Page 19 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to make a decision for me.”

Yefim’s cane comes over the rail.

He does it without a sound, leaning out of his pew, cane held crosswise in both hands, brass head toward her, staring straight ahead at the icons as if his arms belonged to another man. Fifty years since he carried her mother on his shoulders. This is how he honors her.

She takes it. She doesn’t thank him, and he doesn’t want it anyway. The two of them handle it like people who’ve done business before.

She sets the cane, plants her right hand on it, gets her left on the arm of her chair, and stands.

The whole thing comes up through her shoulders. I’ve watched men take a beating with less in their face, and her mouth stays shut, breath in through the nose, out through the nose. Her knuckles go white on the brass. There’s a muscle jumping in her jaw.

Nobody helps her. Nobody in this church would dare.

Then she’s up, still a head and a half under me, sweat already at her hairline, and she turns her face up.

“Well? Get on with it, they’re not paying by the hour.”

The priest gets on with it.

The vows go back and forth in two languages. She says hers in English, then the last three words in Russian, and the accent’s a catastrophe. Yefim closes his eyes. Her mother’s blood coming out of her mouth in a language she never got taught.

She starts shaking in the third minute. It begins in the leg and works up. Her breathing changes and nothing else about her does, no wince, no sound, she just starts paying and doesn’t tell one person in this building the price.

Four minutes. Five. The crowns go up over our heads, gold, held by Danil and Yefim’s nephew, and we go three times around the analogion. I take her weight without making it obvious, my hand under her elbow, her arm gone hard as rebar. She isn’t leaning on me. She’s letting me be there. There’s a canyon between those two, and she’d carve it into stone if she had a chisel.

“Almost done,” I tell her.

“Don’t you dare coach me.”

The priest says the words that make her mine on paper and in front of God and in front of ninety men who’ll carry it across two countries by tonight. Then he tells me to kiss my wife.

It’s procedure. Four hundred candles, ninety witnesses, theater to close a contract. I put my hand under her jaw to bring her face up, because she’s standing on a borrowed cane and I won’t make her reach.

Her mouth opens under mine.

The church goes out.

She’s got a fist in my shirt at the sternum, right over the pocket where her photograph rode for six days, and she pulls, and I go down into it. She kisses the same as she argues. There’s no give anywhere in her. Her teeth catch my bottom lip, and she doesn’t apologize, and I’ve got one hand under her jaw, the other spread flat across her back over the scar, and she makes a sound into my mouth I’ll be hearing at four in the morning for the rest of my life.

Her leg goes.

I’ve got her before she knows it’s going, all of her against my chest, my forearm locked under her ribs. She’s breathing on my throat, hot, her fist still in my shirt. Her mouth’s an inch off mine. Her eyes come open, and they’re her mother’s, blue, wide, wrecked, and for one full second neither of us does a useful thing.

Then we let go like the other one’s on fire.

She gets the cane under her. I take my hands off her, all of them, in front of everyone, and stand there with my palms empty like a man who’s dropped a glass.

The church roars. Ninety people up at once, the old ones hammering the pews, Yefim on his feet without his cane because it’s still in my wife’s hand, Danil holding a gold crown over nothing at all because he’s forgotten what his arms are for.

Vasilisa sits down. On her own terms, chair under her, lowering herself with the cane and one arm and no help, and she hands Yefim his cane back over the rail. Her chest is going. Her mouth is red and swollen, and her hand’s flat on her own thigh, pressing, hard, the same as she did in her living room the night I told her she’d be marrying me.

“Your lip’s bleeding,” she says.

“You bit it.”

“Divorce me.”