3
Darina
I lived above the banya the way my grandmother had lived above it before me — a narrow staircase off the back hallway, a door that still stuck in humidity the way it had stuck for thirty years, and three rooms that smelled permanently, faintly, of eucalyptus no matter how many candles I burned to cover it.
I'd never minded. There was something steadying about falling asleep every night to the exact same smell that greeted every customer who walked through the door downstairs, like the whole building agreed on what it was, even when I didn't.
I wasn't sleeping that night. I was sitting on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets, still in my dinner dress, holding a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago and staring at the framed photograph on the shelf across from me — my parents, younger than I was now, laughing at something outside the frame, taken maybe a year before the car on the Palmetto service road decided not to be careful enough for one ordinary Tuesday.
I did this sometimes. Sat on the floor instead of the couch, like proximity to the ground was its own kind of comfort.
I'd done it the week after the accident.
I'd done it the week I signed the papers taking over Zarya.
I was apparently doing it again tonight, for an different kind of loss, and some small, exhausted part of me resented that my body had only the one response available for grief, regardless of size.
The knock came at the side door — not the public entrance, locked and dark for hours now, but the private one off the alley that only family used, three knocks, evenly spaced.
My first thought was Yegor, coming to check on me the way he always did after something broke.
My second thought, halfway down the stairs, was that Yegor knocked twice and called out my name before I'd even reached the bottom, and whoever this was hadn't said a word.
I opened the door already half-composing the sentence I'd use to send a stranger away at one in the morning, and found Rurik Severin standing in my alley instead, hands in his pockets, looking like a man who'd debated the wisdom of being there the entire drive over and had lost the argument with himself somewhere around my street.
I'd served this man tea for two years. I'd never once seen him outside Zarya's walls, never once seen him in anything other than the controlled, unhurried stillness he wore the way other men wore cologne.
Standing in my alley at one in the morning, he looked — not unraveled, Rurik Severin didn't unravel, I would learn that about him in increasingly inconvenient detail over the following months — but present in a way he never quite let himself be inside my building, where there were always other men watching how he moved.
"It's late," I said, because it was the only true thing I had immediately available.
"It is." He didn't move to come in, didn't move to leave either, just stood there letting me decide which one happened next. "Vadim told me what happened tonight. I wanted to tell you myself that it's handled, before you heard it from anyone else and had to wonder how much of it was true."
"Handled." I tested the word in my mouth the way you test ice before you put your full weight on it. "That's a very tidy word for a man who's currently in federal custody after lying to me for eight months."
"It's the word that matters to you right now.
Whether your name comes up in his file, whether your family's name comes up in his file, whether anyone with a badge has a reason to walk back through your door asking questions you don't have answers to.
" Something shifted in his voice, fractionally, the first crack I'd ever heard in it.
"I made some calls tonight. I made sure of certain things before I came here, because I didn't want to tell you it was handled and have it not be true by morning. "
"Why does that matter to you. Personally.
" I hadn't meant to ask it that bluntly.
Two glasses of vodka I hadn't finished and an entire evening of holding myself together with both hands had apparently worn down whatever filter I usually kept between my thoughts and my mouth.
"You could've sent Vadim. You could've called.
You're standing in my alley at one in the morning instead, and I'd like to understand that, because I've had exactly one man lie to me tonight about his reasons for being somewhere, and I'm not in the mood for a second. "
He went quiet for long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer at all. When he did, it came out lower than the rest of the conversation, like he was handing me something he hadn't fully decided to hand over.
"Because I didn't trust anyone else to tell you gently." A pause. "And because I wanted to see for myself that you were alright, and I've apparently run out of better excuses for that than the true one."
I didn't have anything to say to that. It is a particular kind of disorienting, being told an honest thing by a man you've spent two years assuming kept nothing but strategy behind his eyes.
"You should come in," I said finally, mostly because standing in an alley felt suddenly like the wrong container for whatever this conversation had become. "I've tea. It's the only thing I know how to offer anyone at one in the morning."
He followed me up the narrow stairs, and I was aware of him behind me the entire climb in a way I hadn't let myself be aware of anything in longer than I wanted to admit — not fear, nothing close to fear, just the specific awareness of a body taking up space directly behind your own, deliberate and unhurried, the way he did everything.
My kitchen was small and he made it smaller, standing near the counter while I put the kettle on with hands that weren't quite steady, and neither of us said anything for a minute that stretched longer than a minute should.
"He never knew about this place," Rurik said eventually, glancing around — not the bathhouse below, the apartment, the photograph on the shelf, the crocheted blanket my grandmother had made that still lived over the back of my one good chair. "Did he."
"No." I hadn't thought about it until he said it.
"I never brought him up here. I told myself it was because we weren't married yet, that there was a protocol, but I think — " I stopped, surprised by my own honesty.
"I think some part of me never wanted him to see this part.
The part that isn't performing anything for anyone. "
"Smart instinct."
He moved to the window instead of sitting, looking down at the dark street the way I imagined he looked at everything — assessing exits, assessing angles, a habit so old it had stopped being conscious. "Your brothers know this apartment, though."
"Vadim's the only one with a key. Gleb has the code to the alley door but pretends he doesn't, because he likes that I think he respects the boundary more than he actually does.
Yegor just climbs the fire escape if I don't answer fast enough.
" I almost smiled, despite everything. "They've been protective of this place since I took it over.
Not the business — me, specifically, up here, where I'm not behind a counter being anyone's authority on anything.
I think they decided, after our parents, that there had to be one square footage of the world where nothing was allowed to go wrong on their watch, and this was it. "
"That's not a small thing to decide, at twelve, fourteen, eight years old.
" Something in his voice had gone careful, like he was handling the subject the way you'd handle glass you didn't know the weight of yet.
"Most people don't build that kind of vigilance until something's already gone wrong twice. You three built it after once."
"You'd know something about that."
"I'd." He didn't elaborate, and I didn't push, because some debts of honesty you let a person pay on their own schedule.
"It's part of why I came myself tonight, if I'm being thorough about it.
Vadim would have told you it was handled and meant it exactly that simply, because that's the kind of honesty he's good at — clean, complete, no decoration.
I wanted you to hear it from someone who'd actually looked you in the eye while saying it.
I don't know that I could explain why that distinction mattered to me. It simply did."
"You don't seem like a man who does things he can't explain to himself."
"I'm not." The corner of his mouth moved again, the almost-smile he apparently rationed like it cost him something. "Which is, lately, becoming its own kind of problem."
"You don't know that. You've known me for two years over a tea counter."
"I know you told me to take my ash outside on the third Saturday I ever sat at that counter, in front of four men who'd have crossed the street to avoid telling me the same thing.
" The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, the architecture of one.
"I know exactly what I know, Darina. I pay close attention.
It's the only skill I actually trust myself with. "
The kettle went off before I had to find an answer to that, which was, I suspected, the only reason I survived the next thirty seconds with my composure intact.
I poured the tea into two of my grandmother's gold-rimmed glasses, the good ones, the ones I usually saved for customers I respected enough to bother, and didn't examine too closely why I'd reached for those instead of the everyday mugs in the cabinet beside them.
"Can I ask you something," I said, handing him his glass, "and have you actually answer it instead of managing me the way you clearly manage everyone else."
"You can ask."
"Did you know. About Denis. Before tonight."