Epilogue
LEV
A year and a half ago, I walked out of my father’s compound and found Polina running toward me on an empty road, and I haven’t slept alone since.
Our baby came seven months later.
A girl, which Ruslan was inexplicably thrilled about.
We named her Vera, which means faith, which Polina chose and which I would have agreed to regardless because she suggested it at three in the morning while she was in the hospital bed with Vera on her chest, and there was nothing in the world I was going to argue with at that moment.
She’s nine months old now, and she has Polina’s eyes.
I think about that sometimes when I’m standing over her crib in the dark, which I do more than I’ll admit to anyone except Ruslan, who caught me once and had the good sense to say nothing.
The rest of her, according to everyone at the compound, entirely mine.
She reaches for everything within arm’s length.
She has no fear of anything, which Polina says skipped a generation and I say is accurate.
The apartment is near the hospital, two floors, good bones, and considerably more toys than I anticipated owning by my mid-thirties.
Polina runs trauma. She also runs the clinic she established at the compound for family members who can’t seek treatment through normal channels, which started as two afternoons a week and has become, through some combination of need and Polina’s inability to leave a problem half-solved, something closer to a full operation.
She doesn’t complain about this. She does make very specific faces when I point it out, which I have started doing less.
My own work has settled into something routine.
Dmitri runs a tighter organization now, and my knowledge of how the Morozov side operated has proved more valuable to him than either of us initially estimated.
I sit in the rooms I should sit in, I run the operations I’m assigned, and Ruslan moves alongside me as he always has, with the loyalty of a man who followed me into enemy territory for reasons I can’t fully explain and has never once asked for anything in return.
He bought Vera a stuffed bear the size of a small ottoman. I chose not to comment on that either.
This is what the other side of it looks like: ordinary, in all the best ways.
Tonight, though, is not ordinary. Tonight is Daria and Pyotr’s wedding.
The venue is a restored estate south of Moscow that Dmitri arranged, and the family has gathered in its entirety for the first time since the Morozov threat went quiet.
No security briefings this evening. No satellite maps spread across conference tables.
Just the whole chaotic, armed, improbably warm collection of people I have somehow found myself belonging to.
Polina is three tables away with Katya and Sasha, and I’ve been watching her the way I always watch her in rooms full of people while maintaining the appearance of doing something else.
She’s wearing a deep burgundy dress and the gold bracelet her mother gave her, and she’s laughing at something Sasha said with her head tipped back.
Nine months of interrupted sleep and a surgical schedule that would break most people, and she looks like that.
I take a sip of my drink and accept that I’m a completely compromised person.
Kira, Daria’s daughter, has appointed herself official flower petal distributor and is working the reception.
She’s already targeted three of Boris’s men, who bore it with more grace than I expected, and she stopped at Vera’s pram long enough to scatter petals over my sleeping daughter with great ceremony before moving on.
Now she’s advancing on Ruslan, who sees her coming and doesn’t move, because he has clearly made peace with certain inevitabilities over the last year.
She buries him in petals. He looks at me across the room with an expression I can only describe as dignified suffering.
I look away before I laugh at him.
Daria and Pyotr take the floor for the first dance, and the room goes quiet. Pyotr holds her like she means everything to him, and Daria has the face of a woman who never expected to be this happy and has not yet fully trusted it. I understand that.
Polina appears at my side without my noticing, which she considers a source of personal pride. She takes the glass from my hand, drinks from it without asking, and returns it.
Polina settles against my side, and I put my hand on her stomach the way I always do now even though she isn’t pregnant anymore, without thinking about it, the way you reach for something you want to confirm is real. She covers it with hers.
On the floor, Daria laughs at something Pyotr whispers, and the sound carries over the music. Kira has found a new target in the form of Alexei, who is accepting this with a patience that surprises me until I remember that he has a toddler of his own at home and has probably developed a tolerance.
“Happy?” Polina asks.
“Yes,” I admit, and I mean it without qualification, which is not a thing I had much practice with before her.
She tilts her face up and looks at me with those gold-flecked eyes.
The candlelight does things to them that I haven’t gotten used to, and I’ve had over a year to practice.
I lean down and kiss her once, soft and brief, which she accepts with the small sound she makes when she doesn’t want to admit she was waiting for it.
“Don’t get smug,” she says against my mouth.
“Too late.”
She laughs, and we stay like that for a moment, and I think about the road I walked down eighteen months ago with blood on my hands and my ears ringing, and the woman running toward me at the other end of it.
There was no version of my life, in any plan I ever made, where this was the outcome.
A wedding reception with my daughter. A woman at my side who argues with me about tea and saves lives before noon and carries my child.
I’m holding that last thought when Boris appears at Dmitri’s shoulder.
The change is immediate. Boris doesn’t interrupt Dmitri at celebrations unless it can’t wait, and Dmitri reads his face. They move to the edge of the room together, and I watch without letting Polina see me do it, because she’s been watching Daria dance and I don’t want to pull her out of it yet.
Alexei notices too. He’s on his feet before Boris has said three sentences, which tells me whatever is being said is not something you stay seated for.
Polina’s attention follows mine. She’s a Kozlov, which means she reads a room the way I read threat assessments, and she’s already tracking Dmitri’s face from across the reception hall.
“What’s that all about?” she asks in a whisper.
“I don’t know yet.”
Dmitri says something to Boris. Boris pulls out his phone and types. Dmitri turns to Alexei and speaks two sentences, and Alexei’s expression goes dangerously blank.
The people nearest to them notice. The noticing moves outward like water from a dropped stone, and conversations drop in volume one table at a time until the whole room is aware that something has happened.
Pyotr and Daria stop dancing. Polina reaches under the table and takes my hand. She doesn’t say anything. She holds on.
Boris makes his way across the room and puts his phone in Dmitri’s hand.
Dmitri looks at the screen, and whatever he sees there drains the color from his face in a way I have never once witnessed in eighteen months of working beside him.
Alexei looks over his shoulder, and his expression goes to the same place.
Every person at the table reaches for a weapon or a phone.
It’s automatic, the ingrained response of people who have learned that news which arrives without warning at a family celebration carries nothing worth celebrating.
I stay where I am, reading the room, waiting for information, running the angles.
Polina squeezes my hand.
Dmitri sets the phone on the table slowly, and when he looks up, he looks at every person at the table in turn, and the weight of what he’s about to say lands before the words do.
“A man is at the compound gates,” he explains . “He claims to be Matvey Kozlov. My father’s brother.”
The room erupts.
I don’t move. Polina doesn’t move. I feel her fingers tighten around mine. We both know the same thing—that whatever comes next will change everything, because it always does, and we have survived enough of those to know that surviving them is what we do.
When I get a look at the photograph, I must admit, the resemblance is undeniable. But this man was reported dead in prison twenty years ago. If he’s alive, he holds a claim to a position in a family that has just finished burying one war and hasn’t finished counting the cost of it.
Dmitri rubs his fingers over his lips and stares at the table.
Polina takes Vera and settles our daughter against her shoulder. Vera grabs a fistful of burgundy fabric and holds on.
I watch Dmitri across the table and think that eighteen months ago, I would have read this as an opening. A vulnerability. A pressure point to exploit. His standing as pakhan is officially in question. Any enemy would have a field day with this information.
Instead I lean forward, rest my forearms on the table, and ask, “What do you need?”