The Widow He Inherited

They dressed her in white as if it were a color she still had a right to, and Katya Reznik let them, because the alternative was to argue, and she had learned a long time ago that argument was a currency her father spent on her behalf and never in her favor.

The car came at nine. Two men she didn't know sat in the front and didn't speak to her, which suited her. She watched the city slide past the tinted glass — the wet gray river, the shuttered fronts of businesses that belonged to men like the one she was being given to, a closed restaurant with butcher paper taped over its windows where she knew, the way you know weather, that decisions got made about people like her. Her hands lay folded in her lap over a bouquet someone had chosen. White roses. She hadn't been asked. She hadn't been asked about any of it, and that was rather the entire point of the day.

The cathedral rose out of the morning like something built to outlast everyone climbing its steps. Katya got out of the car without waiting for a hand, because no one had offered one and because she preferred to owe nothing, not even a steadying grip. The wind off the river went straight through the thin white fabric. She did not shiver. There were men on the steps in dark coats — Tarasov men, her father's men, the two kinds indistinguishable from the outside, which she supposed was the joke the alliance was built on — and she gave every one of them the same thing as she passed: nothing. Not fear, not deference, not the small hunted glances they were watching for. Let them wonder what she was made of. Let it cost them a night's sleep to find out.

Her father met her at the top and did not look at her face. "You'll do well by us," he said, which was the closest he had come in twenty-three years to saying anything that touched her personally, and even that was about the family.

"I always have," Katya said. "It's just never been called doing well before."

His jaw worked. He was afraid of these people — she could see it in the way he stood too straight, the way a man stands when he's aware of the arithmetic and knows he's on the wrong side of the ledger. That was what she was here to correct. A daughter handed over to settle what money couldn't. A signature in a wedding dress.

Inside, the cathedral was cold and enormous and smelled of stone and old incense and the cut stems of too many flowers. Candlelight didn't warm it; it only made the dark spaces darker. Perhaps two dozen people, no more, arranged in the front pews like witnesses to a contract, which was what they were. Katya walked the long aisle alone, unhurried, the way she did everything she was made to do, because the pace was the only part of it that belonged to her.

Maxim Tarasov waited at the altar.

She had met him twice. He was handsome in the way of a man who had never once doubted he would get what he wanted — broad, easy, a smile that arrived a half-second before it was earned. The elder brother. The heir. He looked at her coming toward him with a proprietary satisfaction that told her everything about the marriage she was walking into, and she filed it away without heat, the way she filed everything, into the long cold drawer where she kept the facts of her life.

"You clean up," Maxim murmured when she reached him, low enough for only her.

"So does a knife," Katya said, and watched the smile falter, and counted it a small private victory in a day that would afford her no others.

The priest began. Old words in the old language, the language her grandmother had used for curses and for prayers as though they were the same effort, and perhaps at the altar they were. Katya let the sound wash over her without meaning. Somewhere behind her the doors had been closed. Somewhere far to the south a man she would never meet, the one they all leaned toward without saying his name, was letting this happen by not making a phone call to stop it — the pakhan who governed the whole cold kingdom by proxy and kept his own hands clean of every wedding and every grave. His silence was the only blessing this union would get.

She was aware of the brother before she understood why.

He stood off the altar, apart from the family, near the side of the sanctuary where the shadows pooled deepest — younger than Maxim, leaner, entirely still in a room full of men shifting their weight and checking their watches. He was not watching the priest. He was watching the room. Watching the doors, the high windows, the sightlines, the way a man watches a thing he does not trust to stay quiet. Katya's eye caught on him for reasons she couldn't name and then the priest asked Maxim to speak, and Maxim opened his mouth to say the words that would make her a wife —

The window came apart.

There was no drama to it, which was the thing she would remember. Not a roar, not a scream. A flat hard crack from somewhere high and outside, glass letting go in a bright cheap shower, and Maxim Tarasov stopped talking. He stopped as if he'd forgotten the word. A small dark bloom opened at his throat, above the collar, almost delicate, and he touched it the way you'd touch a spot of spilled wine on a good shirt — puzzled, irritated — and then his knees weren't under him anymore and he went down against the altar steps, and the white roses that someone had banked along them were suddenly not white at the edges.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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