Page 46 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
He is already moving.
I expected him to be already moving. A man like Grigori does not absorb a loss and sit with it. He immediately converts it into the next position, the way water converts an obstacle intoa new direction, and the next position he is moving toward is one where he finds a way to make what I have just built cost me something.
He is going to try.
Elena answers on the second ring.
“Friday,” I tell her. “The ceremony is at six. My estate. Kostya will send you the details this afternoon.”
A pause. “That’s four days.”
“Yes.”
Another pause, shorter. “Alright.”
“Your father’s bills. My financial team will contact you today to confirm the transfer. It will clear before the end of business.”
The silence on her end is different from the others. Longer. When she speaks again, her voice has a quality I have not heard before, something beneath the composure that has nothing to do with composure.
“Thank you,” she says.
“It’s part of the arrangement,” I say, because it is, and because I do not know what else to say to the sound of someone’s relief moving through a phone line at midday on a Saturday.
I hang up and put the phone in my pocket, and stand at the window of my office and look at the city.
Four days.
In four days, Elena Vasquez is going to be my wife and the mother of my heir. The woman who has been sitting outside myoffice for two years without me seeing what was right in front of me is going to be standing inside a life I have spent thirty years building alone.
I think about Grigori and Lev Sorokin in that corridor.
I think about the Marchetti syndicate holding its position and waiting.
I think about spreading forty-three pages of Renko’s testimony on a table and ending Grigori Volkov’s career in front of his own people.
I think about all of it, and then I pick up my phone and call Kostya and tell him to bring me everything we have on Grigori’s movements since this morning, because the wedding is in four days, and I intend to know exactly what he is doing before I stand at that altar.
There is a great deal left to build.
I get back to work.
19
ELENA
Mara doesmy hair at the kitchen table the way she has for every significant occasion in the four years we have lived together, with a cup of coffee going cold beside her, pins held between her teeth, and her full concentration on the sections she is working through.
The morning sits gray and still outside the window. The bodega on the corner already has its lights on. A man across the street is walking a dog that keeps stopping to investigate the base of every lamppost, the man waiting each time with his hands in his pockets, neither of them in any hurry. Two people having an ordinary Friday morning, while in this kitchen, Mara divides my hair into sections, and I sit very still in my good dress and try not to think too hard about where I am going to be in four hours.
“Hold still,” Mara says, through the pins.
“I am holding still.”
I put my hands flat on my thighs and look at the window.
She works in silence. The pins go in one by one, deliberate, unhurried. I watch the gray morning outside. I think aboutRoman standing at the front of a room somewhere on the Upper East Side, waiting for me to walk into it. I think about the ring that is going to be on my finger in four hours. I think about the baby, the reason any of this is happening at all. I press my hands harder against my thighs, and I hold still.
“Done,” Mara says.
