The elders stop chanting as if a conductor lowered a hand. The men in black glance toward the sound because even men who fear nothing look when a king stands.
Anatoly takes one step into the aisle, then another. His coat hangs hard on his frame. His mouth is set to the line. His hand goes to his chest. A small, precise press over the cross he wears under cloth. His knees touch the pew. He folds into the wood like a man sitting down without a bench. His mouth moves.
I'm at his side in three strides, Sergei forgotten, gun down, Misha with me, Valentina already moving from the rail, Sasha shifting to keep her covered, the sacristan lifting the oil as reflex, the elders reaching and stopping because love needs space and order. I slide an arm behind Anatoly's shoulders and lower him to the pew. His eyes have the clarity of a winter sky. It is six in the evening and very late.
His eyes go winter-clear and kind, finding mine, then lifting to the altar and back, a father's blessing and a general's surrender in one look. His thumb presses a small cross into my sleeve as if sealing a vow.
"Make him better than me," he whispers.
28
VALYA
Smoke clings to the rafters like a hymn that refuses to leave. The saints in the colored glass stare through cracks that were not there an hour ago. Wax pools along the rail in fat tears that harden as the air cools.
Sergei is gone. He took the side passage by the sacristy, where steps drop into stone that remembers older wars. Two of his men lie facedown near a pillar, scarves tangled, boots askew. Aleksandr sits on the floor with his back to a pew, leg tied off with a strip of linen from the vestry, lips bloodless, pride stitched poorly across his face. Our guests stand, sit, lean, refuse to go, argue in low voices, count children with their eyes, touch crosses at their throats, and look at me.
I kneel beside my father.
His rings are cool against my palm. The line between his brows loosens. The small white scar on his cheek, put there by a bottle in a South Boston bar before anyone called him Pakhan, looks delicate now, almost fine. His chest rises, lessstrong, rises again, then shallower. Heat climbs my eyes. I fix my gaze on the knot of his tie, then on the icon above us, and blink until the salt retreats. He will not see me weep. I hold my face steady for him and keep my cadence even.
The cross under his shirt presses into bone as if metal could hold a sternum together by will. Someone has set the crowns back in their velvet, like children put to bed after a riot. Father Gavril hurries with oil and stole, hand steady, eyes fierce. He is too far. The nave is long and the task heavy for old legs. The prayer will arrive late.
I put my mouth close to my father's ear because friends and enemies are all within three yards, and some words belong to only two people.
"Papa," I say. My voice frays.
His eyes find me through the haze. They sharpen as if some clerk in his soul has opened the file marked "Daughter" and laid it on the desk. He summons a smile, weak as candlelight, and lets it go so he can spend what is left on speech.
"They respect Dmitri. He is a rule they know," he whispers. I must bend to hear him. Air rasps. He spends another phrase anyway. "You. It was always you they could not place, your insistence that God and the street can share a table. You wouldn't fold."
I shake my head once because tears choke my throat, and the staff will take their cues from my spine. He speaks again. I lower my head to hear him well. "You know how the chair thinks and how the kitchen forgives."
"You tried to make a new house with vows as scaffolding," Iwhisper into his ear, words softened by tears. "They insisted on calling it a museum."
"They said rust," he murmurs and smiles. A cough robs a syllable. He recovers it without apology. "They wouldn't kneel together. So I chose a vow that wouldn't bend to councils. I did not build a cage for him." His gaze shifts toward Dmitri, then back to me. "I opened a door for you into a house where you stand first and the ledgers stand last." The smile reaches his eyes, then pain dulls it. I place my hand flat on his chest.
Oil glints at the edge of my sight. The stole slides over a priest's hands. My father knows it will not arrive in time. He looks past me to the Mother with three stars, the one my grandmother kissed with both hands and a sigh. His mouth shapes a child's prayer. He finishes half. The rest hangs in the air as our vow did a moment before glass sang with bullets. His eyes return to mine. The last of his strength climbs into his gaze and presses a command into me.
"Don't let them sell the altar," he says, eyes on mine, voice soft as snowfall on a winter night. "Don't let them turn love into a show. Keep the roof. Make him better than I was." The words are clean, a thin draw of air, then stillness.
I feel that stillness in my bones like a winter bell.
For a moment, the cathedral narrows to the width of his face and my hand over his. Then sound returns without shouting. The priest reaches us and lays the stole on my father's brow. His eyes shine. He speaks the prayer anyway. I lower my forehead to my father's knuckles as if warmth can be forced back into a hand that commanded storms. It cannot.
I rise. My knees refuse. My house requires. I turn to the room. Everyone is here, all his sons and daughters.
"Light the lamps," I tell a sacristan with ash on his smock. "Bring fresh oil. We will not leave the Gospel under gray. Yelena, fetch clothes, the best ones. Not a thread frayed tonight." My voice sounds like my grandmother when a man from the parish knocked snow on her clean floor. Women who were shaking a minute ago find their tasks.
"Father Gavril," I say softly. He looks at me as if I'm still the child who sounded out theTroparline by line. "He did not make it in time."
"No," he answers. "But he began it, and that counts in heaven." He traces the sign over my father's brow, touches his cross to his lips, then to the hand that will never lift an order again. His eyes return to mine and see what is next. "You have decisions to make."
"I have orders to give," I answer. The tremor becomes current. The current becomes command. It is a wire that suddenly carries the whole city.
I look at the house—elders, brigadiers, cousins, keepers, my men, and my women. Then I look at the censer lying on its side, ash veiling the Gospel like morning frost. I give the words enough rise to reach the back, gentle under the icons.
"No one leaves this cathedral until every candle is upright and every splinter cleared from the rail," I say. "No saint looks on blood by morning. No ash covers scripture at dawn. If you eat at our table, you work at our altar. If not, you eat elsewhere."
