Page 20 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

The priest brings us around to face them. I put my hand on her push handle without touching it, an inch off, because I was told that touching those handles gets a man’s foot flattened, and I believed it.

Ninety men and women who were carving up a dead man’s kingdom, on their feet now for a first-grade teacher from Brooklyn with stolen flowers in her hair.

Nineteen years I’ve worked toward this minute in this building. My father’s roof over my head, his watch stopped on my wrist, the Filatov line breathing beside me in white with my ring on it.

She turns her face up. There’s a flower coming loose over her ear.

“Congratulations,” she says, quiet, for me only. “You just married the biggest mistake of your life.”

9

Vasilisa

“You’ve been holding that glass for fifteen minutes, and you haven’t drunk any of it.”

Lev says it from across the penthouse, still in the black shirt, tie gone, sleeves rolled back over the knife on his forearm. There’s a split in his bottom lip that I put there in front of ninety witnesses and God.

“I’m pacing myself. I got toasted forty times today by men who drink like it’s a competitive sport, and I’ve got a spine that files a formal complaint when I mix vodka with the good drugs.”

“So don’t drink it.”

“I’m not drinking it. I’m holding it, it’s a prop.” I set the champagne on the low table. “Do you know what a woman looks like at her own wedding with nothing in her hands? Available. Somebody comes over and starts a conversation.”

“Nobody in that building was going to start a conversation with you.”

“No. They were going to bow.” I pull the flowers out of my hair one at a time and drop them beside the untouched glass. They’ve been dying since eight this morning, and they smell enormous. “Nine people bowed at me today. I counted. Two of them had guns on under the jacket, which I could see, because at this height you get an unbeatable view of a man’s waistband, and nobody has ever thought that through.”

He doesn’t answer. He’s over by the glass with the whole city burning behind him, and I keep talking, because the alternative is quiet, and quiet in this apartment tonight has a subject.

“My best friend called nine times. I’m going to have to tell her Monday that I got married Saturday, and she’s going to eat me. There won’t be a body.”

“Tell her the truth.”

“Which one? The one where a man bought me at a card game, or the one where forty murderers talked about my mother?” The last pin comes out, and my whole scalp lets go, my shoulders dropping two inches with it. “You didn’t dance.”

“I don’t dance.”

“You stood in a corner all night doing a headcount at your own funeral. Yefim danced. Yefim’s got a hip made of gravel, and he danced with me for a full minute while I sat, and he moved around the chair, and it was the best minute of the day.”

“He’ll dine out on it for a year.”

“Good. He earned it.”

I get my hands back on the rims. The reception ran six hours, my shoulders have complaints about every one of them, my back is a live coal, and the leg that quit in the church has been sending bulletins ever since. I pushed myself harder than ever. Broke my own record. With the pills too, which is why I managed.

“I’m going to bed.”

“Vasilisa.”

He says my name and my stomach drops out from under me.

Here it comes. I’ve been braced since the ring went on, the whole speech queued up behind my teeth to remind him about the separate rooms, cold marriage, neighbor I don’t care for. It’s Saturday night, and there’s a paper with both our names on it in a drawer in this apartment, and I know what a paper like that means to a man like this.

I turn the chair to face him and put my chin up. Whatever this is, he’s saying it while I’m looking straight at him.

“Spit it out.”

“Nothing happens tonight.”