Chapter 11
MOLLY
Vet arrives in the morning with a pink box and the satisfied expression of someone who has executed a plan.
“Maple glazed,” she announces, setting the box on my desk with a small ceremonial flourish.
“From the place on Lex. I made the man open early. He was not happy about it, but I was persuasive.” She opens the lid to reveal a dozen donuts arranged with a neatness that suggests Vet may have organized them herself, because Vet organizes everything, including, apparently, pastries.
The smell hits me immediately.
It’s aggressively sweet, thick and warm in a way that usually makes my morning, but today makes my stomach roll in the wrong direction. I press my lips together and breathe through my mouth and stare at the donuts, which I have loved since I came to Manhattan and which are currently my enemy.
“You’re not taking one,” Vet observes.
“I’m not hungry yet.”
She looks at me with those quiet brown eyes, then at the donuts, then back at me, with the unhurried patience of someone running a calculation. “You’re always hungry in the morning. Last Tuesday, you ate two before I had taken off my coat.”
“I had a big breakfast.”
“You got here before me. You didn’t have time for a big breakfast.” She closes the box and sits in the chair across from my desk, and folds her hands. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong. I’m fine. I just don’t want a donut.”
“Molly.”
She says it exactly the way Pavel says it, which is to say in the tone that closes arguments, and I find this deeply unfair and also probably not a coincidence given that they apparently trained in the same school of getting what they want through the precise application of a single word.
I lean back in my chair and look at the ceiling for a moment.
“I found out what a vor is. I went down a research rabbit hole at eleven o’clock last night, and I found out what a vor is, and then I found out what a pakhan specifically does, and then I read some things that I can’t unread, and now the smell of maple glaze is making me want to lie down on the floor. ”
Vet is quiet for a moment. “What things did you read?”
“Things about how discipline is maintained. In organizations like his.” I look back at her. “Things about what happens to people who betray the pakhan.”
“Ah.” She nods once, without any change in expression, which is somehow both comforting and deeply unsettling. “Yes. That is a real thing that happens.”
“Has it—” I stop. Start again. “Has he—”
“I will not answer questions about specific incidents,” she says, not unkindly.
“But I will tell you that Pavel does not do these things for pleasure. He does them because his world has a specific logic, and in that logic, mercy without limit is weakness, and weakness gets people killed. Often the wrong people.” She pauses.
“This does not make it comfortable information. I understand that.”
It does not make it comfortable information.
The man who traces the line of my jaw with his thumb, like he’s memorizing it.
The man who has, according to my eleven o’clock rabbit hole, almost certainly made decisions I can’t let myself think about in too much detail without the maple glaze situation getting significantly worse.
“How do you do it? How do you just—know all of this, and make coffee, and organize my inbox?”
Vet tilts her head slightly. “How do you think?”
“I have no idea. That’s why I’m asking.”
She’s quiet for a moment, in the considering way that means she’s deciding how much to give me. “I didn’t always make coffee and organize inboxes. I did other work for Pavel for a long time. Overseas. I told you this.”
“The operations.”
“Yes. But more specifically than that.” She looks at me evenly. “I did wetwork.”
It takes me a second to figure this out. “Like a cleaning service? Because I feel like that would actually make a lot of sense given how organized you are, and I say that with complete appreciation of what you’ve done here—”
“It’s not cleaning,” Vet says, with the patience of a woman who has explained many things to many people. “It means I was an operative. Specifically, the kind that is sent when the goal is that a particular person is no longer a problem.” She pauses, watching my face. “Permanently.”
The office is very quiet for a moment.
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
“So you—”
“Yes.”
I look at her. She looks at me. The pink donut box sits between us on my desk, cheerfully indifferent to the conversation happening around it.
“Okay.” I need a moment, and okay is what comes out when my brain is buffering. “Okay. And now you’re—here. Organizing my inbox.”
“It’s a significant lifestyle change,” she agrees, with the faint dry gravity that passes for humor in Vet’s register.
I take a breath. “So what—you just decided to retire?”
“I decided that I had done enough of that kind of work,” she says, which is a careful sentence, the kind that has been considered before being offered. “Pavel understood. He found me a new position.” A small pause. “One that does not involve skinning men.”
My stomach hosts a twirling parade up to the back of my throat. I hold up one hand. “I’m going to stop you there.”
“I was not going to elaborate.”
“Okay. Good. Great. Let’s maintain that boundary. Forever.” I press both palms flat on my desk and look at the middle distance for a moment.
The nausea has migrated from my stomach to somewhere more general, a full-body awareness of the world I’ve been living inside for the past several years, which I have managed by keeping it largely abstract, and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to keep it abstract as the details accrue.
Skinning? What do you even use to do that? I imagine a fish knife would work, maybe a vegetable peeler—
Oh god. I have got to stop thinking about this, or I’ll projectile vomit the coffee gone sour in my stomach.
Vet, to her credit, says nothing. She simply sits, unhurried, and lets me work through it, which is one of the things I appreciate most about her and am also, at this moment, mildly resenting.
My voice crackles. “Can I tell you something?”
“You can tell me anything.”
“I know that.” I do, which is the strange part.
Of all the unexpected developments of the past several months, the one I did not see coming was that the person I could say absolutely anything to would turn out to be a former operative who organizes my inbox with worrying precision.
“He had me go to his penthouse last week. Made me take a cab, pay cash, walk the last two blocks, check if I was being followed.”
“I see.”
“And I understood why, in the way that you understand things when you’re standing in the middle of them, and they have a certain logic.
But I got home afterward, and I thought—I am following counter-surveillance protocols to visit my secret boyfriend, who is a crime lord, and somehow this has become a normal Thursday.
” I look at her. “That’s insane, right? Tell me that’s insane. ”
“It is somewhat outside the ordinary of certain circles,” Vet allows.
“And yet the insane part,” I continue, because I have apparently decided to say the whole thing, “is not the counter-surveillance.”
Vet’s expression doesn’t change. Which makes me wonder how many times in her life she has had this exact conversation.
“It’s when I was standing at his window looking at the city, I felt completely safe.
Which makes no sense. I know what he is.
I know what the people around him do. I know—” I gesture toward her, indicating the general category of her former professional life, which we are still not elaborating on.
“And I still felt safer in that room than I feel most places. What does that say about me?”
Vet considers this seriously, which I appreciate. She doesn’t offer me easy reassurance, which I appreciate more. “It says that you trust him,” she says. “And that your instincts about him are not wrong. He is dangerous. He’s also a man who protects what is his with everything at his disposal.”
Am I his? In a real way? It’s not like we go out in public. Ever.
But maybe that’s a part of the protection aspect of things. I don’t know. How can I even bring this up to him without making it sound like I doubt him? Or that I’m suspicious of him?
I finally open the donut box, look at the maple glazed, and close it again. “My stomach still hasn’t forgiven me for the rabbit hole.”
“Stop doing research at eleven o’clock at night.”
“Incredibly useful advice, thank you.”
She almost smiles. It’s the Vet version of a smile, which is a slight softening around the eyes that lasts approximately one second. “You’re going to be alright, Molly.”
“You sound very certain about that.”
“I am,” she says simply, and stands, and takes the donut box to the kitchen, where it will be received with significantly more enthusiasm by the rest of the office.
I sit at my desk and think about what it means that a former wetwork specialist—operative—expressing certainty about my well-being is, genuinely, one of the more comforting things anyone has said to me lately.
My world makes less and less sense.
I spend the morning doing the work, because the work is something I can do without thinking too much.
The Vasiliev account, the supplier contacts I flagged for Igor, a scheduling conflict I resolve by the simple method of telling two men with competing priorities that Pavel’s calendar does not negotiate, which is one of my favorite sentences.
I am good at this work. I have always been good at this work, and its goodness is one of the things I hold on to when the rest of the picture gets complicated.
Pavel passes my desk at ten thirty. He doesn’t stop, just the brief weight of his attention as he goes past toward the conference room, which I register in the way I register everything about him now, with an awareness that is neither professional nor entirely comfortable.
I look up and he’s already looking at me, the passing glance that is never quite as passing as it pretends to be, and for a moment I see both of them simultaneously—the man from last Thursday at the window, and the man my eleven o’clock research described—and I hold both of them in the same frame.
I know what you are, and I know what you are, and somehow both of those things are true at the same time.
He goes into the conference room. The door closes. I go back to the Vasiliev account.
The thing I can’t stop turning over, the thing that has been sitting in my chest since the research rabbit hole and the donut nausea and Vet’s calm recitation of her former professional life, is not the darkness itself.
What I can’t stop turning over is the question of what it means that I can do that.
That I can know what I know about this world and still feel what I feel standing at his window, and not be able to call that a mistake without lying.
Pavel is many things. But a mistake is not one of them.
Vet comes back from the kitchen without the donut box and sets a cup of coffee on my desk without being asked.
The right order, the right temperature, the way she always does.
She spent years doing things I will not let myself think about in detail, and she makes excellent coffee, and she sat across from me this morning and said, “You’re going to be alright. ”
I wrap both hands around the cup. It feels like surety.
At noon, Vet appears by my desk with her coat and her expectant expression. “Forty-Third?”
The deli.
My stomach, which has been staging a protest since this morning, renders a tentative verdict of cautious acceptance. “Yeah. But I’m getting the soup. The donuts were a war crime this morning.”
“The donuts were perfect,” she says, with mild offense. “That was your own weakness.”
“My weakness,” I agree, pulling on my coat, “has been a recurring theme lately.”
She gives me the one-second almost-smile and holds the door, and we go. “Besides, I would have thought you knew better than to bring up my old hobbies, Molly.”
“Donuts?”
“War crimes.” She grins as my stomach turns.
“Don’t remind me.”
“You brought it up.”
“Did not.”
“Did so.”