Page 58 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

A pair of shoes stops in front of my face. English, brown, the good welt, out of place at a funeral, let alone a war.

“Well,” Semyon Krutov says.

He crouches. Not the way a man crouches to a child. He goes down on his heels an arm’s length from me with a pistol hanging loose off his knee. The cardigan under the suit has a spatter across it, and the grandfather is entirely gone out of his face. What’s underneath is a bookkeeper.

“You went over the table,” he says. “At your age. Like a boy in a bar.”

I don’t answer. There’s blood coming up into my mouth, which is the ribs, which is survivable if somebody gets a hand into me inside the hour. I’ve been in this business long enough to have watched men die talking, and men live by keeping their mouths shut.

Then I make the one exception of my life, because I can see past his shoulder.

She’s sitting in the chair with the hearth behind her and the whole hall between her and the doors, and she isn’t moving. Timur is face down on the marble, a yard from her wheels, his coat open. She’s got her hands in her lap. Her chin is down. Any man crossing this room would put her at the bottom of his list and go on to the next thing.

Krutov has his back to her.

“You know what I’ve never understood about your generation,” he says. “The hurry. Ten years I gave this. Ten years, one funeral at a time, sons, nephews, a cousin in Sea Gate who took months to arrange properly, and not one man in this house ever heard my name in the same sentence as any of it. You wanted the chair in a season. You bought a woman at a card table, and you thought that was patience.”

“You knew my father,” I say.

That stops him, and I watch it please him, which is the whole point of saying it.

“Matvei.” He turns the name over like a coin he’s found in an old coat. “I stood at Ustin’s shoulder while he signed that paper. Your father had thirty years in and no friends worth the trouble, and that’s the only math that ever gets a man killed in this business. I’ve never seen a son take a lesson so badly.” He shifts the pistol from one hand to the other. “You should have been a bookkeeper. You’ve got the head for it and none of the temperament.”

Four meters behind him, my wife takes the gun out of the dead man’s holster. She has to lean, and it costs her, I watch it cost her all the way down her right side, but she brings it into her lap with both hands, sets it there, and doesn’t lift it.

“Talk about the throne,” I tell him.

“I’m sorry?”

“You’ve been waiting ten years for the room to be empty enough to say it out loud.” I get another inch off the marble to hold his eyes, and the ribs charge me for it. “So say it.”

He smiles. Two hundred men are killing each other in this hall and Semyon Krutov puts a hand on his own knee and tells me about bloodlines, about the old country, about Ustin building forty years of an organization out of nothing and dying in a bed with no son to hand it to, about how a house without an heir goes to the man who kept the books and not the man who married a name. He tells me he’ll do the girl last. He says it exactly like that, the girl, last, the way you’d leave the smallest item on an invoice for the bottom of the page, and he doesn’t turn his head one degree while he says it.

He’s forgotten her.

That’s not a figure of speech, and it isn’t carelessness. Every man in two countries has done it since her accident, the doctors, the therapists, her father, the fiancé with the duffel bag, Malenko over the veal, forty men who bowed at a bloodline and never saw the woman wearing it. Krutov believed her dead for two years because a drunk lied and the man carrying that lie went into the East River. But now she is six feet behind him, alive and armed.

“Semyon Ivanovich,” my wife says.

He turns.

She’s got it up in both hands with her elbows braced against her own ribs. There’s no shake in her at all.

“You should’ve counted me,” she says, and she shoots him through the chest.

The first one turns him half around. The second takes him under the collarbone and puts him down on his side on the marble. The pistol comes out of his hand, and he’s still alive for a moment with his mouth working. In that moment, he looks at the chair. Not at her face. At the chair, at the frame, at the bare rims with one coat of sunflower enamel dried on them and the second coat never gone on. I get to watch the last thing Semyon Krutov ever does be the math, and I get to watch it come up wrong.

The hall goes quiet in pieces, the near end first, then the middle, then the far doors. Nobody claps. Two hundred men stand in broken glass and understand what they just watched. The understanding travels through that room faster than any story I could have paid for.

Then she’s coming to me.

The floor between us has two bodies and a hundred pounds of chandelier on it, and there’s no line through it for a chair, so she sets the brakes, gets both hands on the frame, and lowers herself down out of it onto the marble. She crosses the last distance on her hands and one hip through other men’s blood in an oxblood dress. Danil moves to lift her, but she says one word to him without turning her head, and he stops where he stands.

She gets to me. She gets my head up onto her thigh, and her hands come onto my face, both of them, red to the wrist.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t you do that with your eyes. Look at me properly.”

“You’re on the floor.”