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I look at her. "Too?"

"Timur called this morning." She bounces the toddler on her knee. "My brother Garick's been named in Yaroslav's will. For Arina. Timur says he's been in love with her for six years but nobody was allowed to say anything about it." She leans across the table toward me, delighted. "Which one are you getting?"

"Evaria."

"Oh, good." Katya grins. "I’m deeply concerned for any man that ends up with Zhenya."

Mila comes barreling up the steps from the lawn with a fistful of daisies, half of them still attached to their roots. She skids to a stop at my knee and holds them up.

"For your wedding," she announces.

The whole table goes quiet.

"How," Kira says, "does she know what a wedding is?"

"Aunt Anastasia," Mila says, like this is obvious. "We play dress up."

I take the daisies. There's dirt all over them. One of them has a tiny worm hanging from it.

"Thank you," I say gravely.

Mila nods, satisfied, and races off again.

When I look up, Kira is watching me with an expression I haven't seen on her face since she was ten years old at the top of the stairs.

"Are you sure about this?” she asks.

I shake the worm onto the grass and place the daisies on the table. “Yes,” I say. “It’s time to settle down, and its not like I meet a ton of women in my line of work.

Neither of us says anything more about it. Nobody needs to.

I leave at half past three with my hair still standing up and a fistful of dying daisies on the passenger seat.

***

I'm in the ring when she arrives.

Ilya asked for one more round, and I said yes, because I needed something to do with my hands. I've been inside this building since four, and I've hit everything in it twice.

The door sticks. It always sticks. I hear it shudder in its frame, then the scrape of someone putting their shoulder into it, and a muttered curse in Russian that's so filthy Ilya's eyebrows go up.

I know without turning around and barely suppress the grin.

I put Ilya on the canvas in the next ten seconds. I didn't mean to. I meant to give him another round, let him go home feeling better about himself. Instead, I put him down because I want this over with, and because she's watching, and because some part of me that's been in back rooms for twelve years wants her to see exactly what it's capable of.

I crouch down to check he's breathing. He is. He asks me who the woman is.

"My wife," I tell him.

Then I pull him up and turn around to look at her for the first time.

Yaroslav Maximov never did give me a photograph, but even if he had, nothing would prepare me for what I’m looking at.

Her hair is pitch black and long. Her eyes are stormy. The black sweater she is wearing hugs her generous curves and her jeans do nothing to hide the swell of her ample hips.

That’s when I know I’m done for.

EVARIA