Page 5

Then he stepped aside and let me in.

I'd have killed for him by the end of that week. I still would. I've never told him, and he's never asked.

"You're quiet," Kira says.

"I'm eating."

"You're pushing lamb around a plate." She shifts Pasha higher on her shoulder. "Theo."

I put my fork down.

Down on the lawn, Mila has taken Lorcan's stick, and Lorcan is appealing to Grace, who is pretending not to see any of it. Saoirse is inside, arguing with someone about the oven. Katya is coming back up from the garden with a toddler on her hip. I can hear Killian somewhere, laughing at something that probably isn't funny.

It's loud and it's chaotic. Nobody here is sent upstairs. Nobody here goes quiet when the head of the house walks into a room.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life thinking a family was something you survived.

"I'm getting married," I say.

Kira doesn't say anything at all.

Anton stops chewing.

"In under thirty days," I go on, because I'd rather say all of it at once. "To one of Yaroslav Maximov's daughters. It's in his will."

"Which daughter?" Anton asks, leaning back in his chair. Its his ‘I rule the world.’

"Evaria."

Kira's eyebrows climb slowly toward her hairline. "The middle one?"

"Is that bad?"

"She threw a bread roll at Gregor Malekonosh at the Petrov christening."

I think about that. "Did she hit him?"

"In the face."

Something warm and unfamiliar turns over in my chest. I ignore it.

"How?" Kira asks. Then, sharper: "When?"

"He came to a fight in Gary four months ago." I pick up my water glass. Put it down. “Afterward, he waited for me by my car."

Yaroslav Maximov, leaning against my truck in a parking lot in Indiana at one in the morning. Big, gray, coughing into a handkerchief he folded away before he thought I'd seen it. He didn't introduce himself. He didn't need to. Everybody in Chicago knows that face.

“You hit like a man who's angry at someone who isn't in the ring.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“It's an observation. I have a proposal.”

"I said no," I tell Kira. "The first time."

Her mouth goes tight. "What did he say to change your mind?"

I've thought about it a lot. I still don't have a clean answer.