"Good. I will be there by eight." He pauses, taking a rickety breath that has me wondering if calling him at this hour was right. "Nikolai."
"Yes, Father."
"Your father loved you very much. He told me so, many times, in confession. He said you were the only thing he made that he was proud of."
I press the phone against my ear hard enough that it hurts. I swallow twice before I trust my voice.
"Thank you, Father."
I hang up.
I sit in the chair beside my father and put my hand back on his. The cold doesn't bother me anymore. I've spent enough time with it now that it feels normal, the way all terrible things feel normal once you've been inside them long enough.
I call the funeral home. A family firm, three generations of Zhirinovsky burials. The woman on the after-hours line knows who I am before I give my name. I tell her the body will be ready for collection after Father Konstantin has done the washing.
I call his accountant. His banker. The three captains who didn't leave tonight, and I tell each of them the same thing in the same voice. Stepan is gone. The chair is mine. There will be a meeting at seven. Attendance is not optional.
Two of them say "Yes, Pakhan" without hesitation. The third pauses just long enough for me to make a note of it.
Between calls, I sit with him.
I look at his face. It's strange how fast a face stops being a face. The nose I inherited, the jaw I didn't, the deep lines around his mouth from decades of holding his expression in check. All of it still there. But the thing that made it his, the animating current that turned bone and skin into a person, that's gone. What's left is a photograph of my father. Accurate but empty.
I think about Sadie.
Every time I sit still for more than a minute, she comes back. Her mouth on my throat in her small apartment. The sound she made when I rolled her on top of me. Her hair falling over one shoulder in the lamplight.
I want to go to her. It sits in my chest like a second heartbeat, and every time it pulses, I put my hand flat on my thigh and push down, grounding myself in the chair, in this room, in my duty.
I owe my father this night.
The calls and the candles and the quiet hours before dawn. The vigil. He sat with my mother for two days after she died, in a chair just like this one, and he didn't leave the room until the funeral home came. I was fourteen. I brought him water he didn't drink, toast he didn't eat, and I remember the way he looked at me when I finally sat on the floor beside his chair and stayed.
"You're a good boy, Kolya," he'd said.
I wasn't. I was a boy who had already killed a man by then, whose hands shook for a week after, whose father taught him to breathe through it. But I stayed. And I'm staying now.
The hours move slowly, then all at once, then slowly again. The lamp burns. Lucia brings coffee at four and again at five, and she doesn't speak either time and I'm grateful for it. At some pointI hear Dmitri on the stairs, low voices in the hall, the front door opening and closing as the shift changes.
I check my phone at six. The feed from Sadie's building is live. The lobby camera shows Lev and Pasha in chairs near the mailboxes. Pasha has a newspaper. Lev has coffee. The hallway camera on the fourth floor shows nothing. Her door is closed. No movement.
She's sleeping.
Good. She should sleep. She had a long day and a longer night, and I left her alone in an apartment I wish I could have stayed in. I'll make it right when I get back to her. Tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.
I close my phone.
I sit with my father for the last quiet stretch.
Gray light creeps through the curtains.
"I found her, Papa," I say. My voice is rough from the calls and the coffee and the hours of not using it for anything that mattered. "She's something. Small and sharp and she doesn't flinch. You would have liked her. Mama would have liked her."
I press my thumb across his knuckles.
"I'll keep her safe. Whatever Viktor does, wherever he goes, I'll keep her far enough from it that she never has to know what it costs."
I sit back.
