Nick
I bury my father on a Thursday.
The sky is the color of pewter and the ground is soft from overnight rain.
Father Konstantin reads the liturgy in a voice that carries across the cemetery without effort, eighty-one years old and still the steadiest man at a graveside.
The casket is mahogany. My mother's icon rests on the lid, and the beeswax candles have been burning since dawn.
I stand at the head of the grave with Dmitri one step behind me. The captains are arranged in a loose line to my left. Ivanov is beside me, because a lawyer at a funeral is a man who is also standing guard, and every person here knows it.
Viktor is across from me.
He stands with his hands folded in front of him, head bowed, the picture of a grieving brother.
Black suit, black tie, black cashmere coat.
He hasn’t spoken to me yet today. He arrived five minutes before the service and positioned himself on the opposite side of the grave with the precision of a man who has rehearsed his plan.
Father Konstantin commits my father's body to the earth. The words are in Church Slavonic, and I let them wash through me without holding onto any of them, because holding on would mean feeling, and I can't afford to feel right now. Not here. Not with Viktor's eyes on me every time I blink.
They lower the casket. I step forward and take a handful of wet earth and drop it onto the lid. The sound it makes is the loneliest sound I have ever heard.
I step back. Viktor does the same from his side. His handful is smaller than mine and he brushes the dirt from his palm after.
The captains file past. Each one takes earth and drops it. Gregor. Yevgeny. Alexei. Each says "Pakhan" to me as they pass, confirming the order publicly, at the graveside, the way it's supposed to be done.
The burial is just the ceremony. The rest of it happens at the house.
Irina has laid out food in the dining room.
Black bread, pickled herring, boiled eggs, the traditional spread my father would have expected.
The men filter in and eat standing up, the way they do at these things, and the house fills with low voices and the clink of glasses and the particular atmosphere of men who are mourning and calculating at the same time.
I stand in the doorway of the library and I watch the room.
Viktor is at the far end of the dining table. He has a glass of vodka in his hand and he's speaking to Alexei. Their heads are close. Alexei's body is angled away from the room, which means he doesn't want to be seen listening, which means what Viktor is saying isn't meant for the room.
I don't react. I watch. I note the duration of the conversation, the way Alexei nods twice, the way Viktor's hand rests on his shoulder for a beat longer than friendship requires.
Then Viktor moves. He crosses the room to Gregor's wife, a woman named Karolina who has no business being spoken to at a funeral by a man who isn't her husband.
Viktor says something to her. She laughs, covers her mouth, looks across the room at Gregor, and then back at Viktor with a smile that tells me he's being charming.
He does this for forty minutes. I watch every second of it from the library doorway while men come to me with condolences and I accept each one with a nod and the right words and a handshake that communicates exactly what it needs to.
Dmitri appears at my elbow.
"Alexei," I say, without looking at him.
"I saw it."
"And Karolina."
"Saw that, too."
"Find out what he said to both of them. Tonight."
"Done." He pauses. "You should go home. You've been here long enough. Irina can handle the rest."
He's right. I've shaken every hand that needs shaking.
I've heard every condolence that needs hearing.
The captains have said Pakhan at my father's graveside, and the will is filed, and the ink is dry.
What's left is Viktor working corners, and I don't need to stand here and watch him do it.
I need to know what he said, and Dmitri will get me that faster than my own eyes.
I leave through the kitchen. The car is waiting. The drive back to the townhouse takes twenty minutes, and I spend every one of them thinking about the woman in the upstairs bedroom.
I haven't seen her since this morning when Mikhail checked her vitals and told me her sugar was holding steady at one-eighteen.
She was asleep when I left for the cemetery.
Mikhail removed the IV yesterday. She's been eating, small meals, the kind her body can process without spiking, and Mikhail has been adjusting her insulin doses with a precision that makes me grateful, once again, that my father saved his life thirty years ago.
I come through the front door and the house is quiet.
Then I hear water running upstairs.
I take the stairs and stop in the bedroom doorway.
She's standing at the dresser with her back to me.
She's wearing one of my shirts, white cotton, the hem hitting her mid-thigh.
Her hair is damp from the shower, pushed over one shoulder, and she's running a brush through the ends of it with the careful, slow strokes of a woman whose head still hurts.
She sees me in the mirror.
"Hi," she says.
Something in my chest cracks open a fraction. Just enough to let something warm flood through the gap. She's upright. She's standing on her own feet in my bedroom, the color has come back to her face, and her eyes are clear for the first time in days.
"Hi." I lean my shoulder against the doorframe and loosen my tie with one hand. "How do you feel?"
"Human." She puts the brush down and turns around. She leans against the dresser and folds her arms across her chest, and the shirt rides up an inch on her thighs. I keep my eyes on her face because I'm a man who is trying very hard to be decent about the woman he's in love with.
"Your sugar?"
"One-twenty-two. Mikhail checked before he left. He said I could shower if I was careful." She pauses. "He also told me I was the most stubborn patient he's treated since someone called Yuri, and I should take that as a compliment."
The corner of my mouth lifts. "Yuri would agree. I’ll have to introduce you when he returns to work."
I reach into my jacket and pull out her phone. I'd had Dmitri retrieve it from her apartment along with clothes and her diabetes supplies. I cross the room and hold it out to her.
"You need to call Dr. Mehta," I say.
She takes the phone. Looks at it, then at me. "Why?"
"Because she came to your apartment two minutes after I did. She was the one who administered the glucagon, Sadie. She kept you alive until I could get you to Mikhail."
Her face does something complicated.
"How did she know?" Sadie asks.
"She tried calling you when you didn't show for your shift. Priya told her you hadn't called in. Mehta went to your apartment. She got there just after I broke the door down."
Sadie looks at the phone in her hand for a long time. Her thumb moves across the screen and then she looks up at me.
"Thank you," she says.
"Call her. She's been asking about you every day. Then eat something. There's food downstairs."
I turn to leave, to give her privacy, because a phone call to the woman who saved her life is not one I should be in the room for.
"Nick."
I stop.
"How was the funeral?"
I look at her over my shoulder. She's still leaning against the dresser. My shirt, my bedroom, my house. She looks like she belongs here in a way that makes my ribs ache.
"It was a funeral," I say. "He's buried. The rest is politics."
She nods once. She understands more than I've told her. It’s another aspect of her that I appreciate. Another reason I found myself falling in love with her.
"I'm sorry about your father."
"Thank you."
I close the door behind me and go downstairs. I pour a glass of water and stand at the kitchen counter, pressing both hands flat against the marble as I just breathe for a moment.
I give her thirty minutes.
When I go back upstairs, she's sitting cross-legged on the bed with the phone beside her and her eyes red. She's been crying, and she hasn't tried to hide it, and that tells me the call with Mehta went the way it needed to go.
"Okay?" I ask from the doorway.
"Okay." She wipes her cheek with the heel of her hand. "She cried, too. In case you were wondering."
She looks at me standing in the doorway in my funeral suit with my tie loosened and my top button undone, and her gaze drops from my face to my throat to my chest, then comes back up.
"Come here," she says.
I cross the room. She unfolds her legs as I reach the edge of the bed, and I sit down beside her. Her hand comes up to the knot of my tie, she pulls it loose, slides it from my collar, drops it on the floor beside the bed.
"Sadie." My voice comes out rougher than I intended. "You're four days out of a concussion."
"I know what I am." Her fingers move to my top button. The second. The third. She parts the shirt and puts her palm flat against my chest, over my heart, and the warmth of her hand makes my eyes close.
"You don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to." She says it with a finality that feels like a warning.
"I want to. I've been lying in this bed for three days listening to your voice through the walls while you made calls and buried your father and held everything together for everyone, and I want to do something for you. So let me."
I open my eyes.
She's looking at me with her chin up and her hand on my chest and her blue eyes steady. The bruise at her temple has faded to a greenish yellow. Her mouth is soft.
I take her face in both hands and kiss her slowly, tasting the mint of toothpaste and the faint sweetness of juice.
Her fingers curl into my shirt and pull me closer.
She kisses me back with an urgency that wasn't there in her apartment, something hungry and specific, and when her tongue finds mine, I make a sound against her mouth that I'd be embarrassed by if I could think straight.
She pushes my jacket and shirt off my shoulders. I let it fall. Her hands move across my chest, my ribs, the scar she traced with her finger before, and this time she doesn't stop to ask about it. She presses her mouth to it instead.
I pull back just enough to look at her. "The rule still applies. Stop means stop."
"I remember." She reaches for the hem of my shirt she's wearing, the one that's been driving me out of my mind for the last twenty minutes, and pulls it over her head.
She's wearing nothing underneath.
My hands find her waist. I pull her into my lap and she wraps her legs around me, and the heat of her against my stomach makes my vision narrow to just her face, her throat, the line of her collarbone.
I put my mouth there. I press my teeth against the skin, gently, a question, and she arches into me and says "Yes" in a voice that makes my blood feel like it's on fire.
I lay her back on the bed. I take my time the way I took it the first night, mouth on her throat, her breasts, the strawberry mark on her ribs. She's less tentative this time. Her hands are in my hair, pulling, guiding, and when I reach her stomach she lifts her hips without being asked.
"Nick." My name in her mouth is a sound I will never get enough of. "Please."
I give her what she's asking for. Slow at first, then steady, reading her body the way she read mine in the sedan, with attention and precision, and when she comes it's with my name on her lips and her fingers twisted in the sheets and her back arched off the mattress in a way that makes me want to start all over again.
I kiss my way back up her body. She reaches for my belt.
"Are you sure?" I ask, forehead against hers.
She looks at me with those eyes. "I have never been more sure of anything."
I let her take the belt. I let her take everything. Looking down at her face in the late afternoon light, I understand something my father tried to tell me in his last clear breath.
The thing you love.
This is the thing.
She is the thing.
And I will burn the world to the ground before I let anyone touch her again.