Page 27 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“Dr. Garson. Eliza.” She doesn’t offer the hand, which tells me she’s read the part of my file where I flatten feet. “Natasha’s still your lead. I’m consulting. There was a scheduling change.”

“A scheduling change.”

“Mm.” She sets the tablet down and crouches to my eye level, and I brace for the spaniel crouch, but it’s not that, it’s a woman getting down to look at the joint she’s about to make me hate. “You transfer left. You’ve built the left side up to compensate, and the right’s lagging, which is going to cap you before your spine does if we don’t get in front of it. Natasha’s been fighting it the right way. I’ve got a couple of things she hasn’t had the equipment for.”

She’s good. That’s the first thing. She’s better than good, she’s the kind of good that makes you forget to be suspicious, and I go full thirty minutes forgetting, up on the bars with her hands hovering exactly where Natasha’s hover, calling adjustments I feel work before I understand them, and it’s the best session I’ve had in two years and I’m grinning like an idiot before the suspicion catches up.

It catches up on the thirty-second minute.

Because a woman like this costs more than my building. A woman like this probably has a waiting list I couldn’t buy my way onto if I sold both kidneys and the chair, and she’s crouched on my clinic floor working my right hip like I’m the only name on her calendar, and I know exactly one person in my life who makes waiting lists evaporate.

“Who’s paying for you?” I ask.

Garson doesn’t lie. I’ll give her that forever. She doesn’t do the little pause, doesn’t check a script, just meets my eyes and says, “I’m not able to discuss the billing arrangement,” which is the most expensive way anyone has ever said Lev Etush to my face.

I finish the last fifteen minutes of my session. I finish it because I’m not going to let a good thing go to waste out of spite, and because my right hip has already tasted what she’s offering and it’s staging a coup against my principles. But I drive home with both hands hard on the controls, and my jaw set so tight I’ll feel it tomorrow, because he did it again. He found the one acre that was mine, the one fight I was winning by myself, and he bought it, wholesale, and tried to bury the receipt so I’d never even get to be angry about it out loud.

He’s at the kitchen island when the elevator lets me off. Coat still on, phone in his hand. It takes him one look at my face to make him set the phone down. He’s not stupid, he’s never once been stupid, and that’s the whole problem.

“You went behind my back and stuck your long nose into my session.”

“I simply sent a consultant to your session.”

“You bought Eliza Garson.” I roll straight at him, no stop three feet off, right up into his space, because I’m done letting him watch me pick where to halt. “You bought the best spinal specialist on the continent, you laundered her through some story about a scheduling change, and you pointed her at my body without asking me a single question, again, again, Lev, after the apartment, after the whole speech about the asking, after you looked me in the eye in that flawless kitchen and said you remembered.”

“I did remember.” He doesn’t move back. “You’ll notice she consults. Natasha stays lead. Nobody moved your therapist, nobody changed your appointments, nobody touched your body without your hands on the decision. You said yes to every exercise she ran today. I was told you say yes.”

“You were told. Of course you were told.”

“You had the best numbers you’ve had in two years. I was told you were even grinning on the bars.” He says it like it’s evidence, like it settles anything. “Where’s the crime?”

“The crime is my recovery is the one thing in this entire circus that is MINE.” My voice cracks, and I hate it. I hate that it cracks. I want it steady, and it goes to gravel on the last word. “Do you understand that? My father gambled away my childhood. My fiancé took my future out the door in a duffel bag three weeks after they fused my spine. You took my name, my apartment, my whole life, and I let it, I signed the paper, I made you toast. But the bars are mine. The seconds are mine. My numbers are mine, and they’re the one score in my whole life nobody handed me, and nobody can spend, and you reached into it, and you bought me a better coach like I’m a horse you like the odds on.”

His jaw works once, like he’s turning a word over before he’ll spend it. It isn’t the millimeter at the mouth I’ve learned to hunt for. It’s his whole face going open for a second, the flat gray dropping out of his eyes, and I watch it take effort, I watch him decide to let me see it, and when he says it there’s no showman anywhere in him, just a plain delivery, a man reading a number off a chart he’s already checked twice.

“You count seconds on those bars like a miser counts coins.” He holds my eyes. “You hoard them. You lie awake doing the math, one better than last week, and you’d sell your own hands before you’d let anyone see how much each one means. I can see it. I’m a gambler, Vasilisa. I’ve spent my whole life at a table reading which hand is going to turn. I back winning hands. You’re the best hand I’ve ever seen sat down at a table that underestimated it, and I put the best coach in the country behind you because I’d bet everything I own on you, and only a fool leaves money on a hand like that.”

The kitchen goes very quiet.

Because he’s not talking about the bloodline. He’s not talking about the ring, or the meeting he mentioned is coming in spring, or the last Filatov breathing, or the crown he keeps telling me I am. He’s looked at me, the arithmetic I do in the dark, the score I keep from everyone, including Natasha, some weeks, the private, stubborn, one-second-at-a-time war nobody’s ever bothered to watch me fight, and he’s called it a winning hand. He saw me. Not the chair he built rooms around. Not the eyes every old man in Brighton Beach genuflects at. Me. The miser with her seconds.

It lands like a fist. It lands worse than a fist, because a fist I’ve got comebacks for, I’ve had comebacks for fists since I was fourteen, and I’ve got nothing loaded for a man who looked at the one thing I keep hidden and told me he’d bet the house on it.

My throat does the treacherous warm climb. His eyes drop half an inch to the color coming up the side of my neck, and this time he doesn’t drag them back to my face fast enough, and the air in the kitchen goes thick as syrup.

“That’s not fair,” I say, and it comes out with no fight in it at all.

“I’m not a fair man. I thought we covered that.”

“You can’t just say a thing like that and stand there being enormous about it.” I get my hands back on the rims because my hands need a job that isn’t reaching for his shirt. “I came in here to scream at you.”

“So scream.”

“I can’t anymore; you ruined it. You put a compliment in the middle of the crime scene.” I back the chair up a foot to get some air that doesn’t smell like him. “Garson stays. I’m not throwing out the best hip work I’ve had in two years to win a point. But you don’t get to feel good about this. You did a controlling, invasive, unforgivable thing, and it happened to be right, and you being right about my body when you didn’t ask is the single most infuriating thing about you, and there is genuine competition for that title.”

“Understood,” he says.

“Don’t you understood me. I’ll bite you again.”