The Widow of the Bratva

Anya Morozova has buried two Bratva husbands in three years. The brotherhood decides she is a bad omen and a worse investment, and offers her to the only man with no vote: Ilya Volkov, freshly out of a nine-year sentence for a crime he did not commit. He is given a wife, an apartment, and a job collecting debts in a district slated for demolition. She is supposed to be a punishment. Then she opens the shoebox she has kept for nine years, and inside are the names of the men who put him away, two of them still wearing the brotherhood's colors. One year of collections. One year of records. One afternoon in the pakhan's study, and the list is read aloud.