Page 59 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“I’m aware of where I am, Lev. I’ve got an excellent working relationship with floors.” Her thumb goes across my cheekbone and leaves a stripe I can feel go cold. “Danil, if you tell me the ambulance is twenty minutes out, I’ll take that iron off you and use it.”

“Seven,” Danil says. “Yefim’s cleared the gate.”

She takes her hand off my face and puts it flat on my side, under the arm, leans her whole weight into the hole, and doesn’t flinch when I do. Her hair’s down over both of us, and she smells like paint and smoke.

“You went over a table,” she says. “At thirty-four.”

“You make me sound ancient. And I’ve already been told.”

“You’re going to hear about it forever. I want you to understand the scale of what’s coming.” Her voice goes then, all of it at once, and she gets her forehead down against mine and holds it there. “You don’t get to leave. Do you hear me? Not tonight, not with all this paperwork. I just got you.”

25

Vasilisa

“Put that needle in me one more time, and I’ll buy this hospital, gut this floor, and turn the whole building into parking.”

The nurse drawing his blood is twenty-four with a cartoon frog on her lanyard, and her hands don’t slow by a hair. She works nights on a surgical floor in Queens, so six days of Lev Etush have not made a dent anywhere in her.

“That’s three now, Mr. Etush,” she says. “The hospital, the cafeteria, and my charge nurse. You’re running out of building.”

“He’ll do it,” I say from the chair by the window. “He owns half of Brighton, he has no hobbies, and a bored man with money and a hole in his side is a public health event. Charge him double and put it on my tab.”

She caps the vial, tapes his elbow, and goes out, leaving the door open, because the door stays open; that’s floor policy, and my husband has lost that argument four days running.

Six days ago a surgeon had both hands inside him. The round went in under the right arm, took a rib apart in three places, and stopped short of the organs nobody in this building will name out loud in front of me. I sat in a corridor with Danil for five hours, and Danil didn’t speak for three of them, then got up and bought me a coffee I never drank.

Now he’s propped against a stack of pillows, gray through the face, running an organization off a phone I confiscate twice a day.

“Give it back.”

“No.”

“There are men in Red Hook waiting on an answer from me.”

“Then they’ll learn patience, which everybody in your line of work could stand to learn, and you’ll eat the fucking gelatin. It’s the red one, or it’s nothing, and I’ve watched you finish a plate of veal with another man’s blood drying on the cloth, so I don’t want to hear one word about texture.”

He eats the gelatin. Nineteen years of terrifying two countries, and he goes down to a woman holding a spoon.

The hospital therapist comes Wednesday, and he informs her he doesn’t need her. I roll in between them and have the finest afternoon I’ve had since the estate.

“You’ve got a hole in you,” I tell him. “I’ve spent two years breathing through pain and getting up anyway, so I know every excuse about to come out of your mouth, in order, and I’ve made all of them in a better voice than yours. You’re not special. You’re bigger, that’s all, and you bleed like everybody else, so shut up and lift the arm.”

“I know how to walk.”

“You’re learning to stand up without tearing your own repairs. Fight her, and I’ll have Danil film it, then I’ll screen it at craft corner with the good projector.”

He does the exercises twice a day, badly, jaw set, and on Friday, when the third set beats him, he says so out loud instead of hiding it, with his eyes on mine the whole time.

They come to the penthouse two weeks after the estate, because three floors down to his own office is still beyond him. Yefim gets out of the elevator first on a new cane he despises, black, hospital plastic, and behind him come eight more with their hats in their hands in my living room, ink up their throats, seventy and eighty years old, standing until I tell them twice to sit.

“We’ve talked,” Yefim says. “All of us, and the men from the other side, and the ones who walked out of that house with nothing left to bargain with. The organization is yours. Both of yours. Her blood, his fist. That’s the whole of it, and there’s no second offer coming, so don’t be clever with us, Levushka; we’re too old for clever.”

Lev sits under a blanket he hates and says nothing at all, because he wants this room hearing me first.

“Here’s my half, and I want it said in front of everybody so nobody has to interpret me in a car afterward.” My hands are on the bare rims, and the cold of the aluminum comes straight up through both palms. “My grandfather’s house, his money, and every man he ever raised goes to my husband. I already handed it over in front of two hundred people, so nobody needs to draft a thing. If there’s a man in this room still waiting on me to sit in that chair, he’ll be waiting into the next decade.”

Nine faces, none of them moving.