"Enough," I say.
One corner of his mouth moves. The ghost of a smile. "Pavlina made coffee."
I look at the room. At the five other men in it who are now looking at me with varying degrees of curiosity and assessment, and I think about what I just heard through the doorway, andthe way he said I won't do it with that weight in his voice, and I wonder what he isn’t willing to do.
"Hello," I say to the room, because something has to be said, and Mia Lawson who is helpful and quiet defaults to polite. "I'm Mia. I'm sorry for the intrusion."
A beat of silence.
One of the men who looks most like Iosif makes a sound that might be a laugh, but quickly suppresses it. One of the others raises an eyebrow. Another one looks at Iosif.
Iosif looks at me.
"You're not an intrusion," he says. And then: "Mia, this is my family."
He doesn't explain further. He doesn't apologize for whatever meeting I've clearly interrupted. He simply takes a sip of his coffee, and the room shifts to accommodate the fact that I'm in it now.
Pavlina presses a mug of coffee into my hands.
“Thank you,” I say and try for a smile as I wrap both palms around it.
I look across the kitchen at Iosif, who is listening to his uncle say something I can't hear and nodding once, and I think about I won't do it, and she's not a solution, and I think about the coat and the shirt and Pavlina bringing clothes in the right size.
I take a sip of coffee and look away before he catches me looking.
Iosif
My uncle is the last to leave.
He doesn't go immediately. He waits until the others have filed out. My cousins make varying degrees of noise about it, my brother, Zakhar, pauses in the doorway to look between Mia and I with an expression bordering disbelief. Then Yury stands in the kitchen with his coffee and looks at me in the way that means he's going to say the thing I've asked him not to say.
"Don't," I say, acutely aware of how Mia is sitting right there at the kitchen island, pushing pieces of fruit around a bowl with the tip of a fork.
He sets his mug down. "I'm not suggesting anything," he says. "I'm observing." He moves toward the door. "Just don't be an idiot about it. Not when the answer is right in front of you."
Then he leaves.
I look over at Mia. She's been managing it well… being in a room full of Dubovich men at eight in the morning. She held herself quietly without being diminished by it, answered when spoken to, didn't flinch under my uncle's assessment, which most people find difficult even when they're not running on no sleep and the aftermath of what she’s been through in the last twenty-four hours.
She's thinking. Hard.
"You can say it," I say.
She turns her head. "Say what?"
"Whatever it is you've been working up to since you walked in."
She places the fork down with a sigh. Then: "I heard you. Before I came in."
I put my own mug down. "I know."
"You knew?"
"The third tile from the door creaks," I say. "Which means you heard most of what we were discussing."
She stares at me. Something shifts in her expression, but it doesn’t look like embarrassment at being caught out.
"What mandate?" she says.
