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EVARIA

I've changed my top four times, and I'm starting to suspect the top isn't the problem.

The bed in my old room is covered in rejects. A silk blouse that makes me look like I'm about to sign a mortgage. A black sweater that makes me look like I'm still at the funeral, which I suppose I am, since Papa's funeral appears to be the kind of event that lasts thirty days. A red dress I bought for a Christmas party three years ago and never had the nerve to wear.

And a gap on the shelf where my gray cashmere should be.

"Arina," I mutter.

I heard the front door at some ungodly hour last night, and again just before five. When I came down for coffee this morning, she was asleep in Papa's chair in the study, wearing my sweater.

I didn't ask. I took a photo, though. That's going in the group chat the second I need leverage.

I hold the red dress up against myself in the mirror and put it straight back down.

Absolutely not. I'm not wearing red to meet a man people call the Brute.

"If you’re going to insist on meeting this man, wear the black," Zhenya says from the doorway.

She doesn't knock. None of us knock. We grew up in a house where Papa took the locks off the bedroom doors after Galana shut herself in the bathroom for six hours over a boy, and none of us ever learned the habit back.

She has her laptop balanced on one forearm like a waiter with a tray. She hasn't put it down since we returned from Viktor's office.

"I look like a widow in the black," I say.

"You look like a woman who isn't interested. Which is the message you should be wanting to convey." She pushes the silk blouse aside and sits on the end of my bed. "I found more."

My stomach drops into my shoes. "How much more?"

"Enough."

Yesterday, in Viktor's office, I didn't even recognize the name.

Arina's came first. Garick Lazovski. That one, at least, made a horrible kind of sense. He'd been staring at her across Papa's grave like he'd been waiting years to be near her. Then Zhenya's, which she didn't react to at all, apart from writing it down. And then Viktor cleaned his glasses for the third time, looked at me, and said, "Evaria Yaroslavovna Maximova is to marry Fyodor Richardovich Nevolin."

We all sat silently dumbfounded by what was happening.

I knew the Nevolins. Everyone knows the Nevolins. Richardu Nevolin sat at Papa's table twice a year and never once laughed at anything. His daughter Kira married into the Orlov family a few years ago, and Papa sent a gift so expensive Mama would have made him return it.

There was no Fyodor.

Nobody had ever said the name. Not at a party, not at a wedding, not in the hundreds of conversations I wasn't supposed to be listening to through the door of Papa's home office.

Zhenya turns the laptop around.

"He's the eldest," she says. "Richardu's only son. He left at eighteen, and there's nothing on him for over a decade. No property or business. No arrests, which is either very impressive or very concerning."

"Concerning," I say. "Definitely concerning."

"Then, about two years ago, he comes back. Rents an apartment above a laundromat in Pilsen. Still no business. No obvious income." She scrolls. "But Kirov's people use him. So do the Orlovs, once or twice. Collections, mostly. Problems other men don't want to deal with."

"What kind of problems?"

"The kind that end with somebody's jaw wired shut for eight weeks."

I scrunch my nose and sit down hard on the red dress.

"And the fighting," Zhenya goes on, in exactly the same voice she uses to read a train timetable. "There's a warehouse in Gary that runs fights every other Friday. Bare knuckle. Cash only. For the last two years, there's been a man on the card they call the Brute. He hasn't lost."