Box twelve held his chess set. Hand-carved pieces, probably worth something to the right collector. I photographed the board, then each piece individually. The white king had a chip in its crown. I remembered when he'd done it—slammed it down after I beat him for the first time at fourteen. He'd been so proud and so furious at the same thing.
I was twenty-four years old and cataloguing my father's life for an estate sale to pay off debts to people who'd probably had him killed.
The debt collectors said heart attack. Natural causes. Stress and genetics and a lifetime of cigarettes catching up to him at fifty-three.
I knew better. My father had worked for the West Coast bratva operations since I was born. Had a photographic memory,used it to track numbers, odds, operations. He'd gotten sloppy after my mother died. Started gambling. Started losing. Started borrowing from people who didn't forgive debt.
$2.3 million. That's what they said I owed now. Gift with purchase—his death, my responsibility.
The storage unit cost $340 a month I didn't have. My studio apartment in the Tenderloin cost $1,800 a month I also didn't have. I'd been working three jobs—morning shift at a coffee shop, afternoon at a bookstore, evenings teaching beginning ballet to kids at a rec center. Brought in maybe $3,200 a month before taxes. The math didn't work. Hadn't worked for six months.
The debt collectors had stopped accepting "I need more time" six weeks ago. Started making threats that were polite on the surface, crystal clear underneath. Pay up or pay different.
I'd been selling everything. My pointe shoes—the custom-made ones—gone to a collector for $2,000. My costumes from ABT performances, gone. Jewelry my father had given me over the years, gone. Furniture, gone. Everything that wasn't nailed down or necessary for basic survival, gone.
It wasn't enough. Wouldn't ever be enough. I could sell everything my father owned and everything I owned and work myself to death for the next ten years and still owe these people money.
But I kept photographing. Kept cataloguing. Kept moving forward because the alternative was standing still, and standing still meant thinking, and thinking meant feeling, and feeling meant—
No.
I picked up the samovar from box nineteen. Antique, probably late 1800s, brought over from Russia by someone in my father's family three generations back. Silver, ornate, worth actual money if I could find the right buyer.
Click. Whir. Shake.
The photo developed slowly. The samovar emerging like something remembered from a dream, all curves and detail and history I'd never be able to keep.
Everything went. That was the rule. That was survival.
I added the photo to the pile—thirty-one now—and reached for my water bottle. My hand shook slightly. Low blood sugar. I'd forgotten to eat lunch. Again. Had forgotten breakfast too, actually. There was a protein bar in my bag somewhere, crushed and probably melted, but it would do.
I found it, ate it mechanically, washed it down with water that tasted like plastic.
When I finished, I heard them. Footsteps in the hallway. Two sets, heavy, deliberate, not the shuffle of someone hunting for their own unit or the quick clip of facility staff making rounds.
I knew before they stopped at my door. The same way dancers know when they're about to fall, that split second of recognition before gravity takes over.
My hands didn't shake as I set down the Polaroid. Right now my body was doing what it always did under threat—going very still, very calm, running calculations. Exit routes. Weapons. Odds of survival.
The metal door screeched up with a sound that echoed through the concrete hallways. Two men in expensive suits stood silhouetted against the fluorescent lights, and I understood immediately that everything I'd been doing for the last six months—the three jobs, the selling, the careful documentation—had been pointless theater.
The one on the left was Asian, mid-forties, with a scar bisecting his right eyebrow like someone had tried to split his face and given up halfway. The one on the right was white, younger, with the kind of face that should have been forgettableexcept for his eyes. Pale blue and completely empty. Dead man's eyes in a living face.
"Sophie Andreeva." Scarred Eyebrow's voice was professionally pleasant. Not a question. A confirmation of inventory.
"Volkov," I corrected automatically, then wished I hadn't.
My father had used his mother's maiden name after the Volkov family exiled him twenty-five years ago for stealing. Safer that way. Less complicated. But I'd kept his real name out of some stupid sentimentality, some need to claim a family that didn't want me.
Using it now just made this more real.
"Your father's debt." Scarred Eyebrow stepped into the unit, expensive shoes silent on concrete. "Your problem now."
"I'm working on it." My voice came out steady. Good. "I have a payment plan with—"
"Plans changed." Empty Eyes moved to flank me, cutting off the angle to the door. Professional. Practiced. "Contract's been sold. You're coming with us."
My heart slammed against my ribs but my brain was already moving, calculating. Sold. The debt had been sold. That meant new owners, new terms, new rules. That meant whatever agreement I'd been barely maintaining was void.
