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“Ask me.”

“Ask you what?” she says, lifting the cup and taking a sip of the tea.

“Anything. That’s why we’re here.”

She studies me. Brown eyes, very dark, with flecks of gold near the pupils in the light from the window. She doesn’t look away as fast as I expected.

“What do you actually do?” she asks. “Zhenya says private security, but she said it the way people say import-export.”

I almost smile. “Protection. Risk assessment. Some recovery work. People with money and problems hire me when they don’t want to go to the police, or to their own people.”

“Bratva people?”

“Mostly.”

“And your family? The Reznikovs?”

“My cousin Ivor runs the family business. Mostly in Europe now.” I drink some coffee. “I don’t work for him.”

“Why not?” she asks, her cup clinking back into its seat in the saucer.

I shrug one shoulder. “I don’t work for anyone.”

She takes that in. “Papa must have hated that.”

“He offered me a job four times.”

“And you said no four times.”

Her eyes rove over my face, taking in everything they see. She is thorough about it too, her eyes staying a little longer on the fine silver line of scar that sweeps along the side of my jaw.

“So why marry me?” she asks. “If you don’t work for anyone. If you said no four times to my father. Why say yes to this?”

It’s a fair question, and I’ve been waiting for it since the moment she opened her mouth in her father’s living room.

“I didn’t,” I tell her. “Not at first.”

Her fork stops halfway to the apple cake.

“He came to me in the summer,” I say. “He asked me to marry his daughter. I told him no.”

“Oh.” She sets the fork down. Her cheeks are pink again, but this time it isn’t embarrassment. It looks more like hurt, pressed down flat before it can show. “That’s... okay. I understand. You don’t know me. It’s a strange thing to ask anyone.”

“Galana.”

She looks up.

“I said no to the arrangement. Not to you. I’d never met you.” I lean back in my chair. “Then I met you.”

“You didn’t meet me. Not until today.”

“No,” I agree. “But I’d seen you.”

She frowns. I don’t explain. There’s a version of the truth that I’ll tell her one day, but it isn’t this one, not over apple cake on our first morning.

In April, Yaroslav had a new security system put into the house. Cameras on every door, motion sensors on the grounds, a control room off his study with six screens and software that cost an eye-watering sum of money. The contractor was a man named Daniel Riddings. American, ex-military, very polished, with very good references.

Yaroslav didn’t trust him. Yaroslav didn’t trust anyone. So he paid me to check Riddings’s work.