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I noticed.

Yaroslav Maximov has been in the ground for less than an hour, and half of Chicago is already measuring his house for new curtains.

I check my watch. Viktor will have them in his office by now. He'll be pouring water nobody drinks while the girls pour vodka. He'll clean his glasses twice before he starts, because he always cleans his glasses twice when he's about to ruin someone's day.

Forty minutes, maybe less.

Then Arina hears my name.

“You want the car brought around?” My brother, Timur, asks.

“I'll drive myself.”

He hands me the keys without comment and stands behind me silently. I stay a moment longer, looking at the grave. At the mountain of white lilies and the raw, wet dirt and the black marble headstone Yaroslav picked out himself, if the rumors are to be believed.

At the funeral, she looked straight at me across his coffin.

Held my gaze for maybe two seconds. Then lifted her chin and looked away like I was a puddle she'd decided not to step in.

It's the most attention she's paid me in six years.

I stood there with the rain running down the back of my collar, and she looked up at me with those cool gray eyes, rimmed red from a day of not crying in public, and all I could think was. I promised him.

My apartment is quiet when I arrive home. I moved out of my family home two years ago, after Katya left to marry into the Orlov family, and my mother stopped coming out of her room entirely.

After losing Sergei, everything changed. Not just because Matilda was also dragged away from us that night, but because something in my father snapped irreparably. Sergei was the next in line. The heir to the Lazovski empire. After he was killed, everything fell apart.

I pour two fingers of whiskey but don't drink it.

I take off my jacket, my tie, my watch. I put my gun on the kitchen counter beside the glass and stand there with my hands braced on the marble, and I let myself think about the last real conversation I had with the old man.

Four months ago, Yaroslav called me at two in the morning.

He said come, and I went, because in six years of working for him, I'd learned that when Yaroslav Maximov called you at two in the morning, it was either very bad or very important, but usually both.

His study smelled like cigars and gun oil and the cedar polish his housekeeper used on everything that didn't move. He was sitting in shirtsleeves behind his desk with a bottle of Armenian brandy and two glasses already poured. The chessboard by the window was set up mid-game. It had been mid-game for as long as I'd known him. I never saw anyone else play.

He looked old.

Yaroslav had always been one of those men who seemed carved rather than born. Big shoulders, thick gray hair, a voice that could fill a warehouse without being raised. That night, under the green glass of the desk lamp, he looked like a man who'd been carrying something heavy up a long flight of stairs.

“Sit,” he said. He pushed a glass toward me. “I've been making arrangements.”

“What kind?”

“The kind a man makes when he has five daughters and too many enemies.”

I waited. With Yaroslav, you always waited. He'd get there eventually, usually by way of a story about his grandfather or a complaint about the price of something.

Not that night.

“When I die,” he said, “my girls inherit everything. The houses. The money. The companies. The rest of it.” He turned his glass slowly on the blotter. “And the men who answer to me now will smile at five beautiful women at my funeral, and by the end of the month, they'll start taking it apart. Piece by piece. A warehouse here, a contract there. Someone will marry Milana for her shares and have her signing papers she doesn't read much less understand.”

“Milana reads everything,” I said. “She once sent back a restaurant bill because the bottom line was wrong.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “You know my daughters.”

I didn't like where that was going, so I drank.