Page 16

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I say. “Lock the doors.”

***

There are already cars outside Papa’s house when we pull in.

Two black SUVs, one either side of the gate, with men sitting in them. Another one comes up the road behind Theo’s truck and parks across the end of the drive. Big men in dark coats climb out of it and spread along the wall without being asked.

For one horrible second, I think it’s Rusakov.

Then one of them lifts a hand to Theo, and Theo nods.

“Garick’s men,” he says, when I get out of the car. “They’re here to watch the house.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s what I’d have done.”

The front door flies open before I’m even halfway up the steps. Milana comes out first, barefoot, with cotton wool stuffed between toes that are now painted bright pink. Galana is right behind her, holding a spatula. Zhenya stands in the doorway with her arms folded, looking past me at the man standing at the bottom of the steps.

Nobody says anything for a moment.

Then Milana says, “Oh my God. He’s enormous.”

“Milana,” I gush in embarrassment, but I don’t know why I’m surprised. We barely have a filter between the five of us.

“I’m only saying what everyone’s thinking.”

“She’s not wrong,” Galana murmurs.

Theo stands at the foot of the steps with his hands loose at his sides, letting them look. He doesn’t come any closer. He doesn’t try to smile or charm or shake anybody’s hand. He just waits, the way he waited in that tiny office while I worked up the courage to ask him something ugly.

“This is Theo,” I say. “Theo Nevolin. He’s...”

I don’t know how to finish the sentence. My fiancé? The man Papa picked out of a parking lot in Indiana? The man who spent all day fixing a fence at the shelter, holding my hand on the back step until the sun went down?

“He’s staying for dinner,” I say.

Theo’s eyes cut to me. I lift my brows and dare him to argue.

***

Nobody in this family has ever known how to eat a quiet meal.

Galana made a mountain of blini. Milana puts out sour cream and three kinds of jam and the caviar Papa kept for special occasions, which none of us should be touching, and tells us to stop looking at her like that because special occasions were his rule, not ours. Zhenya sets her laptop on the table beside her plate and keeps her phone face up next to it.

Theo stands in the kitchen doorway until Galana tells him to sit.

He looks at the head of the table. Papa’s chair. Nobody’s sat in it since the funeral.

He pulls out the chair beside mine instead. Something in my chest pulls tight and doesn’t let go.

Zhenya lets him eat precisely two blini before she starts. “You fight,” she says. It isn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“And do collections for Kirov.”

“Some.”.