Chapter 2 #4
“Lev rarely travels to a serious meeting without Daniil,” Anton said. “His eldest is his operational lead. If Lev is discussing compromised personnel, Daniil will be there to present the Sokolov side.”
“Of course,” I said. “I was asking about the full delegation.”
“You were asking about Daniil.”
I looked at my brother. He looked back. There was no accusation in his voice. Anton was not Zoe — he did not push, did not tease, did not corner me with coffee and bagels and seven years of accumulated observation. He simply noticed, and let me know he had noticed, and moved on.
“The full Sokolov delegation will likely be Lev, Daniil, Arkady, and Nikita,” my father said. “Kiryl may attend the dinner but not the private meeting. Lev keeps him away from operational discussions.”
Four brothers. Lev’s sons. I had watched them assemble at family events for fifteen years.
I had watched Daniil across those rooms for years. Always Lev’s shadow. Already carrying the weight of being the son who would inherit.
I had watched him at the Orlov-Sokolov anniversary dinner two years later, seated across the table from me, answering my father’s questions about freight volumes with precise numbers delivered in a voice that carried without being raised. He had not looked at me once during that dinner. Not once.
I had watched him at Yelena’s engagement reception—the one Lev had arranged before she escaped to Chicago—standing in the corner with his hands in his pockets while the room celebrated a match that everyone knew was a cage.
His face had been unreadable. His jaw had been set.
I had thought, watching him, that he disagreed with what his father was doing.
That he found it ugly. That somewhere behind the composure, something was being pressed down hard enough to leave marks.
I had also thought, watching him, that I wanted to put my hand on his jaw and feel whether the tension was as hard as it looked.
That thought had frightened me. It still frightened me. Daniil’s calm authority drew me the way deep water draws someone who knows she can’t swim well enough. His control looked like safety from the outside. From the inside—if I ever got close enough to find an inside—it might look like a wall.
“Ksyusha.”
My father’s voice brought me back. He was looking at me across the desk, and in his face I saw something I rarely saw — a softness that he kept for moments when the room was small enough and the audience was only family.
He reached across the desk and took my hand. His palm was dry, his grip firm. The hands of a man who had spent forty years on the waterfront.
“I need you beside me tomorrow, Ksyusha,” he said. “You make difficult rooms easier.”
The diminutive. Ksyusha. He used it rarely — at home, late at night, when the Pakhan had been put away and only the father remained. Hearing it now, in his office, with Anton standing at the window, meant something. It meant he was asking me as his daughter, not as his asset.
Or it meant he knew that asking me as his daughter was the most effective way to deploy me as his asset.
I loved my father. I trusted my father. I also understood him.
The two things coexisted without contradiction, because Mikhail Orlov had never pretended that love and strategy were separate.
He loved his children and he used them, and he would have been genuinely baffled by the suggestion that those were different things.
“I’ll be there,” I said. “Seven o’clock. Volna.”
“Thank you.”
He released my hand. The softness in his face retreated, not vanishing but receding behind the watchfulness that was his default state. The father put the Pakhan’s coat back on.
I stood. Anton opened the door for me. As I passed him, he leaned close enough that only I could hear.
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” he murmured.
“I want to.”
“Ksenia.”
“I want to, Anton. Papa needs me.”
He held my gaze for a moment. Then he nodded and let me pass.
I walked down the corridor toward the stairs, my heels clicking on the old floorboards. Behind me, the door to my father’s office closed.
Tomorrow. Volna. Seven o’clock.
Daniil would be there. He would stand at his father’s right hand. He would watch the room. He would present the Sokolov analysis with precise numbers and a voice that carried without being raised.
And I would stand beside my father, polished and useful and composed, and Daniil would look past me exactly as he always had.
I drove home with the radio off and the windows down and the November air cold enough to feel in my fingers.
*
I locked the door at eighty-two Pioneer Street and stood in the dark for a moment.
The apartment was small. A one-bedroom in a converted warehouse three blocks from the water, with exposed brick, original beams, and a radiator that clanked like a prisoner dragging chains.
I had bought it five years ago with my own money — not Orlov money, not Bratva money, but the money I had earned restoring buildings for people who had no idea what my father did for a living.
The mortgage was in my name. The deed was in my name.
The only person with a spare key was Zoe.
This was mine.
I dropped my bag on the floor by the door. I kicked off my shoes and they landed on their sides near the shoe rack I never used.
I stood in the hallway and let the day fall off me.
The pipe. The ceiling. The inspector. Sergei’s face, swollen and broken, his voice cracking on his wife’s name. My father’s hand around mine. I need you beside me, Ksyusha. The drive home with the windows down and the cold air on my fingers and the radio off.
I went to the bedroom. I changed.
The pajamas were lavender. Soft cotton, faded from washing, the elastic in the waistband stretched enough that they sat low on my hips.
The socks were striped — pink and cream, thick, the kind that made my feet look slightly ridiculous.
I had bought them at a drugstore two years ago and had never worn them outside this apartment.
I went to the kitchen and put a pot of water on the stove. Macaroni and cheese. From a box. The kind with the powdered cheese that turned the color of something unnatural and tasted like comfort in a chemical formulation. I ate it standing at the counter, out of the pot, with a wooden spoon.
No plate. No table. No performance.
I rinsed the pot. I left it in the sink.
In the living room, I pulled the yellow blanket off the back of the sofa and wrapped it around my shoulders.
It was wool, heavy, slightly pilled at the edges.
I had found it at a flea market on Atlantic Avenue.
It smelled faintly of cedar and the previous owner’s laundry detergent, which I had never been able to fully wash out.
I didn’t want to. It smelled like someone else’s home, and sometimes that was enough.
I collected my rabbit from the bedroom. His name was Misha.
I had named him when I was nine, after my father, which my father had found either touching or alarming and had never specified which.
Misha the rabbit was grey, threadbare at the ears, missing one button eye that I had replaced with a felt circle glued on with fabric adhesive.
He sat on my lap while I arranged the blanket around my legs.
I put on Kiki’s Delivery Service. The opening notes filled the apartment — soft, warm, the particular gentleness of a story about a girl who was still learning what she could do. I had watched it perhaps forty times. I did not need to watch it. I needed it to be on.
On the coffee table, I had set out the miniature greenhouse kit.
It was a model — a tiny Victorian conservatory, no bigger than a shoebox, with pre-cut wooden pieces and paper foliage and a set of instructions translated from Chinese into English by someone who had clearly never assembled a model in their life.
I had bought it online three weeks ago. It had arrived on Tuesday. I had not opened it until now.
I sorted the pieces. I laid them out on the table in rows — walls, roof panels, window frames, tiny flower pots, strips of paper printed with leaf patterns.
I found the glue. I found the tweezers. I found the magnifying glass I used for fine detail work on restoration drawings, repurposed now for gluing paper leaves to wire stems.