He paused with the fork halfway to his mouth.“I can sweat it out in the pit.”
I said nothing. I let him have it.
Vera moved around the table pouring black tea. Leonid pushed the honey and sugar to the centre. The table had the performance of warmth—the good china out, the extra chairs, the cake that had taken someone hours—and underneath it the distinct tension of a family that had been told to be on their best behaviour and was finding it costly.
Galina hadn’t helped at all. She sat at the table like a visiting dignitary rather than a daughter of the house, contributing nothing, her eyes moving between her sister and me with a calculation she wasn’t quite clever enough to conceal.
I took my tea black and bitter.
The layered honey cake looked good, though. I leaned across and took my spoon to Ruslan’s plate. He shook his head and began eating faster, which was the correct response.
I waited until the table had settled—plates pushed back, tea cooling, the specific lull that follows a meal when people have run out of reasons not to address what they came for.
“I’d like a word with Iskra. In private,” I said, and stood.
Her eyes went immediately to her father. Panic, quickly suppressed. Leonid smiled at me and nodded.
“Of course. The living room is free,” he said. He aimed a look at Iskra that she understood and I understood and everyone at the table understood.
Galina watched her sister with vicious eyes. Vera laughed nervously and reached for the gold cross at her throat, turning it between her fingers the way people reached for rosaries when there was nothing left to do but pray. I didn’t look at the boy. I could feel him without looking—that quality of furious, helpless attention.
I glanced at Konstantin.
Ruslan had Iskra’s back the way I should have had Konstantin’s.
The thought came and went. Old ground.
“This way,” Iskra muttered, and moved past me quickly, as though speed might give her some advantage.
The living room was clean, modest, a little tired at the edges. Furniture that had been good once and was now simply enduring. Nothing like my home. I closed the door behind us.
She stood in the middle of the room.
I moved toward her and began to circle—unhurried, methodical —taking inventory. The line of her shoulders. The set of her jaw. The way she tracked me without turning her head, eyes following from the corners, giving nothing away that she could help.
“How many men have you fucked?”
She gasped.
Her head came up. And what was on her face wasn’t fear.
It was anger.
Good. Fear bored me.
“Well? Is the number that high?”
“How many women have you—” she stopped, gathered herself, pushed through it, “—fucked?”
She struggled with the profanity the way someone struggles with a word in a foreign language. Knew it. Hadn’t used it much.
“I asked first.”
“Are you five years old?” she said, turning to keep me in her eyeline as I continued to circle.
“Is that your number? Five?”
“One.”
