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She sleeps like she does everything else. All in. One arm flung across me, one knee hooked over my thigh, her face pressed into my shoulder and her hair everywhere. Across my chest, my throat, the pillow. She’s breathing slow and even, and every time she exhales it tickles the hollow of my neck.

I don’t move. I lie there in the gray light and listen to her breathe while trying to remember the last time I woke up next to someone and didn’t want to leave.

I can’t. I don’t think it’s ever happened.

On the nightstand there’s a paperback lying face down with a pressed flower poking out from between the pages. A daisy. Flattened and brown at the edges, its bent stem carefully straightened.

Mila’s daisy.

She kept it.

I ease myself out from under her, inch by inch. She makes a small, cross sound and burrows into the warm place where I was, and I stand in the middle of her childhood bedroom in my underwear and look down at her for longer than I should.

Then I find my jeans and T-shirt and go downstairs.

***

Someone’s already in the kitchen.

Arina Maximova is standing at the counter in a gray robe, waiting for the coffee machine to finish. Her hair is wet. Her knuckles are hands red. She looks up when I walk in, and her eyes move over me once, top to bottom, cool and gray and missing nothing.

I’m wearing yesterday’s jeans and pulling my T-shirt over my head, yet I don’t think I’ve ever felt more naked in my life.

“Theo Nevolin,” she says.

“Arina.”

“There’s coffee.” She takes a second mug down from the cupboard without asking how I take it, and fills it, and slides it across the counter toward me. Black. “Garick says you called Timur. Before the docks.”

I nod.

“Thank you.” She wraps both hands around her own mug. “Not everyone would have.”

I drink the coffee. It’s good. Better than mine. Better than the place on Halsted.

Arina watches me drink it. Then she says, very quietly, “You know about Volkov.”

It isn’t a question. I don’t insult her by pretending. “Yes.”

“Does Eva?”

“I told her last night.”

Something flickers across her face. Fear, maybe. Or the shadow of it.

“What did she say?”

“That you did it so the rest of them wouldn’t have to.”

Arina looks down into her coffee, and for a second, the cool, sharp woman in the gray robe disappears, and I see someone else. Somebody’s big sister. Somebody who’s been standing in front of the others her whole life and is very, very tired.

“She always sees the best in everyone,” she says, a little roughly.

“She sees what’s there.”

Arina looks up at me. She studies me for a long, silent moment.

“Eva doesn’t know how to say no to people,” she says. “She never has. She’ll give away the last of everything she’s got, and she’ll smile while she does it.” She sets her mug down on the counter. “Don’t be someone who needs her for the wrong reasons.”