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“Thank you,” Arina answers.

His eyes move to her. Stay there. I watch him recalculate.

“Your father and I never did business,” he says carefully. “I'd hoped that might change.”

“It won't.”

“No?”

“You tried to take something that belonged to my family the day after we buried him. Your men beat one of mine half to death on my dock.” Her voice is perfectly pleasant. It's the voice she uses on Milana when Milana has borrowed her clothes without asking. “I sent you back your property. I'm assuming you received it.”

Something flickers in his face. Volkov's body on the front steps of his club, in front of half his men. That's not the kind of thing a man forgets.

“I received it,” he says.

“Good. Then consider it a receipt.”

Rusakov looks at me. It's an old habit, I suppose. Thirty years of looking for the man at the table.

I lift my coffee and drink it.

“She's the one talking, Oleg,” I say.

He's quiet for a long moment. Then he folds his hands on the table.

“What do you want?”

“Compensation for Andrei. His medical bills and a year's wages. Paid to him, not to me.” Arina takes a sip of her tea. “Your trucks stay off the river. All of it. Not just the Port District.”

“And in return?”

“In return, I don't destroy your business one truck, one man, at a time.”

Rusakov laughs. Then he realizes nobody else is laughing, and he stops.

He looks at my wife for a very long time. The silver beard. The careful, clever eyes. I can see him adding it up. A Maximova with her father's knife and her father's temper, and me sitting at her shoulder, not in front of her.

“Agreed,” he says finally.

Arina stands. I stand with her.

Rusakov stays seated, which is a mistake, but a small one. As we turn to leave, he speaks again.

“Your father had five daughters, Arina Yaroslavovna Maximova.” He says it mildly. Conversationally. “You can't stand in front of all of them.”

She stops. Turns back.

“I don't need to,” she says. “Our father saw to that.”

She walks out without waiting for his answer.

I give him one long look before I follow her. Long enough that he understands that if he ever goes near a single one of those women, it won't be my wife he has to worry about first, because there’s five of me, all as unhinged as each other, and all as devoted to our wives.

He looks away before I do.

Andrei is waiting by the car when we get back to the Port District, rain dripping off the brim of his cap. He straightens when Arina gets out.

“Well?” he asks.