I pour her tea because I don't know how to hold that sentence any other way. She watches me like she wants to see if there is still gentleness under my ribs. I let the steam fog the air between us.
She drains the cup, sets it down with a clink. "Fine. Ignore the sister who fixes your servers and your suspects." She leaves. The door shuts with a small sound that feels like a period at the end of a line. I stand for a moment with my hands on the back of the chair and let the muscles in my shoulders remind me that they still exist.
Katya's boots are hardly gone before the walls press close again. I must say my prayers. The estate chapel waits at the edge of the estate, its lamps dim, its air dry with incense and old wood. I cross myself, step inside, and let the hush take me. Icons watch from the walls, saints with eyes that know too much. I kneel before them, the stone cold beneath me. My words come easily.
My mother taught me prayers when fever burned her thin and luminous. Then she was gone, and the orphanage gave me rooms that stank of boiled potatoes and chlorine, beds too small for sleep, and fists that came quicker than food. Boston taught me that structure is the only boat a child can build when the sea comes in. That tradition is a spine strong enough to hold your head when nothing else will. That control is not cruelty. It is survival.
Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.I don't come with petitions, only with the weight I carry and cannot name aloud. When I rise, the house is already shifting. It stirs with preparation for tomorrow's gala. Laughter climbs from the main stair, a piano threads through the rooms, chandeliers catch every polished surface. In my world, an enemy's enemy can be a friend. Tonight, the house whispers it in that language.
The room tightens to a single point. Valentina stands at the window, snow scoring lines against the glass. Her black silk makes her a silhouette of light, a crucifix gleaming at her throat. She doesn't move, doesn't need to, her stillness a dare. I count the distance between us, and in my mind, I erase it. She is beautiful and dangerous, untamed in a house built to break the wild.
God help me, I already choose her.
3
VALYA
Morning is the only hour that doesn't argue with me. The house still sleeps like a great animal with a jeweled collar. Cameras blink in a slow rhythm, and marble floors hold their breath as I walk the rug edges and practice vanishing. I carry the last box for the South End program against my hip,PANTRYwritten in neat block letters, and the elevator mirror returns my face—one girl who belongs to a house like this and one who might run, both of us sharing one mouth and an inconveniently honest pair of eyes.
Reza once said every escape is easier when it looks like an errand, and Baba Yaga in my head cackles while I turn it into a small art. I text my driver that I must stop at the library annex to return books, which is true because I'm carrying Tolstoy on top of beans. He replies with the exact thumbs up he sends when he doesn't want to know more. The service door breathes me into the courtyard, where the snow lies in delicate sheets on the boxwood. The gargoyles look pleased today to be dusted with sugar. I breathe theclean winter and feel the weight on my shoulders slip half an inch to the left, not freedom yet, but still a miracle.
In the car, I tuck my braid into my collar and pull the thrifted camel coat close. I hold the box on my lap like a sleeping cat, possessive and careful. Beacon Hill tilts its chin at the morning like a dowager who has earned her arrogance. The city below her stretches and mutters to itself like a clerk ticking through a list under their breath. Bus brakes sigh, storefronts yawn open as we take the long way to the South End. The short way passes a patrol car that has grown too friendly lately. The driver asks whether I will wait at the curb while he loops the block. I say yes in the voice reserved for doing the opposite.
The community center stands as a brick cube more forgiven than funded by City Hall, paint scuffed at the handrail, a bulletin board crowded with flyers for ESL classes, plus a notice about a lost calico cat. Inside, it smells like coffee, floor wax, and the kind of stubborn hope that dresses itself in tinsel. Reza lifts his head from behind the card table we pretend is an office and gives me his tired, patient smile, the one that includes every late-night email and every delivery of store-brand cereal I have ever bullied out of a wholesaler.
"You are early," he says, which is code forI'm grateful you are here, and please avoid your driver seeing you.
"I'm hiding, avoiding a breakfast with my father," I say, which is the kind of truth we trade like contraband.
We move like dancers on a floor. Reza peels tape, I stack cans by category because I believe beans should marry beans and never hide beneath peaches. We take inventory with the mutual pleasure of people who like lists for theirclean edges. Mrs. S arrives with a pan of pastries and pretends she baked them, which means she went to the good bakery and asked for yesterday's tray at a discount. She presses a warm paper bag into my hands and tells me I look thin in a tone that is ninety percent affection and ten percent command.
The boxes I brought from the house sit like obedient children at the foot of the stage,PANTRY,TOYS,BOOKSstacked as straight as I could make them, and the hum in my chest eases. I cut another length of ribbon. I fuss. I write down Mrs. Liu's pledge because she forgot her glasses, not because I doubt her. Two more step up and ask for quiet credit. On the clipboard, I putAnonymousA.L. and R.H.. In my notebook, I write the names small and the wordsno recognitioneven smaller. This is the part of my life that makes sense. It is the same reason I memorize my grandmother's prayers—because tasks are the opposite of drowning.
I step out for ten stolen minutes into the pale winter light and walk to the corner cafe. The girl knows me as the woman who orders tea and tips like someone who never counts, which is half wrong. I slide into a table near the window and open my small black notebook full of schedules, sizes, lists, and the names I will never say upstairs. I sip my tea and taste cloves.
For a blessed ten minutes, I'm no one. A woman reads the paper, a man in paint-speckled jeans stirs his coffee and hums along to a song the radio almost remembers. Nobody here calls me princess. Nobody watches my mouth for moments I overrule my father's edicts. I finish, buy a sack of oranges, carry them like I'm bringing the sun home insegments. Reza teases that I'm bossy when I stack the oranges in a pyramid. We load his van. I put my hand flat on the door and promise it will not betray us, which is ridiculous and still feels like a binding. I check my watch and see the day pulling me back by the hem.
Toma waits by the loading ramp. Most afternoons, I find him there, knit cap tugged low, palms cupped around a paper star he folded from a donation flyer. He taps it twice against his chest, then points to me, his language made of eyes and small rituals.
Beacon Hill is a different planet by noon. The house has woken up into an orchestra of logistics. Florists in black carry in winter like a choreographed storm, white roses and pearled branches and garlands of cedar that perfume the hall with a memory of the forest my grandmother always said was God's first chapel. Men on ladders test the lights that will make the marble shine like ice. Someone in the kitchen laughs in Russian at a joke, and the laugh comes out tired and real.
Yelena meets me at the service entrance like a general on a mission, skirt in black, braid coiled at the nape of her neck, hands already reaching for my coat and for the oranges. She smells of cedar and soap and can do six things with two hands and makes them look like grace. I loved her before I knew what love was. She once hid me in a laundry cart during an argument laced with gunfire and hummed a lullaby that filled the hallway. She fusses over me in the careful way that mothers do. Her grief for the daughter the Bratva raid took from her has turned each gentle touch into a second chance she will not name.
"You look like the wind," she says, her way of saying I'm underdressed and smug.
"I brought oranges," I say, useless and proud.
"Good," she says and lifts the sack as if it weighs nothing, then tucks a stray piece of hair behind my ear with fingers that have set bones and kneaded bread with the same firm tenderness.
"Upstairs. Bath. Then we choose which face to wear."
I want to say the face I wear is always mine, but I kiss her cheek, smell flour and beeswax, and carry myself up the back stairs with a quickness I will deny later.
Hot water and eucalyptus pull the city out of my muscles. I let my hair down, and it falls halfway to my waist, rich chestnut, heavy with shine, carrying a faint veil of chapel smoke. I think of my grandmother's hands working a lifeline of braid, her voice telling me that a woman should know how to hold her crown. I smooth oil onto my skin. The mirror gives me a body I know too well, the scars I can count and the softness I guard, the crucifix shining with tiny stubborn light. I press it to my lips and ask for patience, the only thing I never owned outright.
Yelena arrives with a garment bag and a basket of cosmetics that looks like a painting of opulence. She lays everything out with a ritual that turns a dressing room into a sanctuary—a comb, pins, the velvet roll of Grandmother's rosary, a small jar of kohl mixed with rosewater that grandmothers bring out only when the city wants to believe in fairy tales. She parts my hair with diamond-cut precision and braids it low, then ties the end with a narrow carmine silk ribbon. She sets the braid into a shape that would catch any candlewithin ten meters. I pretend I don't want to wear the gown she chooses, pale silver with a slit for legs that know stairs. When she unzips the bag, the fabric unfurls with the hush of expensive secrets.
"You are not a picture," she says, easing the gown up and settling it on my shoulders like snow. "You are a reminder. Tradition is not a cage, Valya. It can be a handrail on black ice."
