The Bratva Debt

One debt, two cousins, and a silver locket that has not come off her neck since the day it was put there. Golden scales, still slick with sea water, stick to Raisa Sokolova's forearms as she scrapes the last of the day's catch into the ice bin. The blood has dried brown under her nails. She stopped noticing the smell hours ago: fish guts, brine, the chemical bite of bleach. Sokolova. Office. Now. Misha never says *now*. He says *when you get a minute*. He says *no rush, kid*. He lets her smoke behind the dumpster on her break and once slipped her an extra twenty when the register came up short, because he knew where her money goes. Tonight he is standing in the doorway with his jaw tight and his eyes fixed somewhere past her shoulder, and that means somebody is in the building who does not care about twenty-dollar kindnesses. Her life has taken the shape of corridors she walks down because the doors behind her have already locked. Her father taught her that you do not run from a debt. You only try to make it smaller. Pavel collects without blood, and says so as though it were a mercy. His cousin has been away in Moscow learning the family business and says almost nothing at all, and when Dimitri walks past the desk and leans against the wall behind her chair, not touching, not close enough to touch, the back of her neck prickles anyway. Pavel notices. Pavel notices everything. The locket was pressed into her palm by a mother who said *keep this, it's all I have that's worth anything*, and then walked out the door and did not come back. What is inside it is worth a great deal more than that, and every man in this story is about to find out exactly how much. What follows: a blade between ribs, a brother's reckoning, an informant with a price, a trap built inside another trap, and a cabin where somebody finally says the thing out loud. Will the promise made at that cabin hold when the warehouse doors come open? Or does Raisa settle the last of her mother's debt by learning how to say goodbye?