Chapter 4
Ksenia
By seven-thirty on the morning of my father’s funeral, I had corrected the flowers twice, changed the order of three cars, and made a grown man move a box of memorial candles six inches to the left.
The candles had not been blocking anything. That was not the point.
The point was that they could be moved. The lilies could be rearranged.
The black cars could be placed in the correct order outside St. Seraphim Russian Orthodox Church.
The list of mourners could be checked against the list from Anton’s office.
The side door on Richards Street could be watched. The umbrellas could be counted.
My father could not be brought back.
So I handled the things that moved.
Rain had fallen during the night. It had stopped before dawn, leaving Red Hook dark and wet beneath a low November sky. Water shone on the sidewalks. The brick church looked almost black in the morning light.
Inside, incense already thickened the air.
The florist had used too many white lilies near the coffin. My father had passionately disliked lilies.
“Move half of those to the entrance,” I said.
The woman beside the arrangement hesitated. “Mrs. Petrov sent them.”
“I know. Keep her card with the flowers. Move the arrangement.”
She obeyed.
I checked my phone.
Six missed messages. Two concerned parking. One concerned the cemetery. One asked whether a former union official should be seated with the senior captains or behind them.
I answered all six.
“Ksyusha.”
Anton stood near the doors to the nave.
He wore a black suit and a white shirt. No tie pin. No pocket square. Our father would have approved of the restraint. Anton had not slept much in four days. Neither had I, but grief settled differently on him. His face looked harder. The soft similarity between us had disappeared.
“You need to stop,” he said.
“The first car is too close to the curb cut.”
“Someone else can move it.”
“They placed the family vehicle third.”
Anton stepped into my path. “Let someone else fix it.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
“You have other things to do.”
“So do you.”
I looked down at the phone in my hand. The screen showed the funeral schedule in fifteen-minute blocks. Church. Procession. Cemetery. Return to Orlov Marine. Food for principal mourners. Security rotation.
Every part of my father’s burial had an assigned time.
It was obscene. It was necessary.
Anton reached out and closed his hand around my phone.
“I need that.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Anton.”
“Ksenia. Today isn’t about following a plan. It’s about Papa.”
His expression shifted.
For one second he was not Pakhan. He was my brother, tired and angry and frightened by how calm I was.
“Please,” he said.
That almost worked.
Then the doors opened, and the men carrying my father’s coffin entered. Every thought in my head stopped.
The coffin was dark walnut. Closed. Polished until the church lights reflected along its sides. A gold cross lay across the lid. Someone had placed a small icon near the head.
I had chosen the coffin. I had chosen the lining.
It moved slowly down the center aisle. The men carrying it stepped in unison. Their shoes sounded against the church floor.
I could not breathe.
Anton’s hand found mine.
His fingers were cold.
The coffin passed us.
Four days earlier, I had knelt beside my father in the Birch Room. His blood had soaked through my dress and dried against my knees during the hours that followed. I had watched Anton close his eyes. I had watched men lift him from the floor.
I had known.
My body had not.
Now it did.
The first mourners arrived soon after.
They came in dark coats with rain caught on the shoulders.
Old men from the waterfront. Union officials.
Warehouse owners. Families whose children I had known since childhood.
Men who had feared my father. Men who had owed him money.
Men who had loved him as much as men like them allowed themselves to love anyone.
Each person crossed himself before the coffin. Each person came to us afterward. Anton stood first in the receiving line. I stood beside him. Kostya, my father’s brother-in-law and one of the oldest surviving Orlov advisers, stood on Anton’s other side.
Hands closed around mine.
Voices lowered.
Your father was a great man.
Mikhail Mikhailovich helped my family.
He will be remembered.
God keep him.
I thanked them.
I remembered who had wives, who had children, who had recently undergone surgery, who took sugar in tea, who had argued with Papa in 2018 and never quite repaired the relationship.
I made each of them feel seen.
That was what I did.
It was easier than feeling myself.
The church filled. Wet wool, candle wax, incense. Low voices rose and fell beneath the icons.
A shift moved through the men near the entrance.
I saw it before I saw the reason.
The Sokolovs had arrived.
Daniil entered first.
Black coat. Black suit. White shirt. No visible sign of the blood that had covered him four nights earlier. No sign that tomorrow he would bury his own father.
He had changed.
Not physically, perhaps. He still carried himself with the same controlled certainty. His dark hair was neat. His face was composed. His ice-blue eyes passed over the room once, assessing doors, people, distances.
But the space around him had changed.
At Volna, he had stood beside the throne. Now he occupied it.
Arkady came behind him. He looked more dangerous than usual, which I would not have thought possible. His grief had sharpened every line in his face. Nikita followed, his expression quiet and closed.
Their younger brother, Kiryl, walked beside Yelena. He wore a black coat that seemed slightly too formal for him. His face was pale.
Yelena looked striking even in mourning. Dark honey hair. Pale eyes. Black wool. No diamonds. No trace of the gilded daughter Lev once displayed.
Her husband, Salvtore, walked beside her.
He did not touch her as they entered. He stayed close enough that he could.
Daniil stopped just inside the church.
For one tense second, the room held two families who had lost their Pakhans in the same locked room.
Every person in St. Seraphim watched what happened next.
Anton released my hand. He left the receiving line.
A murmur passed through the rear of the church.
My brother crossed the floor toward Daniil.
Daniil waited.
They faced each other beneath the icons, two new Pakhans wearing black for fathers who had died before either son had been ready.
Anton offered his hand. Daniil took it. Then Anton drew him closer and embraced him.
Briefly. Hard. Publicly.
No one in that church could mistake the meaning.
The alliance held.
Daniil said something I could not hear. Anton answered. Then my brother turned and placed one hand against Daniil’s upper arm, guiding him toward the front.
Not to the ordinary rows.
To the principal mourners.
The Sokolovs followed.
Arkady’s gaze moved through the room. Men stepped out of his way without being asked. Nikita acknowledged several familiar faces with small inclinations of his head. Kiryl stared at the coffin.
When he reached me, Daniil stopped.
“Ksenia.”
He said my name quietly.
“Daniil.”
His eyes moved over my face.
Not my dress. Not the room behind me. Me.
The memory of his arm around my waist struck without warning. His body against mine in the corridor. His hand spread over the green dress. His voice telling me Anton did not look as good in it.
Then darkness.
Shots.
Blood.
I hated that the first memory came attached to the second. I hated more that some part of me still separated them.
Daniil offered his hand. I took it.
His grip was warm. Firm. Careful.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
Formal words. Proper words.
“Thank you.”
He released me.
Arkady came next. He did not offer empty comfort. He clasped my hand once.
“Mikhail was a strong man,” he said.
From Arkady, it was praise.
“Thank you.”
Nikita bowed his head. “Ksenia.”
His usual smile was absent.
Kiryl reached me and looked as though he might say something. Nothing came. His eyes flicked toward the coffin again.
I touched his arm.
“You don’t have to,” I said.
His throat moved. He nodded.
Yelena stopped in front of me. For a moment we only looked at each other.
She knew what it was to lose Lev. That grief was not simple. Mine should have been simpler. Papa had loved me without crushing me. He had used me, yes. Needed me. Raised me to make sacrifice feel like affection.
But I had never doubted that I was his daughter before I was an asset.
Yelena could not say the same.
She took both my hands.
“I am so fucking sorry,” she said.
The profanity in church should have shocked me.
Instead, my mouth trembled.
“Thank you.”
She squeezed hard, then let go.
Sal inclined his head. “Ksenia.”
There was steadiness in him. Not distance. The kind of quiet that made room instead of filling it.
He moved on with Yelena.
Daniil remained near Anton among the principal mourners.
I returned to the receiving line.
The service began.
Oh god, the grief. The pain.
The next morning, I put on black again.
My father had been in the ground for less than twenty-four hours. Lev Sokolov waited for his turn.
The Church of the Holy Protection stood on Brighton Fourth Street beneath a sky the color of dirty snow. The rain had stopped, but the wind off the water cut through my coat as Anton, Uncle Kostya, and I approached the entrance.
Orlov men followed at a respectful distance.
Not security, officially.
Everyone at the church knew better.
The Sokolovs had attended Papa’s funeral in full strength. We did the same. Public grief had rules. Political grief had more.
Inside, the church glowed with candlelight. Incense hung beneath the icons. The nave was already crowded.
Lev had ruled for a long time.
Men had come from Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey, and farther. Captains. Business owners. Community leaders. Old Russians who remembered him before Sokolov House. Younger men who had known no other Pakhan.
At the front stood Daniil.
It was his turn to receive every one of them.