Page 39 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“I don’t know. Years. Before.” He waves it off, this grenade, this thing he’s carried loose in his pocket my whole life, and he doesn’t even see it go off in my face. “It stopped. They stopped coming. I thought they gave up. Vasya, the money, please, I’m asking my own daughter—”

“Before what?” I ask, and my voice has gone somewhere very cold and very steady, the register I use when the fire drill is real smoke. “You said before. Before Etush, sure. But you almost said something else. Before what, Papa. Finish it.”

He looks at me, confused, wanting his money, wanting to be forgiven, wanting anything but the question I’m actually asking, and something in his face gives, some old guilt he’s kept folded up behind the drinking. He says it so quietly I almost lose it under a passing bus.

“Before your accident.”

There’s a cold thread that starts at the very base of my spine, right where the scar begins, right where they fused the bottom of me back together two years ago, and it pulls, once, hard, and everything I’ve built my whole life around goes very still.

Two years ago. A car accident. A wet road and a curve I’ve taken a thousand times, and a night I’ve never been able to fully account for, that the doctors said was the memory going where the trauma was, that I stopped questioning because questioning it hurt more than the leg did. No one else hurt. Just me. Just my body. Just my life, rerouted in a single afternoon.

Men asking about my mother’s name. About me. Years ago. Before.

“Papa,” I say, and I’ve stopped being angry, I’ve gone somewhere past angry into a place that’s all ice and machinery, “the accident. Two years ago. What do you know about it?”

“Nothing. It was an accident, Vasya, the road, the rain—”

“You just told me men were asking about me before it happened. So you’re going to stand in this parking lot and tell me the truth for the first time in your life, or I swear on the mother you keep putting in your mouth, you’ll never see another dollar of anyone’s money as long as you live.” I roll closer, and Danil’s gone very still by the car, listening, but I don’t care. “Who was asking? What did they look like? And did any of them, ever, come back around the time my car went off a road I’d driven since I was seventeen?”

My father starts to cry. Not the church tears, the performing ones. Real ones, the scared kind, and Poppy’s voice is in my head, the scared ones and the cruel ones look identical from the outside. I watch my father shake and weep in a school parking lot, and I understand that I’ve been asking the wrong question for two years.

I’ve spent two years asking my body why it failed me.

I never once thought to ask whether somebody helped it.

18

Lev

“You’ve been polite to me for six days. I’d rather you screamed.”

She’s on the terrace when I say it, wrapped in a blanket against the cold, watching the city she’s supposed to help me take, and she doesn’t turn around.

“Politeness is free, and it annoys you more. I’m a public school teacher, Lev. I know how to make a budget stretch.”

I’ve tried to fix it three times this week and made it worse each time, because I negotiate with violence, not with whatever this is, and every time I open my mouth to close the distance I hear myself widening it. When a man came to my mother’s kitchen with a watch in a bag, I learned that words are how they lie to you before they do the thing. I don’t have the other kind of words. I never learned them. So I stand on my own terrace behind my own wife, and I try, badly, the only way I know.

“Krutov moved a man to Coney Island watching your father. That’s why the locks. That’s the reason I couldn’t—”

“I know why. You told me. My own good.” She pulls the blanket tighter. “That was never the part that broke it, Lev. You could’ve said the reason. You chose the locks instead of the reason. That’s the problem.”

I don’t have an answer, so I go inside, and I’m three steps down the hall when I hear her rolling behind me silently, and she says my name in a voice that isn’t the Antarctic and isn’t the fight, it’s something new, low, and it stops me the way nothing else has all week.

“Lev.”

I turn.

“You want me to stop being polite.” She rolls toward me, and there’s a thing in her face I haven’t seen before, and I’ve spent months learning her face. “Fine. Bedroom. Yours. Now. I’m done being furious at you from across a kitchen. I want to be furious at you up close.”

I lead the way to my bedroom because she wants me to, and right now, I’m willing to do whatever she wants. The second the door clicks shut, she’s got her hands on my shirt, and she’s pulling me down to her level, and I don’t think; I just go, and she kisses me. It isn’t soft. It’s teeth and heat and all the things she hasn’t been saying in words, it’s her anger, it’s her hands fisted in my collar, it’s her leg braced against my hip, the good one, the one she still uses like a lever, and it’s everything I’ve wanted and everything I’ve been terrified of. I kiss her back, hard, and my hands are in her hair.

She wraps her arms around my neck, allowing me to pull her up and onto the bed, and I can feel her whole body shaking underneath me, and I realize she’s crying, but it isn’t the tears from the clinic, it’s the tears from the fight, and I don’t know which ones are worse. I pull back, just enough to look at her face, and her eyes are like the night she found the file, wet and furious and wide, and she’s looking at me like I’m a ghost.

“Make me feel something else,” she whispers, and it’s not a request, it’s a demand, and it’s the most dangerous thing she’s ever said to me. “Anything else. Just for a minute. I’m so tired of being angry. I’m so tired of being betrayed. Just make it stop.”

I don’t say anything. I just kiss her again, and this time it’s softer, slower, and I can feel her body start to relax under my hands, just a little, just enough for me to know that she’s not fighting me anymore, she’s fighting the memory, and I can work with that. I can fight with her against that. I slide my hands down her back, and I can feel the scars there, the ones from the accident, the ones she never talks about, and I trace them with my fingers, and she shivers, and I know I’ve got her. I’ve got her for right now, in this room, with the city lights outside and the locks on the doors and the guards downstairs and all of it, for this one second, it’s just us, and I want to keep it, I want to keep this feeling for the rest of my life, and I don’t know how, because it’s the one thing I can’t buy or build or steal.

She pulls away from my mouth, her breath coming in short, sharp bursts, and she looks at me, and her eyes are clear. “Don’t be gentle,” she demands. “I don’t want gentle right now.” She yanks my shirt, pulling the buttons. “Gentle is what you do to a thing you don’t want to break. I’m not breakable, and you don’t get to treat me like I am. I’m not the crown, I’m not the asset, I’m not the girl in the photograph. I’m the woman you locked in a cage, and you don’t get to pity her.”