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“So hard that you’ll feel it for days.”

He lifts my legs until my feet are on the edge of the island. “Look at your pretty cunt,” he says. “All stretched out around my cock.”

He keeps going like this, worshipping me with his dirty words until I can barely breathe.

When my legs begin to tremble, he knows I’m close and changes the angle to hit that spot I’ve come to crave.

When I come, the pressure from the fluid pushes out between us, making a glistening milky mess that tips him over the edge.

Neither one of us needs to be quiet now, and he roars as he fills me. I’m still getting used to the sounds I make. They range from a low mewl to a sharp cry of pleasure and I make every one of them now.

“I’ll never get enough of you,” he says, one hand tangled in my hair, the other holding the base of my back.

In the afternoon, I start on Papa’s box.

Leo brought it over yesterday, along with two suitcases of my clothes and Mama’s teapot, wrapped in a towel. I’d forgotten I’d asked for it. Viktor wanted all of us to go through Papa’s personal papers for the estate. Letters, receipts, anything that might matter. The others put it off. Arina’s too busy. Zhenya says she’ll do it after she’s broken the trust. Evaria cried the one time she tried.

I sit cross-legged on the living room floor in front of the dreadful cream sofa, with my back against it and a cup of tea on the carpet beside me. Caleb’s in the study with his laptop and his phone, talking to Leo in low, quick Russian.

He told me about Riddings last night, before we left the hall. That he’s disappeared. That someone warned him. He told me about the money too. A hundred and twenty thousand dollars through a company in Delaware called Northwind something, into a bank in the Caymans.

He told me first. Before Arina. Before anyone.

He keeps doing that. I don’t think he knows how much it means.

The box is mostly boring. Utility bills. Christmas cards from men I vaguely remember. A program from Arina’s college graduation, folded in half. A photograph of Mama, laughing, in a green dress, that I put carefully to one side. Papa’s appointment diaries going back three years, leather-bound, his blunt handwriting filling every day.

I flip through this year’s. Lunch with Viktor. Dentist. Something I can’t read on the day of Milana’s birthday, crossed out so hard the pen went through the paper.

Then, near the end of August, there’s an entry that makes me stop.

Thursday 28th. 4 p.m. N.

Just that. One letter.

There’s a business card paperclipped to the page.

It’s plain and expensive, with thick cream card and gray lettering. No phone number. No address. Just a name and two words.

Northwind Integrated Solutions.

I sit very still on the floor.

I remember that afternoon. I didn’t, until this second, but now it comes back all at once, like something falling off a high shelf.

A man came to the house. I was in the kitchen making pierogi. It was hot, the end of August, and the back door was open. I heard a car on the gravel and looked out the window. A dark sedan parked right by the front steps, inside the gate. Not out on the road, where Papa’s visitors usually parked.

I remember thinking that was strange. Nobody parked inside the gate unless the gatehouse called up to Papa first. And the phone in the kitchen hadn’t rung. I’d have heard it.

Geoff brought him in. Papa’s head of security. He’s worked for us since before I was born. He walked the man through the front door himself, past the kitchen, down the hall to Papa’s study.

The man was older, with gray hair and a good gray suit. He looked like somebody’s accountant. He glanced into the kitchen as he passed, and saw me at the counter, and smiled. A polite, empty smile.

I took them tea. Papa told me to put it down and go.

Twenty minutes later, I heard Papa shouting. I’d never heard him shout like that. Not even at Zhenya. Then the front door slammed, and the sedan drove away.

That night, Papa locked his study door and didn’t come out until morning.