Chapter 30
PAVEL
She fits in my hands.
This is the first thing I notice about my girls.
I am a man with large hands, hands that have done things I will never speak of, and she fits in them entirely.
Both of them do, though not simultaneously.
I attempted this on the first morning, which Molly observed from the rocking chair with an expression that was equal parts alarm and tenderness, followed by giggling.
I hold one of them now, in the study, sitting in the armchair that has become my preferred location for this activity. The light is good, and the chair is deep enough that I can sit with proper support, more so than in the nursery room rocking chairs, which I will be replacing later this week.
She is asleep. She sleeps the way they both sleep—with the complete, uncomplicated commitment of people who have not yet learned to mistrust rest. Did I ever sleep that way?
Only my parents would know, and they’ve been gone for many years.
I watch her face, which is doing nothing except being her face. Unbusy, unbothered.
I should not be jealous of a newborn, but I am.
I’ve been thinking about things since the hospital. Since the moment they were placed on Molly’s chest, and I looked at their faces—the small, furious, crumpled faces of people who had just arrived and were unhappy about it. I felt something happen inside me that I don’t have the language for.
I thought that the moment everything changed was when Molly told me she was pregnant.
I was wrong. That was the moment I understood that everything would change.
The actual changing happened in the hospital room when I heard them cry for the first time.
I felt the person I had been for forty-three years step aside for someone I’m still meeting.
It’s a disorienting experience.
A lack of sleep probably plays into the disorientation, as well.
I look at the face in my hands, and I think about legacy, which is a word I have been using for my entire adult life to mean something specific.
The continuation of the organization, the maintenance of the position, and the structures that persist beyond any individual.
That is the thing people depend on, and it is why I must do my best to maintain my position.
It’s a great responsibility to ensure the safety of those who work for me. Their families. To maintain the structure of the bratva in a world that is against us. It’s a power we fight to attain and fight to keep, so we can use it to protect and provide.
I thought I understood legacy. I had a working definition that had served me for decades.
I was wrong.
Legacy is not power. It is not the organization, the position, or the structures. It is this. Legacy is what you leave in people, not in systems. And I have brought two people into this world who will be the start of something new.
She wakes up in my hands, grimacing up at me.
“Hello,” I say, quietly.
She blinks.
“I know. It’s a lot.”
She makes a fussing sound, and unglamorous, complete love crashes into me again and again, threatening to take over everything in my life.
An empty threat. It already has.
I have been reorganizing since the hospital.
The reorganization will be ongoing and is somewhat overwhelming, but it must be done.
I have been conducting it largely in the hours when Molly is asleep, and the house is quiet.
She doesn’t need to know anything about it—she’s on maternity leave, though I keep telling her I can find someone to fill her role.
She insists she’s coming back to the office. But after how much labor took out of her, I hope to talk her out of that. She deserves to spend time with our girls. She deserves rest and anything else she ever wants.
I call Igor in at nine, and he comes into the study, smiling instantly the moment he sees her in my arms.
“How are they sleeping?” he asks.
“In shifts, it would seem. They have organized themselves into a rotation that ensures someone is awake at all times. I believe it’s deliberate.”
“They are your daughters. Already starting a proper watch cycle? Definitely yours.”
“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”
“And Molly?”
“Sleeping now. She fed them at six, and I took over so she could sleep.” I look down at the one in my arms. “She needs it. She’s been—” I stop, because the sentence that wants to come is something like extraordinary, which is accurate and also insufficient and also not something I want to reduce to a status report to Igor.
“She’s well,” I say instead. “She’s doing well. ”
Igor nods. He looks at the baby in my arms with the expression he has been wearing around them since we came home from the hospital—a man finding the reminder that there is more to life more welcome than he expected. He doesn’t reach for her. He’s waiting to be offered.
“Take her,” I say, and transfer her with the practiced care that I have been developing over four days.
She regards him with her ancient, unfocused attention. He regards her with something that is not unfocused at all.
“I need to talk to you about the business,” I say.
Igor looks up. The shift in his attention is professional and immediate, the sovetnik assembling himself, while his hands remain careful around the sleeping weight. “What aspect?”
“All of it. Or—not all of it. But more of it than you’re expecting.”
He waits. This is one of the things I have always valued about Igor—he doesn’t fill silence with assumptions.
I look at my notes on the side table, which are not operational notes in the usual sense.
They are a different kind of list, made over several nights in the armchair while my daughters slept and the house was quiet, and I was thinking about the thing I have understood.
I begin with the biggest point of contention. “The guns.”
Igor is still.
“I stopped thinking about where they go. At some point in the early years, I stopped following the chain past the transaction. I told myself that was professional—that the point of sale was my business and the use was someone else’s business, and the separation was clean, and I maintained it.
” I look at the face of the daughter Igor is holding, at the pale eyes and the small features of a person who has been in the world for four days and is entirely without defenses against it.
“I’ve been thinking about where they go. ”
“Pavel—”
“I know the arguments. I’ve made them myself.
If we don’t supply, someone else will. The market exists independent of our participation.
The demand doesn’t disappear because we exit the supply chain.
It’s a valid argument. I also know that I can’t look at this face”—I gesture at the one Igor is holding—“and think about other, just as innocent faces. The ones those guns reach eventually.”
Igor is quiet for a moment. “This is not a small change.”
“I know.”
“The gun operation is a significant revenue stream. Extracting from it cleanly takes time, and there will be questions from the network about why, and Fedor’s people—whoever helped him escape prison—will read it as weakness.”
“We have managed harder things. Someone else’s perception is not my priority.”
He looks at me across the room, and there is something in his face that is not opposition. He’s taking the full measure of what is being said and where it’s coming from. “What else?”
“Anything that reaches children.” I fold my arms, wondering who I was that I let it go on this long.
“That’s the line. I’m not going fully legitimate—that’s not realistic, and it’s not what I’m saying.
Adults making decisions about their own risks in a world that has risks, that’s one thing.
But any part of the operation that could put what we do in a child’s path—” I stop.
Look at the baby in Igor’s arms. “That’s over. ”
The room is quiet.
Igor looks down at the baby he’s holding, and she has gone back to sleep with the complete commitment that is their primary mode of existence, evidently. He looks at her sleeping face for a moment with the expression he has been wearing around them—the expression of a man being reminded.
“The gun operation will take months to exit without causing riots,” he says.
“If we move carefully and manage the narrative correctly, we can frame it as a strategic pivot rather than a withdrawal. There are legitimate security contracting operations that would absorb several of the key relationships without raising questions.”
“Work up the transition plan. Take whatever time you need. I want it done right, not fast. There is no room for error on this.”
“Which other operations are you looking at?”
I brief him on my thoughts, and Igor is quiet for a moment. I watch as he adjusts to the new version of the organization, so different from the one he willingly joined. “This is going to require some difficult assessments.”
“Yes.”
“There will be parts of the operation that we cannot clean up quickly or quietly.”
“I know.”
“And you are prepared for what that transition looks like? The relationships that will be disrupted, the—”
“Igor.” I look at him across the room. “I spent years building something that I am now looking at from the outside for the first time, because there are two people in this house who are going to grow up in the middle of it, and I cannot—” I stop.
“I cannot be the reason that what they grow up in could hurt them. Their friends… other children.” I let the silence sit for a moment.
“I am certain of this pivot, but it will be a long and arduous journey. I know that.”
He looks at me for a long moment with the full assessment, and then he nods. Once, definitively. “Alright. Then we begin.”
The baby in his arms shifts, makes the small sound that precedes waking, and then settles back into sleep. Igor looks at her face with something that is not quite a smile and is not quite the absence of one. Fascination, perhaps.
“She has your nose.” He transfers her to me, and I receive her weight and settle her into the crook of my arm. “It’s a better nose on her than on you.”
I look up at him.
“Objectively,” he says.
“Get out of my study.”
He smirks a little, stands, straightens his jacket, and moves toward the door with the contained dignity that is his permanent condition.
At the door, he pauses. “For what it’s worth.
This—what you’ve decided this morning. I think it’s right.
” He looks at the baby in my arms for a moment, and at me.
“I think it’s been coming for a while. I think they made it impossible to avoid. ” He leaves.
The way we keep track of time changes at the behest of consequential people. Caesar. Jesus. Galileo. Kelvin. There was the perception of time before these people, and the perception of time after them.
I think about the man I have been, the man I’m four days into being, and the distance between them, which is both larger and smaller than I would have predicted.
The distance is not the dramatic rupture it might appear from outside, but a shift in orientation—the same man, standing in the same place, finally looking in the right direction.
She opens her eyes again.
“Hello there. Nice of you to join me.”
She blinks her pale eyes at me, ancient and unfocused and entirely present, and I look back at her, and this is the most awake I have been in my entire life. It took her four days to do it. What else is she capable of?
Four days versus the decades before her, and she has fundamentally changed everything in my life, including me. For her, I will do anything, be anything. Whatever she needs me to be.