CHAPTER 20
Siena
His name was Fyodor Sazonov and I had never heard it in my life until the morning Ivan said it in my kitchen.
He was forty-four. He had a wife in Bensonhurst. He had sat in a car outside my sister's building in another city for nineteen days, in rotation with two other men. Kolya put him there on the night he married me and never mentioned it again.
They found him on the Thursday morning in the front seat with his coat done up.
No noise. No damage to the car. Somebody had walked up to the driver's window of a man whose entire job was watching for people who walk up to windows.
Ivan told me standing up, with his hands at his sides. Kolya was in Manhattan, and Ivan had decided I should not hear it from a telephone.
I asked the only question I had. "Bea?"
"Your sister is safe. She is in a car with four of our men, moving, and she has been told there was a gas leak in the building." Ivan's voice didn’t change at all. "She is annoyed about a shift she is missing. She does not know."
I sat down on the kitchen chair.
My body went to work. Blood pressure, airway, what do I have, what do I need. Except there was no body in front of me. Nothing to hold. No hands to put anywhere. So all of it arrived and stood in the room with nowhere to go.
"Was it quick?" I asked.
"Doctor—"
"Ivan. Was it quick?"
"Yes." A pause. "He did not get his hand up."
I had told nineteen families in that hospital that a person died quickly. I said it when it was true and I said it when I wasn’t sure. I’d never once been on the receiving end of it. For whatever it was worth, it did nothing at all.
"Does his wife know?"
"Kolya is with her now."
That was where he was. Not in a war room. Not with the vory. He had gone himself, at seven in the morning, to a house in Bensonhurst.
"There's no message," I said. "Is there. No note, nothing left, nothing taken."
"No."
"Because there doesn't need to be." I heard my own voice go somewhere very cold and level.
"It isn't a threat, Ivan. A threat is a thing you send when you want somebody to change their behavior.
This is a receipt. He's showing us he was there.
That he could have gone up the stairs instead.
That the only reason my sister is alive this morning is that he decided today wasn't the day. "
Ivan said nothing, which was how Ivan agreed.
Weeks. That man sat outside my sister's building for weeks and I didn’t know his name. He was dead because of a decision I made on my first night in this house, with a bullet in my pocket.
I did not cry. I hadn’t been able to cry since I was sixteen, except once, for a man singing badly in a kitchen. It did not come when I call it.
Kolya got home at four.
He came up to the council room and stood in the doorway, still wearing the coat. He had the particular exhaustion that comes from four hours of being looked at by somebody whose life you have ruined.
"She has two boys," he said. "Eleven and six."
"I know. Ivan told me."
"She asked me whether he suffered. I said no." He put his hands in his pockets. "I don’t know whether that is true. I’ve never known. I say it because it’s the only thing anyone can do with the question."
Then he said, "Bea is being moved tonight. Not to me. Somewhere with no Volkov on the paper anywhere, and four men who have never worked this house. It is the safest thing I can build and I would like you to tell me if it is not enough."
"It's enough."
"Siena."
"It's enough, Kolya." I put the pen down. "You have been better to my sister than I have. You put a man on her before I thought to ask and I have spent nineteen days not knowing his name."
He crossed the room and crouched down in front of my chair, so that I was looking down at him. That man does not do that.
"Fyodor Sazonov," he said. "Say it once. Then you will have said it, and you can stop trying to work out whether you are allowed to."
So, I said it. Then I put my hands over my face, in front of my husband, in the middle of the afternoon. I stayed there about a minute. He held on to my wrists and did not tell me it was not my fault.
Anyone else would have said it. He knelt on the floor and let it be exactly as much my fault as it was.
At nine that night I went to find him. He was in his study with two telephones and a map and the door open. I stood in it until he looked up.
"I need you to take this off me," I said.
He put the phone face down. "Say it plainly."
"I have been running a room since seven o'clock this morning.
" My voice stayed steady.. "I've made nine decisions today about a man I never met.
I've decided what my sister gets told. I've decided what to do about a garage in Gravesend.
I have decided, twice, not to be sick. And I cannot put any of it down, because there is nothing in this house heavy enough to hold it. "
He stood up. "Tell me exactly what you want."
"I want to not be the one deciding." I made myself hold his eyes. "For an hour. That's all. I want somebody else to hold the whole weight of it and I want it to be you. I'm asking in words because I know what you're like, and I don't want you standing in a doorway waiting to be told."
He came around the desk.
"Then I need three things," he said. "You will tell me if you want it to stop, and I will stop, and it will not cost you a single thing. You will not thank me afterward. And you will not apologize to me at any point for needing this."
"Agreed."
"Say the third one back to me."
"I won't apologize for needing it."
"Good." His hand came up and closed around my nape, and everything in my spine let go at once. "Upstairs. Do not speak on the way."
I did not speak.
He took his time. Ten minutes in, I understood. The refusal was the entire point.
He undressed me standing in the middle of the room. He put every piece of it on the chair, folded. For some reason, that undid me more than anything he did with his hands. Then he sat me on the edge of the bed. He knelt and took my shoes off, one and then the other, with his head bent.
"Lie back."
I obeyed.
He tied my wrists to the headboard with a length of silk. He checked it twice with two fingers under the knot. He made me pull against it to prove I couldn't get free. Then he stood at the end of the bed and looked at me for a long moment without touching me at all.
"You are not deciding anything for an hour," he said. "Not one thing. If you try, I will stop and we will wait until you stop trying."
"Yes."
"Da. Say it in mine."
"Da."
Then he took me apart.
He did it slowly and in order, the way I closed a chest. Mouth first, at my throat, at the inside of my elbow, at every place I have never once been touched with any patience.
He put his hands flat on my ribs and held them there until my breathing came down to meet his.
He got to my breasts eventually and stayed there far longer than a man usually does.
The ache of it went from good to unbearable. I made a sound I had no control over.
I could not touch him. That was the whole architecture of it. My hands were tied and my job was gone and there was nothing left for me to run.
"Kolya."
"No."
He moved down. He put his mouth on my clit and worked me with his tongue. I came the first time with my hands pulling against the tie and my heels on his back. He did not stop. I came a second time about ninety seconds later, shaking, saying things I have no memory of.
"Again."
"I can't," I whined.
"You can, and you are not deciding tonight." His voice came from between my thighs, dead level. "That is the arrangement."
I came a third time and cried through it. Properly, this time, with noise, the way I hadn’t done since I was sixteen. He stayed exactly where he was and let it happen. He didn’t say one word about it.
Then he came up over me and pushed his cock inside me and held still, with his forehead down on mine. I was so far past organizing anything that I would have agreed to whatever he said.
"Moya," he said.
"Yours."
"Look at me."
I met his gaze.
He moved slowly and did not let me look away. When I came the last time it was with his name in my mouth. Shaking, under a man I had asked to hold it for me.
Afterward, he untied my wrists and rubbed the feeling back into both of them, one at a time, with his thumbs, checking the skin.
He got a wet cloth and cleaned me up. He put a shirt of his own on me and did up three of the buttons himself.
He brought water and made me drink all of it and then brought more.
Then he got into the bed and pulled me onto him. He put his hand flat between my shoulder blades and held it there.
"Say his name once more," he said, into my hair.
"Fyodor Sazonov."
"Fyodor Sazonov," he said. "Forty-four. Nineteen days outside a building in another city for a woman he never met."
Then he sang three lines of his mother's song, badly, in the dark.
I’d spent my entire life being the one who holds. Until that room, I had it backwards. Being held was what made the holding survivable.
Four weeks ago I would have called this house a cage and meant it.
I fell asleep in it, on him, with my wrists still marked. I had never in my life felt safer than I did in the exact center of the most dangerous place I’d ever been.
That should have frightened me a great deal more than it did.