Vowing the Butcher

My grandmother left me the butcher shop, the cleavers, and a rule: never take a Milev's money. My mother broke the rule in 1988, and this week Gregoir Milev walked in with the receipt. He's the family's fixer. He doesn't do wives. He doesn't do explanations. He moved into my back room with a duffel bag and started eating my dinners standing up like a man who's already said no to something. I asked him why the contract says his name instead of the Pakhan's. He asked me if I wanted the cleaver sharpened. Three weeks in, my mother died, and the will told me what the debt actually was. Blood. Mine. His father's hands. I took my grandmother's cleaver and walked into a room I wasn't supposed to come out of. He followed me. A forced marriage mafia romance, told in one voice, from inside the shop.