Page 30 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

I stand.

The room goes to glass. Malenko’s grin is still half up, dying by degrees as I come down the length of the table, and he starts to rise, starts to do the thing drunk men do, the walking-it-back, the it-was-a-joke, but I put a hand on his shoulder and sit him back down in his chair, not hard, almost kind, and the almost-kind is what empties his face.

“Say it again,” I tell him. Low. A low voice makes a loud room tilt toward you, and thirty people tilt.

“Lev. Levushka. It was a joke, only a joke, we’re all friends here.”

“You asked the room a question. Whether the merchandise works.” I keep my hand on his shoulder. “It’s a fair question. You should have your answer. Put your hand on the table.”

“Lev.”

“Your hand. On the table. Palm down.” I lean in, and I let him hear the whole of it. “You want to know what works and what doesn’t. So we’ll do a demonstration. Mine works. Watch.”

He puts his hand on the table. He puts it there himself; that’s the part the room will carry home. He lays his own hand flat on the white cloth because thirty witnesses and the cold in my voice have taken every other option off the table.

I take the knife from beside his plate. His own knife, his own place setting, and I put it through the back of his hand into the table in one motion, no wind-up, no speech, and the sound Malenko makes is high and thin and the sound the table makes is nothing at all.

He’s screaming. That part’s just weather. I straighten, and I look down the length of the room at thirty faces, the captains, the wives, the ones who laughed and the ones who didn’t, and I let them all get a clean look at me before I speak.

“My wife,” I say, “is Vasilisa Filatova. The last living blood of the man half of you swore your lives to. When you sit at a table with her, you stand when she enters, and you keep her name out of your mouth unless it’s to bless it.” I pull the knife out. Malenko folds over his ruined hand, and I set the knife back down beside his plate, in its spot, where it goes. “The next man who prices her at a dinner won’t get a hand back to eat with. Are we clear?”

The room is clear. The room has never been clearer about anything.

I sit back down. Someone takes Malenko out, two of his own men, and there’s a smear on the cloth they’ll burn, and the accordion in the corner, God help him, starts up again because the accordion player is a professional and a coward and both are useful. I pick up my fork. There’s veal I haven’t finished, and I finish it, because a man who does a thing like that and then can’t eat is a man who did it out of feeling, and I need every mouth in this room to carry home that I did it out of calculation.

I finish my dinner. The knife and the veal, back to back, no seam between them.

I expect her horror.

I tell myself I want it. I’ve told myself the whole drive here that distance is the useful thing, that the cleanest version of this marriage is a woman down the hall who thinks of me as the thing she saw in a corridor with blood on his hands and sleeves rolled up, that if tonight buys me her disgust then tonight was efficient. She came apart in my hands a week ago with her fist in my shirt, and a man in my position can’t afford what that’s doing to me, the way I’ve caught myself timing my day to the hour she gets home, the way I put oil in her wheels and a specialist in her clinic and now a knife through a man’s hand for the crime of asking whether she works. Her horror would be a wall. I could use a wall.

I make myself look at her.

She’s facing me, and she’s white, properly white, and her hand’s still flat on her thigh, and yes, there’s horror in it. I put a knife through a man’s hand ten feet from her, and she watched it, and there’s horror in her face, exactly the horror I told myself I wanted.

But it’s not only horror.

I’ve spent nineteen years learning to read what’s under a face before the mouth catches up to it, and I read hers now and it isn’t clean, it isn’t the flat disgust I ordered, it’s got the other thing braided through it, the thing that climbs her neck, the thing that rode down the same wire as her fear in a corridor that smelled like copper. She’s horrified. Her pupils are blown wide, and her breath is riding shallow and high, but it isn’t only from the knife.

She hates that it isn’t only from the knife. I can see her hating it. I can see her doing the same thing I do, shoving it down a flight of stairs and slamming a door on it, and the door won’t quite shut, and she looks at me across the wreckage of my own table with her mother’s blue eyes gone dark, and neither one of us does a useful thing for three full seconds.

Then she reaches for her water with a steady hand, and she takes a drink, then sets it down and says, across the ruined cloth, quiet, for me and Yefim and nobody else:

“You’ve got veal on the knife now. That’s going to be very hard to explain to the man who sharpens it.”

Yefim makes a sound into his glass. It might be grief. It’s mostly a laugh he’s too old and too smart to let all the way out.

And that’s the moment the wall I built tonight comes down, because a woman who’s only horrified doesn’t make a joke about the cutlery over a man’s blood, a woman who’s only horrified goes home and locks a door and never lets me near her again, which is what I wanted, which is what I told myself the whole drive here I wanted. She looks at me like I’m the worst thing she’s ever seen, and she can’t stop seeing me, both at once, and I understand that I’ve done the exact opposite of what I set out to do.

I meant to build a wall.

But instead, I built a door, and I left it open, and she’s looking straight through it at me, and I have no idea any longer which one of us is the thing that’s caught.

13

Vasilisa

“You should be packing.”