Ruthless Ledger (The Volkov Ledger #1)

Chapter 1

Vera

Everyone at this funeral thinks I’m crying for my father. I let them.

Grief is the easiest costume I own. It fits over anything — even a plan six years in the making. So I let the tears come on cue, let my shoulders fold in like a broken girl’s shoulders are supposed to fold, and I keep my eyes down where a grieving daughter’s eyes belong.

The funeral is six years late. The city buried what was left after the crash, but the brotherhood refused him its rites, his name, and the Sokolov family ground while it called him a thief.

Last month Grigori approved an exhumation and reburial without explaining why.

Mercy, he called it. Bait, I called it. They wanted the last Sokolov standing where they could see her before they collected the debt. I came because bait works both ways.

Down is a good angle. From down here I can count the room.

Seventeen mourners. Four exits. Two men at the back who aren’t mourning anything.

The church smells of incense and cold lilies I didn’t choose.

Someone chose them for me. Someone always chooses for the Sokolov girl now — the flowers, the black dress, the debt.

My father is in the box at the front, closed lid, because the men who arranged his accident did not leave a face worth showing.

I know this. I was made to know this. And still I press a knuckle to my mouth like the knowing is fresh, because the performance is the point, and the performance has an audience.

The Volkov men stand along the back wall in their black coats like a row of well-dressed threats.

I don’t look at them. I feel them — as you feel a draft from a door you can’t see.

Four of them. The young ones hold their hands folded low, jackets cut to hide what the jackets are hiding.

They came to a funeral armed. Of course they did.

Men like this don’t stop being what they are just because God is watching.

And at the center of them, one man who doesn’t fold his hands at all.

Nikolai Volkov.

I know him as you know a storm before it reaches the coast — by the way everything else goes quiet first. The priest’s voice thins.

The old women stop their whispering. Even the candle flames seem to sit up straight.

He hasn’t moved, hasn’t spoken, and the whole room has already rearranged itself around him.

Pakhan. Forty. The man who signed the paper that made me an orphan.

He thinks he’s here to collect a debt.

He has no idea he’s the one being collected.

I let my gaze drift up — slow, wet, unfocused, the look of a girl who isn’t really seeing anything — and I let it catch on him for exactly as long as an innocent would let it catch. A second. Less. Long enough to be caught, not long enough to mean anything.

He’s already watching me.

Gray eyes. Not cold as winter is cold — cold like a scalpel is cold, clean and interested and entirely without apology.

There’s a scar I can barely see along the left line of his jaw, a pale seam a lesser man would grow a beard to hide.

He doesn’t hide it. He doesn’t hide anything, and that is the most dangerous thing about him.

A man who hides nothing has decided the truth can’t hurt him.

We’ll see about that.

He looks at me as I imagine he looks at a room full of guests when he’s already decided which one gets buried first. Not cruelly. Just — sorting. Weighing. Filing me under a heading I can’t read from here.

I give him the heading I want him to have.

I let my chin tremble. I let my eyes fill and spill, one tear down the left cheek, timed.

I look like a lamb. I have practiced looking like a lamb in the mirror of a locked bathroom for six years, since I was sixteen and understood, all at once, that grief without a plan is just noise.

My father taught me numbers before he taught me prayers. He used to say a ledger never lies — people lie, but the column always tells the truth if you know how to read it. He didn’t know he was training a weapon. He thought he was raising a daughter who’d be safe because she’d be useful.

He was half right.

The priest says my father’s name. Anatoly Sokolov.

He says it as you’d say the name of a stranger — carefully, like it might be a trap.

Everyone in this church knows what my father was.

Bookkeeper. Not of ledgers you’d find in any office.

Keeper of the obshchak — the common fund, the blood-money artery of a brotherhood that does not forgive a missing dollar.

And everyone in this church has been told the same tidy story: Anatoly stole from the fund.

Anatoly ran. Anatoly died for it, in a car that left the road on a dry night.

I was there when they told my mother. I watched her believe it. I watched it hollow her out until there was nothing left to bury but a woman who happened to still be breathing. She’s gone too, now, in the quiet way grief takes people who stop arguing with it.

I didn’t stop arguing.

My father did not steal. My father counted — that was his sin. He saw a number that shouldn’t have been there, and someone made sure he’d never say it out loud. I don’t have proof. Not yet. Proof is buried inside the Volkov empire, in a locked room, in a ledger only one person alive can read.

Me.

So I’m going to go inside.

I’m going to let them think they’re dragging me. I’m going to be so light in their hands they’ll forget I have weight at all.

The service ends as these things end — with the men who arranged the death carrying the casket, faces solemn, palms steady.

I follow. I keep my eyes on the floor and my hand on the small gold cross at my throat, which is not a cross, which is a thing my father gave me that isn’t what it looks like either.

We come from a family of things that aren’t what they look like.

Outside, the December air is a slap. Brighton Beach in winter — gray sky, gray water somewhere past the low buildings, the smell of salt and exhaust and someone frying something four doors down because grief doesn’t stop anyone from being hungry.

They’re waiting for me by the cars. Black cars. Of course.

And he detaches from them and comes to me himself.

That’s the first thing that isn’t in my plan. I expected a lieutenant. A messenger. A folded set of instructions delivered by a man who wouldn’t meet my eyes. Powerful men send other men to do their collecting; that’s what the power is for.

But Nikolai Volkov crosses the wet pavement toward me alone, and the row of well-dressed threats stays exactly where it is, and I see that this — the coming himself — is a message all its own.

He stops close. Closer than condolence. Close enough that I have to lift my chin to hold the fiction of eye contact, and I hate — hate — the small honest thing my body does when I do. A skip. A catch. Somewhere under the costume, a pulse I did not authorize.

Interesting.

I keep it. I’ll deal with it later, as I deal with every variable I don’t like: I’ll take it apart until it stops being a surprise.

“Miss Sokolova.” His voice is low and unhurried, a voice that has never once in its life needed to be raised. “My condolences.”

“Thank you,” I whisper. I make the word small. I force myself to small, all folded edges and downcast lashes, the picture of a girl who doesn’t know she’s standing in front of the Pakhan who ordered her whole life burned down.

“Your father,” he says, “was a careful man.”

He watches me when he says it. Not how a mourner watches. The way a man watches a coin he’s about to flip, curious which face comes up.

Careful. Not good. Not loyal. Not even sorry for your loss, he was one of ours. He’s chosen the one word that is also a question, and he’s set it down between us on the wet ground to see if I’ll pick it up.

I don’t. Not yet. Amateurs answer the question they’re asked. I’ve spent six years learning to answer only the questions that serve me.

“He was,” I say, and let my voice break clean in half on the second word, and look away toward the water like the grief is too big to hold his gaze through.

Silence. Wind. The far cry of a gull.

When I look back he’s still watching me, and something has shifted behind the gray — some small recalculation, a number moved from one column to another. He wanted a reaction and I gave him one. He just isn’t sure it was the true one.

Good. Let him not be sure. Uncertainty is the only soil my kind of plant grows in.

“There’s a matter of your father’s debt,” he says. “We’ll speak of it. Not today.” A beat. “Soon.”

“I understand,” I whisper, and I do — better than he knows. I understand exactly what the debt is, and exactly what shape the payment takes when a brotherhood decides a daughter is the only asset a dead traitor left behind.

I see that he thinks he’s about to buy something.

He opens the car door for me himself — another message, another crack in the script I built for this man in my head — and as I move past him I catch it: leather, cold vodka, gun oil, and under all of it something clean and expensive, the scent of a man who can afford to smell like restraint.

I slide into the dark of the car. He shuts the door. Through the tinted glass I watch him turn back to his row of well-dressed threats, already the Pakhan again, already sorting the next thing.

He thinks he found the loose thread of a dead man’s mistake.

He thinks he’s holding the leash.

They all think I’m the lamb.

He has no idea he’s the one being led to the slaughter.