"My grandmother said a necklace can be a prayer," I answer. I touch the little crucifix where it rests at the hollow between my breasts, somehow both heavy and weightless, and think of her kneeling in a winter chapel with candles turning the air to honey, her voice as steady as a bell, while my father and his men argued about legacies and debts. Heat ghosts my palm. The tiny burn scar from vigil candles pricks like a remembered lesson, a white seed of pain I rub when I need courage.
Yelena paints my mouth with a color that could be a bruise or a blessing depending on the light, and she uses kohl on my eyes to make the brown look like burnished gold, then dusts my shoulders with a powder that smells like violets. By the time the gown settles and the red-and-silver ribbon glints and the slit proves its usefulness, I look like the kind of woman men write about and the kind of girl a grandmother can still recognize.
"You will be kind," Yelena says, smoothing the line of fabric over my hip, "and you will be ice when you need to be."
"I prefer snow," I say.
"I know," she answers and tucks a tiny sprig of pine into the braid as if to claim me for the season.
The house blooms hour by hour. Candles stand in ranks along the staircase like a procession of small saints. Musicians warm up in the gallery, their scales spilling like champagne bubbles. The first guests arrive with a murmur of expensive wool and good perfume, and the coat check becomes a theater of shrugged shoulders and practiced laughter. I stand at the top of the main staircase and pretend I'm a painting, then I descend because a painting cannot offer its hand to the mayor's wife and ask how her mother's hip is mending.
The Kirov winter gala dresses tradition for modern cameras. Place cards bear the family crest beside a discreet QR pledge to the Foundation, gilt icons printed on thick stock, a glass votive glowing electric where beeswax once burned. Everyone here knows the performance, and everyone is practiced at pretending the stage is a church.
I move through it like a queen exiled in her palace, smiling with a mouth that can bite, making small talk with politicians whose hands are too soft and with Bratva sons whose hands are too eager. From the service corridor, the kitchen breathes dill and lemon, the steam of fish and warm bread, a quiet signal of family beneath the din. I let that scent anchor me. I deflect a compliment about my gown by praising a woman's earrings. I soothe a councilman who wants reassurance that my father will never retire. I pat the hand of a judge who looks tired enough to be honest. I gather pledges with charm and a careful ledger memory, and when one young heir tells me he would like to make a private donation, I tell him we accept checks with signatures and not promises with winks.
Anatoly appears at my shoulder like a portrait that learned to move and tells the ambassador from somewhere cold that he is honored by his presence. I incline my head and let the men talk about stability as if it were a thing that can be loaded into a cruciform glass and sipped. I catch sight of Dmitri across the room, not moving. He wears black, which has everything to do with intent, shoulders built to teach a doorway respect, a stillness that reads as a threat until the passage feels earned. He speaks seldom, nods even less. Elders watch warily. The younger men do their best not to imitate him in front of witnesses.
When the Moscow import arrives, he is the exact kind of handsome that looks better reflected in a spoon, hair just long enough to be described with a sigh, cologne that would be expensive if it were not so eager. He introduces himself as Daniil Reznik. His vowels have a Moscow gloss that always makes me want to check my pockets for protection. He is one of Sergei Vetrov's recent acquisitions, a man who believes a fresh passport is a personality.
"Miss Kirov," he says, taking my hand in a grip that is polite for men who think possession is manners, "I have long wanted to meet the crown of Boston."
"I prefer citizen," I say, retrieving my fingers and the sensation in them. "Crowns bend the neck."
He laughs as if I told him a dirty story. His eyes slide to the slit in my gown and back up in a way that makes my grandmother's rosary cold against my skin.
"Your father has created quite an evening," he says. "You must allow me the honor of the next dance."
The waltz begins as if choreographed by my karmic enemy. He leads me to the floor with confidence. I step in because it is easier to step than to make a scene, and because I'm good at turning time into leverage. His hand at my waist lingers past politeness. His breath tries to lean on my ear. I keep my smile as diplomatic as a treaty that knows it will be broken, so I ask whether he is enjoying Boston. He says the architecture pleases him and the women are soft, and I say the weather is less forgiving than it looks. He twirls me with more force than necessary. I take my balance back without letting him see me flex for it.
"Sergei speaks of you," he says, and that is meant to be a threat, or a compliment, or foreplay. "He says you are the most valuable ornament in the Kirov collection."
"I'm not an ornament," I say gently. "I'm a knife that remembers where it came from."
He smiles in a way that says he doesn't hear words, only tones, and his hand slides a fraction lower, a fraction closer. I lift my chin and let the music end. I thank him with genuine relief disguised as courtliness. He bows and steals a look at my leg, then moves into the crowd with the swagger of a man who believes he has planted a flag.
I need air. I slip out the side door to the stone terrace that overlooks the courtyard, the snow clean as linen, the night calm in a city way that reminds me that silence is a sound. The cold strikes my bare shoulders with a sweetness that almost hurts. I stand with my hands on the stone and think of my grandmother lighting vigil candles, of my mother's perfumes lined like soldiers on her dressing table, of the way this house catches me in its palm every time I try to jump.
Footsteps scrape. I turn my head and see Daniil in the doorway, that smile again, the open collar of his tuxedo showing a chain that doesn't look like it knows any saints.
"You are difficult to catch," he says, crossing the stones with the easy arrogance of men who have never been told no by anyone they respect. "I prefer conversations away from the noise."
"I prefer conversations with content," I say. I don't step back because I never do.
He steps in close, closer than manners, closer than tolerance, and lifts his hand to the wall beside my shoulder. His fingers press near my waist with the confidence of a man who has always been punished too late for the wrong things. I bare my teeth behind a smile because I have been trained for diplomacy since I had knees. I turn my face away so that my crucifix is what he sees.
"Don't," I say, softly enough that the words are silk over steel.
He leans anyway. He puts his other hand on my hip. I catch his wrist in a grip that would make my father proud, but he is heavier than his manners, and I'm boxed by stone and by my refusal to scream for a room I will have to reenter. For a long breath, I consider breaking his finger, and I probably would if the door behind him did not open with a noise I feel in my spine.
Dmitri is there. The room rearranges itself around a man who doesn't have to announce to be believed. He crosses the terrace in one swift step, and his hand closes on Daniil's shoulder with a control that makes the body beneath it obey like a knee to a prayer. He doesn't look at me, not yet,because he is busy deciding how to remove a stain without getting it on the stone.
"Pakhan's dog," I mutter under my breath, because I'm cruel in very small ways when I'm afraid, and because I want to see if he will flinch.
He doesn't. He takes Daniil's face in one hand with a precision that wouldn't spill a drop if he were holding a chalice, and then he introduces it to the wall in a single fluid correction that is so efficient, it feels like hygiene. Daniil makes a noise that is mostly indignation with a little blood in it. Dmitri speaks low, Russian in his mouth like a blade he has polished, and I catch only the shape of the warning.
It is over fast. Daniil slumps with more insult than injury, which is probably worse for him. Dmitri releases him without theatrics and finally looks at me. It reads heat and location and safety before it reads anything else. I stand very straight. "don't fight me here," he says, and then his fingers close around my wrist.
4
