Liam stares at me. Then, slowly, he nods. "You want to use his own rules against him."
"He wants the old ways? He can have the old ways. Every part of them. Including the part where a man who disrespects another man's wife answers for it in front of the brotherhood."
"That could escalate."
"It won't. Because Malekonosh is a coward who hides behind customs he doesn't fully understand. When he realizes what he's actually invoked, he'll fold."
Liam is quiet for a long moment. I watch him run the calculations. He's better at politics than I am, always has been, but he knows when the politics and the personal intersect and there's no separating them.
"Alright," he says finally. "We do it your way. But clean, Aidan. No blood unless he forces it."
"Clean," I agree.
"And Tanya? Are you going to tell her?"
I think of her in our bed this morning, reading brochures for a life she's only just starting to believe she can have. Reading them against her chest like a secret. Like hope is something fragile that needs to be hidden.
"No," I say. "Not yet. She doesn't need to know that the world is still trying to belittle her. She's just starting to realize it doesn't have to."
Liam nods. He gets it. He's watched Katya come through her own version of this, watched her shed the weight of expectation and step into herself, and he knows that the early stages are the most delicate.
"One more thing," I say from the doorway.
"What?"
"If Linchenko says a word about my wife. If he so much as nods along the next time someone disrespects her name, I won't wait for a council meeting."
Liam looks at me for a long beat. "Understood."
I walk out of his office and I get in my car and I sit behind the wheel for a full minute before I start the engine. My hands are on the steering wheel and they're white-knuckled and my jaw is so tight I can feel my pulse in my teeth.
Then I think about Tanya. College brochures against her chest. Scrambled eggs in my mother's kitchen. The sound of her laughat dinner last night, unexpected and real. The way I waited forever for this woman.
I loosen my grip. I start the car.
Tanya
I spend the afternoon with Grace, Katya, and Iris, and for the first time in my life, I understand what women mean when they talk about their friends.
I've never had friends. I've had allies. Strategic acquaintances. Women I sat beside at Bratva functions and exchanged pleasantries with while we both calculated what the other was worth. Friendship requires honesty, and honesty requires trust, and trust was a currency I couldn't afford to spend.
But these three make it difficult to hold the line.
Grace is feeding Lorcan in the big armchair in the main house living room while telling us, in forensic detail, about the time Liam tried to assemble a crib and ended up with three leftover screws and a structure she refused to put her child in. Katya is on the floor with her legs bent, reaching to paint her toenails a shade of red that Killian apparently hates, which is exactly why she chose it. And Iris is lying upside down on the sofa with her feet over the back and her hair pooling on the carpet, scrolling through her phone and providing commentary on every dating app profile she encounters.
"Absolutely not," she says, flashing the screen at me. "Beard like that, he's hiding a weak chin. It's science."
"It's not science," Katya says without looking up.
"It's my science,” Iris mutters, “and it's never wrong."
I'm sitting in the window seat with a cup of tea that Saoirse made before she left for some errands. I'm wearing one of Aidan's sweaters because I grabbed it this morning without thinking, and it wasn't until I was already at the main house that I realized what I'd done. The sleeves hang past my fingers. It smells like him. I find it all too comforting, but refuse to acknowledge the way it makes me feel inside.
"Okay, Tanya," Iris says, righting herself with the boneless agility of someone half her age. "Serious question. And you have to answer honestly because you're an Orlova now and Orlovas don't dodge."
"That's not a rule," Grace says, looking at me pointedly before returning her gaze to Lorcan’s peaceful face.
"It's absolutely a rule. I just made it." Iris fixes me with those dark green eyes that are so much like her mother’s it's unsettling. "What's the most surprising thing about being married to my brother?"
