"Get some sleep. You'll need it."
He hung up.
I stood holding the phone, staring at the dark screen. Mikhail had done something. Arranged something. Set something in motion that I hadn't calculated for, hadn't seen coming.
The perfect strategist, blindsided by his own grandfather.
I wanted to call him back. Demand answers. But that wasn't how Mikhail operated. He planted seeds and watched them grow. He tested people. Pushed them. Forced them to adapt or fail.
I returned to the table. Looked at the chess board where white had achieved perfect checkmate. Looked at the map where five families competed for territory and power.
"Life isn't chess," I murmured to the empty room.
I turned off the lights. Left the chess game on the table—white victorious, black defeated, perfect strategy executed perfectly.
But as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd just played the wrong game.
And somewhere in the darkness, the real board was being set up.
With pieces I'd never seen.
Including one that would checkmate everything I thought I knew.
Chapter 2
Sophie
Isatcross-leggedonconcretethat smelled like dust and someone else's abandoned life, my father's reading glasses centered in the Polaroid's viewfinder. The shutter clicked. The photo slid out with that mechanical whir I'd heard a thousand times, and I shook it gently, watching Dmitri Andreev materialize on film like a ghost deciding to stay solid.
Wire rims. Scratched left lens. The nose pads worn to the exact shape of his face.
I set the photo on the pile beside my knee. Twenty-three down. God knew how many to go.
The Polaroid OneStep was cream-colored, battered, held together with electrical tape on the bottom right corner where I'd dropped it on the subway platform two years ago. Sergei had given it to me for my nineteenth birthday, back when birthdays meant something other than another year survived. Vintage Polaroids went for decent money on eBay—I'd checked threetimes in the last month. Could probably get two hundred for this one, maybe two-fifty if I found the right buyer.
I couldn't do it. Couldn't sell the last thing I had from before.
Before the knee injury that ended my career. Before Sergei died with his blood soaking into my overall dress while I held him. Before my father's heart gave out and left me with $2.3 million in gambling debts and a storage unit full of everything that used to mean family.
The camera stayed. Everything else went.
I lined up the next shot—a leather-bound copy of Crime and Punishment, my father's favorite, margins filled with his handwriting in Russian and English. His thoughts in conversation with Dostoevsky across a hundred and fifty years. The pages smelled like his cologne, something expensive he couldn't afford but bought anyway because appearances mattered in his world.
Appearances had mattered right up until his heart stopped.
Click. Whir. Shake.
My photographic memory meant I didn't need pictures to remember. Could close my eyes right now and see every object in these twenty-three boxes with perfect clarity. Could recall every conversation I'd ever had with my father, every disappointed look when I chose ballet over the family business, every proud smile when I made soloist at twenty despite being too short and too curvy for the corps.
But the Polaroids felt different. They captured the moment before it disappeared forever, made it real in a way memory couldn't. Memory was just neurons firing in patterns. Photos were physical. Solid. Proof that these things had existed outside my head.
I added Crime and Punishment to the pile and reached for the next box.
Unit 237 at SecureStore Self-Storage on Geary Boulevard wasn't large—ten by ten, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, roll-up metal door that screeched like something dying every time it moved. I'd been here since nine that morning. It was two now, and my ass was numb from the concrete, my bad knee starting that deep ache that meant I'd been sitting too long in one position.
I shifted. The knee protested. Three years post-injury and it still punished me for everything—sitting, standing, stairs, cold weather, stress. Torn ACL, meniscus, patella damage. Career-ending at twenty-one. The surgeon had been optimistic about full recovery. The surgeon had been wrong.
Box seven held kitchen items. My father's teapot, Georgian black tea still in the caddy. Four cups barely larger than shot glasses, blue flowers painted on white porcelain. I photographed them one at a time, methodical, trying not to think about Sunday mornings in his apartment in the Mission, the smell of that tea mixing with cigarette smoke while he read the Russian-language newspaper and I stretched on his living room floor.
