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“Yes,” Viktor says dryly. “I rather thought it might be.”

“Did she ask about me?”

“She asked how long you’d known.” I hear the creak of leather as he lowers himself into a car.

“What did you tell her?”

“The truth. That it was not my place to say.” He sighs, long and weary. “She'll come to you, Garick.”

“I know.”

“She won't be gentle about it.”

“I'd be disappointed if she was.”

Viktor makes a sound that might be a laugh in a younger man, and hangs up.

I set the phone down beside the gun and the whiskey I still haven't touched. Outside, the light is going, the river turning from gray to black. The city switches itself on, one window at a time.

She'll come tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.

She'll come up here with her chin raised and her mind made up and probably a knife in her boot, because her father taught her that too. She'll stand in my doorway and tell me exactly what I can do with Yaroslav Maximov's will, and every word of it will be deserved.

Let her.

She can tell me no as many times as she needs to. I'm not going anywhere.

I've been waiting six years for Arina Maximova to look at me properly. Thirty days is nothing.

I pick up the whiskey at last and drink it in one swallow.

Then I walk to the front door, and I unlock it.

Arina

At ten past three in the morning, I decide Garick Lazovski needs to hear it from me.

I've been lying in my childhood bed for four hours staring at the ceiling. Same pale pink paint. Same crack above the window that Papa promised to fix when I was fourteen. Milana is curled up beside me, snoring softly, because she announced at midnight that she couldn't possibly sleep alone in a house where our father's slippers are still by the back door.

Nobody went home after Viktor's office.

We came back here instead, like homing pigeons, and drank Papa's vodka at Papa's kitchen table, and fought about Papa until Galana started crying again, and Evaria threw a dish towel at the wall. Zhenya has been on her laptop since ten o'clock, building a spreadsheet of every lawyer in Chicago who might be able to break a trust. She keeps muttering the word precedent like a curse.

Viktor read four more names after mine.

I heard them. I just haven't been able to think about any of them, because my brain got stuck on the first one and refuses to move.

Garick Lazovski.

Garick, who looked at me like he was searching for something.

He was searching for how I was going to take it.

I slide out from under the duvet without waking Milana, pull on jeans and the first sweater I find in a closet I haven’t opened for four years, and creep downstairs in my socks.

Papa's study door is closed. I stand outside it longer than I'd like to admit before I go in.

It still smells like him. Cigars and brandy and old oak. His reading glasses are on the desk, folded on top of a newspaper from last week. The chessboard by the window is set up mid-game, the way it's been my entire life.