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Milana gets to her first. Then Galana. Then all five of us end up in a knot in the front hallway, with Arina in the middle, and nobody saying anything.

She hugs every one of us. Me last. She holds on a little longer than she needs to.

The skin across her knuckles is raw and red, like she’s scrubbed them under very hot water for a very long time.

I don’t say anything. I just hold her tighter.

“I’m fine,” she says into my hair. “I’m going to have a shower and sleep for a week.”

“You slept at Garick’s,” Milana says, delighted.

Arina pulls back and gives her a look that could strip paint. “I slept,” she says, with great dignity, and goes upstairs.

Milana waits until the bathroom door shuts. Then she turns to the rest of us, eyes huge.

“She did not sleep.”

***

Theo’s wearing clean jeans, a dark sweater when he arrives, his hair still damp at the edges from a shower. He brings flowers for Galana, a bunch of tulips from the store on the corner, and she goes so pink that Zhenya rolls her eyes.

“Thanks for breakfast,” he says.

He doesn’t bring anything for me.

He just looks at me in the hallway, the way he did in the gym on the first day I met him. Like he’s checking me against a picture in his head. Then something in his face changes, and I know.

Something has happened.

“Walk with me?” he asks.

Papa’s garden is dark and cold. The path is lit by little lamps Mama put in when I was a girl, half of them burned out now. Theo walks beside me with his hands in his pockets, shortening his stride to match mine without being asked.

We get as far as the bench under the pear tree before he stops.

“My father came to see me today,” he says.

I sit down on the bench. He doesn’t. He stands in front of me in the dark, big and still, and tells me.

All of it. The Mercedes outside the laundromat. His father sitting on the stairs with his coat folded over his knees. One fifth of Yaroslav’s empire. The best routes on the river. The dinner on Sunday. Bring the girl.

And then the ugliest part.

“He’s friends with Rusakov,” Theo says. “He has been for a long time. He knew I’d hung up on Gleb before I’d even got home.” His jaw works. “He wants us inside your father’s house when it falls, Evaria. That’s what this is for him. That’s all you are to him.”

The cold seeps through my coat. I pull it tighter.

“And you?” I ask quietly. “What am I to you?”

He looks at me like I’ve struck him.

“Not that,” he says roughly. “Never that.”

“I know,” I say. “I needed to hear you say it.”

He lets out a breath. It clouds white in the air between us.

“There’s something else,” he says.