CHAPTER 15
Kolya
We buried Timofey on the Thursday.
The wake ran until two. Ninety men in my mother's house, every one of them wanting a minute. I gave all of them that time. I put my hand on shoulders. I said the words. I stood at the door for two hours and let each of them look at me and find the hand steady.
Siena worked the room from the other end of it.
Nobody asked her to. She had put on black and gone in among them.
My heart tugged at how easily she stepped into the role and because she did it so genuinely.
By midnight she had found Timofey's brother and sat with him for forty minutes.
She had taken his daughter out of that crowd to a quiet room upstairs.
With a plate of food nobody else had thought to give her.
Ivan told me, otherwise I wouldn’t have known. My wife did not report her good deeds or leverage them. She did them because she believed someone needed to and she was never wrong.
By two, the house had emptied. Siena and I were left in the kitchen with the plates and the cold food. Neither of us had the appetite or the energy to be anywhere else.
I got the bottle of good vodka out of the freezer. My father's brand, the one he kept for men he liked and never once opened for an Orlov.
"Sit," I said.
She did,
I poured two and put one in front of her. She looked at it suspiciously. "I don't drink much."
"Tonight you do."
"Is that an order?"The corner of her mouth lifted, then she pretended not to check me out.
"It is a recommendation from a man who has been to a great many of these."
She drank it. She did it properly, in one, and did not cough, and set the glass down and pushed it two inches toward the bottle. I refilled it.
"He was teaching me the names," she said.
"Ivan said that."
"There are nine men who work the doors and I could not tell them apart in the first week.
It was making me stupid, and I hate being stupid.
" She turned the glass. "Timofey took me around and introduced me.
Every one of them. He made them say it twice so I'd have it.
Stepan on the east gate has a daughter starting school.
Mikhail's mother is sick. Oleg wants to be a chef, which I am not supposed to know, because they laugh at him. "
I sat with that.
Fifteen days she had been in this house. In that time, my wife had learned more about the men on my doors than I had troubled to learn in six years. She learned it because a dead man walked insisted, for no reason except that she asked.
"Say something," she said.
"I did not know Oleg wants to be a chef."
"No." She almost smiled. "You didn't."
"I’ve known him nine years."
"I know." She said it without any edge at all, which was worse. "It isn't a criticism. You have been running a war since you were thirty-four. Nobody who is running a war asks a man about his mother."
We drank in silence. Somewhere a door, somewhere a car, the specific creak of the third stair that everybody in this building steps over without thinking.
Then she said, "Take your jacket off."
I looked at her.
"You've been in it since seven this morning and you're sitting like a man with a sore shoulder." Her voice went flat and clinical. "Take it off. I want to look at you. You have been favoring the left side for two days and I have said nothing because there were ninety men in the house."
"It is nothing."
"Then it will take me ten seconds to agree with you."
I took the jacket off. Then, because she waited, the shirt.
She came round the table and put her hands on me, and they were a doctor's hands for about four seconds. Then her fingers softened and explored. I barely quieted a moan at the contact. She was touching me because she wanted to, offering me kindness and warmth I hadn’t asked for and didn’t realize I was missing until right now.
There was an old scar under the left scapula where a man got closer than he should have when I was thirty-one. She found it. She worked her thumb along the muscle beside it. The joint was fine, she said, and the muscle was locked. Then she went quiet.
She had stopped looking at the scar and started looking at the ink.
"Can I ask?" she whispered.
"You can ask."
Her fingers went to the stars at my collarbones. She didn‘t touch them. She held her hand a half inch off my skin and traced the shape in the air, which was a great deal worse than her touch. I already missed it and hated that I knew that.
"These are the same on both sides."
"Vor stars. They mean I kneel to nobody." I heard how it sounded in that kitchen. "I was twenty-two. I had them done in a room over a laundry by a man who is dead now."
"And this?" The cathedral across the shoulder.
"Domes are years. There are eleven."
She counted them. Out loud, under her breath. She got to eleven and stopped with her fingertips resting on the last one.
"You were inside for eleven years."
"No. Four." I found I was telling her all of it, which I had not decided to do. "The rest are my father's. He did his own eleven before I was born. He did not live long enough for anyone to put them on him properly. So I carry them. It is not how it is done. I did not ask permission."
Her hand stayed where it was. "You put your father's prison on your own back."
"Yes."
"Kolya."
"It is only ink."
"It is not only ink and you know it." Her voice caught on the last word. She stopped, and started again. "Sorry. That wasn’t a question and I said I would ask questions."
"Ask."
"What's this one?" Low on the ribs, small, older-looking than the rest, badly done.
"That one is not a Bratva mark." I had to think about how to say it.
"My mother used to sing when Dima and I were small.
Every night, the same one, always the last three lines because she could never remember the beginning of it.
When she died I was seventeen. I had two lines of it put on me by a boy with a sewing needle, in a basement.
So it would be somewhere I could not lose it. "
Siena's hand had gone still on my ribs. "What does it say?"
"Spi, moy mal'chik." I have not said it aloud since I was seventeen. "Sleep, my boy."
She did not say anything. She kept her hands exactly where they were and let the silence hold it.
Then she said, very quietly, "Sing it."
"No."
"Kolya."
"I do not sing."
"I've watched you kneel on a kitchen floor with a man's blood on your hands. You can sing three lines."
After sighing, I sang three lines of my mother's song. Badly. In a kitchen at two in the morning, to a woman I had married at gunpoint.
When I finished, she was crying. Without any sound, and without any apparent involvement in it. The way she does everything that costs her.
"Siena."
"I'm fine. Don't." She wiped her tears with the heel of her hand, furious with herself. "It's the vodka and it's a funeral and I have not slept properly in days."
"Da."
"And a man taught me the names of nine people last Tuesday and on Thursday I helped his brother carry him."
"Yes."
She stood in front of me with her hands still on my ribs. Neither of us moved. The whole thing turned over in the air between us, the way a coin turns coming down.
"I said I wasn't going to do this," she said.
"You did."
"I said not until it was over. Not with a gun in the room."
"I remember exactly what you said."
"I want you to hear me say the rest of it, then.
" Her reckless courage never once failed her and it had never once been anything but the most dangerous thing in any room she is in.
"There might not be an over. That's what today was.
Timofey had a Thursday routine and a daughter and a place he always parked.
He was going to do the rest of it later.
I'm not waiting for later. That's not surrender, and don't you dare take it as one.
I've thought about it for twelve days and I'm choosing it now, in a kitchen, sober enough to mean it. "
"You have had three."
"I've had two and I could recite the branches of the celiac trunk backwards." Her mouth moved. "Try again."
I put my hand on her face gently, stroking her cheek bone, while my forefinger followed her jaw Her breath went out of her. A seam that had been holding for fifteen days went quietly in me.
"Say it," she said. "Say something so I know you're not being noble at me."
"I have wanted you since you walked out of that corridor with my brother alive on your hands.
" My voice wasn’t steady. "I have wanted you every hour since.
I refused you twice and both times it took everything I have.
If you are choosing this, milaya, then choose it now, because I have nothing left to refuse you with. "
"I'm choosing it."
"Say my name."
"Kolya."
I kissed her.
The hallway had been two people running from a gun. This was slow, and deliberate, and neither of us was going anywhere. Her hands came up into my hair. She made a small sound against my mouth. It went all the way down through me. I was finished as a man who could think about anything but her.
I got her up onto the table.
Siena laughed, once, shocked out of her, and then stopped laughing when I got her knees apart and stood between them.
The black dress went up over her thighs.
My hands went under it. My mouth went to her throat.
She tipped her head back and gave it to me.
I couldn’t survive that surrender. A woman who has spent her whole life refusing to be handled gave me her throat.
"Upstairs," I said, against her skin. "I am not doing this on a table."
"You were going to."
"I was. Upstairs."
I carried her. She protested exactly once, in the doorway, on principle, and then put her mouth under my jaw and stopped protesting.
In my room I set her down. I caught her zipper and let the dress go. Then I stood back, looked at her, and did not touch her.e I wanted this memory to be accurate.
"Say something," she said. "You're making me nervous."
"I am trying to decide where to start."
"That's a terrible answer."
"It is the true one."
I took my time. I had waited fifteen days and I was not going to hurry any part of this to spare myself.
I put my mouth on every place she had spent her life pretending she didn’t need touched.
The inside of the wrist, where a surgeon's pulse lives.
The bend of the elbow. The line under her ribs, where her breathing went uneven under my mouth.
I got her out of the rest of it slowly. I made her say when she wanted more.
She hated that. She said it anyway. By the time my mouth found her clit she had stopped being able to be embarrassed about any of it.
She came the first time with her fist in my hair and my name coming out of her broken in the middle. "Kolya. Kolya."
"Again."
"I can't."
"You can," I insisted before taking the time to prove it.
She could.
Then she got a hand in my hair and pulled me up her body. She told me exactly what she wanted, even when she lost her steady calm. What was left of my control went out like a candle.
"Now. I want you now. I want to feel it," she decided.
"Wait." I got my forehead down on hers. "There is a thing to say first."
"I have an implant, it's been in fourteen months, and I have not been with anyone in two years." Fast, level, a doctor clearing a checklist. "And you?"
"Nobody since before my father died. Tested in March."
"Good." Her hands came to my face. "Then don't make me ask twice."
I pushed my cock into her slowly. She made a sound I had not heard from her before, and would be hearing for the rest of my life. I stopped there, buried in her, holding still, because if I moved in that moment it would have been over.
She put both hands flat on my chest. "Look at me."
I looked did. Her, under me, dirty blonde hair everywhere, mouth open. Her blue eyes dead steady, looking straight up at me while everything else in her came apart.
"Moya," I said.
I did not decide to say it. It came up out of a place I do not have access to, in a language she does not speak. It left my mouth and I could not call it back.
She didn’t know the word. She knew the weight of it. Her whole body answered before her mind could.
"What does that mean?"
"Mine." My voice was gone. "It means mine."
"Say it again."
So I said it again, and then I moved, and after that there was nothing in the world but her.
Afterward she lay across me with her ear over my heart and one leg thrown over mine. We did not speak for a long time.
"Your heart's fast," she said eventually.
"You are a doctor. That is your fault."
"Mm." Her thumb moved once on my sternum. "Kolya."
"Da."
"Sing it again."
I did. Three lines, badly, in the dark, with my hand in her hair. She was asleep before I finished, which I think was the point.
I lay in the dark under the weight of my wife, in a house I have run since I was thirty-four. I let myself have exactly four minutes of it. The whole four. I counted them. Then I put my hand on her back and did the sum I had been holding off since Tuesday.
Yuri would reach for her inside two weeks. Everything I knew about him said so.
I was going to let him get close enough to try, because that was the only way to catch him. I had just made it worse in the only way that mattered.
Fifteen days ago I could have told myself she was a witness I was keeping alive.
I looked at the top of her head in the dark and could not make that sentence work anymore.