Page 7 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

Mr. Etush. The name means nothing to me, but the cold going down both my arms means it should, and I resent that; I resent a stranger’s surname having a key to my nervous system.

“Tell Mr. Etush I’ve got work in the morning.” My voice stays light, and I’m proud of it. “Show-and-tell. It runs on a schedule you would not believe. There are children depending on me.”

“Miss Plaksin.” Almost kind now, which is so much worse than the alternative. “I’m not knocking because I want your night. I’m knocking because the other version of this is me opening the door, and I’d sooner you came out of here upright, on your own two feet. Your father asked for that much. It’s the one thing on his list I don’t mind granting.”

On her own two feet. He’s built the whole gentle speech around a woman who walks out to meet him, and something wide-awake and mean in me wants to open the door for the pure pleasure of watching the script come apart in his hands.

But I don’t. Instead, I sit in the dark with my thumb over the call button and do the only math that counts tonight, the bare hanger, the empty tin, the gray suit he saves for pretending, a name I’ve never heard delivered like a verdict.

My father didn’t run from anything tonight.

He sat down at a table, and he bet the one thing left in the room that wasn’t his to spend.

And the house is at my door to collect.

3

Vasilisa

“She won’t open it.”

The man in my hallway says it into a phone, not to me, and I sit with my back against the inside of my own door, brakes locked, hands going cold in my lap, listening to a stranger report my disobedience to someone further up than himself. I’ve been refusing to open this door for an hour. I’m good at no. I say it to twenty-six children a day, and I’ve said it to my father more times than I can count, and I’d assumed a locked door and a firm no would send two men in coats back to whoever sent them. Instead, one of them is on the phone, and the other is just breathing in my hallway like he’s got all night, and it’s starting to occur to me that a debt this size doesn’t knock politely and then leave.

I don’t open the door. Reckless has kept me company my whole life, but reckless and stupid were never on speaking terms, and I know the difference the way a body knows a fever without the thermometer.

An hour goes by like it’s being charged by the minute. The building stops breathing. Then a new set of boots on the stairs, heavier, slower, one man where there were two.

He doesn’t knock. He works the handle, finds it locked, and the quiet after that isn’t a man being patient, it’s a man pricing my door and finding it cheap. This lock came with the Nixon administration. We both know what it’s worth.

“Open the door, Vasilisa.” This voice is lower than the others, unhurried, and it slides through the wood and down under my collar like a melted ice cube. “I’ve had a long night. I’d rather not finish it in front of your neighbors. Thin walls make witnesses. Witnesses make an evening longer than it needs to be.”

“Then here’s a wild idea, walk away.” I keep it light, the same voice I use when the fire alarm’s real and twenty-six kids are watching my face to decide whether to cry. “I’ll write you a hall pass. Please excuse Mr. Coat, he had a prior engagement with literally anywhere else.”

The silence that comes back is wrong. I’ve been making men laugh since I was old enough to read a room, it’s the toll I pay to cross most of them, and I know the beat right before a laugh lands and the beat that strangles one in the crib. He gives me the second one, holding his laugh.

“You have until five. Then I open it myself, and you spend the rest of your life knowing a lock was only ever a polite request. One.”

“See, this is bad technique. You’ve told me the ending twice now, both versions, so what exactly am I cooperating for?”

“Two.”

“Three.”

My heart’s throwing itself at the inside of my ribs like it wants out before he’s in. I roll back off the door, because I’ve spent two years learning where not to put my knees when something heavy is about to move, and I plant myself dead center in my own living room and turn on the lamp, then the overhead and the kitchen light too. I turn on every bulb I own, because I decided a long time ago that whatever came for me was going to have to come in the light and look at me while it did it. I lock the brakes, set my palms on the rims of the chair I painted sunflowers on, and put on the face I wear when a parent swears their child is gifted but I already know their child ate a crayon at snack.

“Four.”

“Relax.” I wheel closer, reach up, throw the deadbolt myself, and roll back to my mark before it’s even finished sliding. “It’s open. Come take whatever you think is in here. Fair warning, the good stuff is all under forty inches tall and none of it’s for sale.”

The door opens.

He doesn’t enter the room so much as take it over. He drops one shoulder to bring the rest of himself through a door I’ve cleared ten thousand times without a thought, and then he’s inside, too big for the space, and the whole apartment feels smaller for having him in it.

Black coat, black under it. A thin white seam splits one eyebrow where a blade once came too close. He doesn’t rush me. His eyes go around my apartment like a man walking a house he’s already bought and already scheduled for demolition, the brown water map on the ceiling, the couch I got for forty dollars. They stop on the wall of kid art I’ve taped up crooked, worth more to me than everything else in the room stacked together, and I watch him price it at nothing and move on.

Then he finds the chair, finds me in it, and he stops there.

Two years I’ve been this thing, and I’ve seen all the looks possible. There’s pity, which is the house special. There’s the flinch people think I can’t see. There’s the mercy-smile that snaps on like a porch light. There’s the ones who get louder, like my legs took my hearing when they went. There’s the crouchers, folding themselves down to my eye line like I’m a spaniel who did a clever trick.