The mercenary on the right flank kicks a basin, and water leaps across the floor. Candles spit, steam rises, the room smells of old myrrh turned sharp by fight. The air is close and bright and full of fast decisions. Misha shouts a count once, then switches to hand signs. Our men read them and answer with their bodies. "Door," Sasha says and points with his chin.
The side bar begins to close. One of Sergei's men dives and wedges it again with a folded brochure of feast days he stole from the narthex. He grins like a boy who has cheated a parent, and I put a round through his hand. He shrieks. The brochure catches fire where it touches the candle. Sergeisteps onto the first rail step as if onto a stage. He doesn't glance down at the glass under his soles. He raises his pistol toward the Gospel as if finishing a thought. I move forward, and the shot finds my shoulder again with a punch that spins me half a step.
The elders begin to chant. The words wash across the pews and settle into the smoke of the room. It gives me permission to do what I came to this house to do. Sergei sees the elders and the chant and the way the candles refuse to lie down. He understands what he has walked into.
"Walk away from her," he says just to me. "Come to the docks. I will sign theobshchakinto your hands. I will give you Boston and a corridor to New York. You can finish your vows on New Year's Day with anyone you like."
"Anyone I like is already here." I keep my voice level.
He smiles like a gambler who has found a man who refuses the table. He lifts the pistol a fraction and then lowers it, a small admission. "Then we will do it the old way," he says.
From the nave's far corner, a mercenary in black rises with a long rifle he broke down in a choir stall and built again while we bled. He plants his cheek. The barrel seeks a line that leads through the altar toward the aisle where Valentina stands. I see the path, the breath he takes before the squeeze. I move. There is no time for speech. I shoulder into him from the side. The shot sends the thurible stand into the air, where it flips and rings. She doesn't shrink. Her eyes are on mine that don't say thank you. She holds her ground as a daughter of a house that will not fold.
Sirens far off would be a mercy. We have none. The fight narrows to small pieces. Wrist against wrist. Muzzle againstarm. Boot against thigh. Knife against belt. We press. They press. A rosary snaps under a heel and scatters beads like hail.
I look for Sergei in the smoke of candles and the churn of bodies. He is backing down the side aisle, resetting lines, men between us, Aleksandr dragging himself with his hand out. Our men hold the doors. The side hinge screams as metal finally remembers it is fallible. Misha puts a shoulder to it, and it sets true.
"Stay with her," I tell Sasha. "No gap."
Sasha nods once and takes his place a half step to Valentina's left, knife low, pistol high, posture like a vow.
"Sergei," I call. "You came into a church. Leave the way cowards leave."
He laughs. "I brought you a chair, and you brought me hymns." He scoffs. "We are at an impasse."
"You mistook hymns," I exhale, "for a lack of knives."
He lifts his pistol toward me in a little salute and winks. He knows he will not take me today. He is too much a merchant to die on a tiled floor when there are invoices to send.
Then the room changes.
A hand touches the pew behind me, and the old wood groans, a sound from thirty years ago, from a winter when a man built a city with favors and blows and the iron belief that vows outlast any ledger. Anatoly has been standing near the back, hands on the pew, ring bright under the lamp. He has watched with a face like law. He has notmoved because moving costs him now in a currency none of us can repay.
