The Bratva Vow

A silver Zippo engraved with nautical stars sits on the napkin beside her elbow, and it is not hers. Mila picked it up off the floor of the coat check two weeks ago meaning to return it, and now it lies between her sweating glass and her sketchbook like an accusation she cannot name. The Ocean Cove smells of salt and spilled beer and somebody's cigarette burning itself out in an ashtray. The jukebox plays something Russian and mournful, the kind of song her mother used to hum while she scrubbed other people's floors. Thirteen missed calls. All from Anya. *I'm working. Stop calling.* The reply arrives before she can put the phone down. *Please. Just five minutes. I need help.* She has heard that line. Five minutes becomes an hour, becomes three hundred dollars, becomes the kind of favour that earns you a bruised jaw and a warning from men who do not make threats because they make promises instead. The vodka arrives. She drinks half of it in one swallow and feels it settle in her chest like a bad decision she has not made yet. The man at the end of the bar has been watching her since she walked in, and not in the way men in this bar usually watch. Kostya Volkov does not stand when she is finally brought in front of him. A mahogany desk, two leather chairs, a decanter catching the light of a single lamp, no windows and no family photographs anywhere. *Miss Petrova. Sit.* *You came alone.* *I don't have anyone to bring.* That sentence is the lie the rest of the book takes apart. What follows is a debt paid in blood and ink, a trap designed with her own drawing hand, knives under a chandelier, a slice of mercy offered at exactly the wrong moment, a rescue with a price on it, and the peculiar loyalty of people who have already been broken once. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. The hours since he kissed her goodbye and told her he would be right back. *You're bleeding, Mila. You said you were going to the bakery.* *I lied.* She walked in with nobody to bring and no one to call. She walks out with people, and a name that means something, and a great deal more to lose, which is the entire trouble with being saved. The lighter still is not hers. She keeps it anyway.