Chapter 14 #2
Anton studied my face. His eyes moved across it the way they had moved across the photographs — systematically, looking for the thing that would tell him whether what he was seeing was real.
“I love him,” I said.
The words landed on the kitchen table between the cold eggs and the face-down photographs. Anton’s hands went still on his coffee cup.
“You love him?”
“I tried not to. Couldn’t help it.”
Anton’s mouth moved. Not a smile. Something more complicated—the expression of a man confronting a feeling he had not expected to feel.
“I’ve been carrying this,” he said. “The marriage. The agreement. Watching you walk into it because the alliance needed it, because Papa was dead and the organizations needed holding together. I let you choose—I know you chose—but I’ve been carrying the weight of what that choice cost you.”
“I know you have.”
“I kept thinking—if I had been stronger. If I had been more prepared. If I had been the kind of Pakhan who didn’t need his sister to—”
“Anton.”
He stopped.
“You can put that down,” I said. “That particular worry. I chose him. I chose the marriage. And then I chose him again—not the alliance, not the Pakhan, him. Daniil. You don’t get to carry guilt for something I’d choose again tomorrow.”
Anton looked at me. His eyes were bright. He blinked twice. He picked up his coffee cup and drank, and the drinking was a cover for whatever his face was doing behind the rim.
“You’re sure?” he asked. Setting the cup down. Composed again.
“I’m sure.”
“He’s lucky to have you, dear sister.”
“He’d say the same thing. He’d say it with less emotional range, but he’d say it.”
Anton almost laughed. The sound got halfway out before he caught it and turned it into a cough, and I loved my brother in that moment — loved him for the cough, for the almost-laugh, for the guilt he had carried and was now, tentatively, setting down on the kitchen table beside the cold eggs.
The spare bedroom smelled like paint and dust.
It was the smallest room on the second floor—barely ten by twelve, with a single window facing the street and a radiator that clanked when it woke up. Daniil had been using it as storage. Three boxes of Lev’s old files. A broken lamp. A very uncomfortable chair.
I had taken the room for a work call because Daniil was in the library with Nikita’s files, and the kitchen table had the worst lighting I had encountered in a residential building.
I had tried to review drawings there this morning and had ended up squinting at my own handwriting, wondering whether I had specified a load-bearing partition or written a recipe for borscht.
The call was with Luis. Henry Street. It seemed kind of perverse that I had to just keep working, despite the threats and the danger.
But also, I was glad of it. It felt normal, and normal felt safe.
The client had approved the revised floor plans, and Luis needed my sign-off on the material samples before Tuesday.
I sat on the floor—the chair was non-negotiable, I would rather sit on hardwood—with my back against the wall and the drawings spread around me like fallen leaves.
“The pine is wrong,” I told Luis. “The grain is too tight. It’ll look like plastic from six feet. Go with the oak. Same budget, better finish.”
“Oak it is. Anything else?”
“Send me the window spec again. The sash weight calculation looked off. I think the contractor used the wrong multiplier.”
“Will do. Boss—how are you? We haven’t seen you.”
“I’m fine, Luis. Send the specs.”
I hung up. I sat on the floor. The drawings surrounded me—floor plans, elevation studies, material schedules, a detail sketch of a window jamb I had drawn at three in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. The pencil lines were precise. The paper was soft at the edges from handling.
I was staring at the ceiling, composing a mental complaint about the kitchen light, when Daniil appeared in the doorway.
He leaned against the frame. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow. He had a pen behind his ear that he had probably forgotten was there.
“You’re on the floor,” he said.
“The chair is a crime against hmanity.”
“I’ve been meaning to replace it.”
“You’ve been meaning to replace it since you moved in. It’s still here. It will outlive us all. It will be the last artifact of our civilization.”
He looked at the drawings. His eyes moved across them—not reading, but registering. Taking in the spread of paper, the pencil set beside my knee, the eraser shavings on the floorboard.
“Would you like to make this room your studio?”
The question was practical. He said it the way he said things that were not practical at all—evenly, without emphasis, as though the magnitude of what he was offering could be disguised by the casualness of the delivery.
I looked at him. I looked at the room. The boxes of Lev’s files. The broken lamp. The criminal chair. The window with its decent afternoon light.
“You mean convert it.”
“I mean make it yours. The room. The light. Whatever you need.”
“Daniil.”
“Yes.”
“This is your house.”
I stared at the drawings around me. My pencil set. My eraser shavings. The window jamb detail I had drawn at three in the morning in a house I had been living in since the wedding without fully moving into.
“Most of my things are still at Pioneer Street,” I said.
His expression did not change. He waited.
“My drafting table. My books. The lamp—the good one, the one with the adjustable arm. My chair—you know, one of those weird ones that don’t cause spinal injury.
My reference library. The plan chest. Most of my clothes, actually.
I’ve been rotating the same four outfits and buying socks from the bodega on Smith Street because I keep forgetting to—”
“Ksyusha.”
I stopped.
“You’ve been keeping things packed,” he said. “At your old apartment. Because some part of you has been treating this as temporary.”
I looked at the floor. The eraser shavings. The pencil lines on paper.
“Yes.”
“I want you here. Not visiting. Not stationed. Here. Your drafting table. Your books. Your plan chest. Your furniture, which I suspect you consider superior to mine in every category.”
“Your taste in chairs is genuinely criminal.”
“I concede the chair. The rest of my furniture is perfectly acceptable.”
“Your nightstand wobbles.”
“It does not wobble.”
“It wobbles. I put my phone on it last night and it slid six inches to the left.”
“I’ll fix the nightstand. I’ll replace the chair. I’ll clear this room and you can set it up however you want. Where does the desk go?”
“Under the window. Obviously.”
“The radiator is under the window.”
“The radiator is under the left side of the window. The desk goes on the right. Anyone with spatial awareness can see—”
“Show me.”
I stood up. He stepped into the room. We stood together in the center of the small space.
“First,” I said, “the chair goes.”
“We’re agreed on the chair.”
I grabbed one arm. He grabbed the other. We lifted it—it was heavier than it looked, dense and ugly and constructed from what felt like compressed disappointment—and carried it into the hallway. We set it against the wall.
“That felt ceremonial,” I said.
“Amen.”
We went back in. Daniil moved the boxes of Lev’s files to the hallway—three trips, efficient, stacking them neatly against the opposite wall.
I picked up the broken lamp and carried it out.
The room emptied. The space opened. The window light fell across bare floorboards and clean walls and the particular possibility of a room that had been nothing and was about to become something.
“Desk under the window,” I said. I stood with my back to the wall and extended my arms, measuring. “Here. The plan chest goes against that wall—the long one. My reference shelf beside the door. The drafting lamp on the desk.”
“Where does the good chair go?”
“Under the desk. Where chairs go.”
“You have strong opinions about chairs.”
“I have strong opinions about everything. You married me. You should have read the fine print.”
He looked at me. The room was empty. The light was good. The radiator clanked once and fell silent. We stood in the cleared space and it felt good.
I reached for him. My hand found the front of his shirt. I pulled him toward me—not hard, not urgent, with the slow, deliberate pull of a woman who had just admitted she had been living as though this might end and had decided, standing in an empty room with good light, that it wouldn’t.
His hands found my waist. I kissed him before he could say anything else about chairs.
He made a small, amused sound against my mouth, and I kept hold of his shirt.
“I’ll call the building manager at Pioneer Street tomorrow,” I said, against his mouth.
“Good.”
“I want the drafting table by Friday.”
“Friday.”
“And the plan chest. And the books. And the lamp. And the chair.”
He kissed me again. His thumb traced the line of my jaw.
The empty room held us in its bare, clean, uncluttered space, and I thought: this is mine now.
This room. This house. This man. This life that I had been circling without landing in, treating as provisional, keeping my things packed for—just in case.
Just in case it ended. Just in case he changed.
Just in case the fear was right and the love was wrong.
I was done packing.
The blue dress was not new. I had bought it two years ago for an architect’s show that I had attended alone and left early.
It was navy silk, simple, cut close through the bodice and falling straight from the hip.
I had not worn it since. I put it on and I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and I thought: tonight I am having a date with my husband, and he is going to court me, and we are dressing for it, and the Voronins can wait.
I came downstairs at seven.