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I feel her orgasm throbbing between my lips and I flick her clit with the tip of my tongue until her thighs clamp around my ears, and her entire body shudders.

“Nikolai!” Her voice slices through the heat in the cozy bedroom, and I lick until the violent shudders give way to gentle twitches.

When her body is limp on the bed, I remove my clothes and stretch out alongside her on my right side. Supporting my weight on my elbow, I kiss her mouth, my erection solid between us as she sucks her taste from my tongue.

“Soon, pchelka,” I murmur. “You’d better be ready for me.”

Vera nestles her face against my neck. “I’ve been ready for you since I saw you on my back step, Nikolai.”

Her alarm goes off at four, and I’m already awake.

I’ve been awake for some time, listening to the radiator knocking in the corner like someone asking politely to be let in. Her apartment has two rooms and a kitchen the width of a hallway, a quilt that someone made by hand, a shelf of cookbooks with broken spines, and on the counter, a teapot with a chip out of the spout.

She slept with her back against my chest and her hand around my wrist, as though she’d decided that if I was going to leave in the night she would at least know about it.

She shuts off the alarm, lies still for one breath, and then is up and moving, soft and quiet, practiced at doing this in the dark. She goes into the bathroom. The water runs.

I get up in my three stages and go into the kitchen. I learn it the way I learn any room. The kettle is on the back burner. The tea is in a tin beside it. The teapot, when I lift it with my right hand, is lighter than it looks, warm under my thumb from the radiator. It feels like learning to walk after a broken leg, or like planting roots, both of which are new to me.

When she comes out with her hair wet and half pinned, the tea is steeping, and I’ve found two cups that match.

She stops in the doorway, radiating something I wish I could bottle. “My grandmother’s teapot,” she says.

“I guessed. I was careful.”

She looks at the pot, then at the two cups. “Nobody’s used it since…”

“I’m sorry, I–”

“No.” She comes and stands beside me at the counter and pours, her shoulder resting against my arm. “No. It’s good. It’s right.”

I kiss her hair, and she stops pouring until I move my mouth away.

“You’ll make me late.” She tilts her face, and I give her another kiss, properly this time.

We drink tea standing up, because there isn’t time to sit. She finishes pinning her hair one-handed with her cup in the other. Then she goes to the bread box, takes out a roll from yesterday, wraps it in a paper napkin and puts it in the pocket of my coat where it hangs by the door.

I can’t remember the last time someone cared enough to feed me, so I eat it later that morning, with Vera’s sugar and honey scent lingering on my skin, and her taste lingering on my lips.

On Thursday afternoon, Maxim’s load reaches Zorin’s dock.

Grisha and I watch it come in from a van with a plumbing company’s name painted on the side. Twenty-two pallets. Full, the way Maxim wanted it. Zorin’s night foreman, the tall one, signs for it himself. He doesn’t check the van. Nobody does.

An hour later, a gray sedan comes in through the yard gate.

It parks beside the office trailer, and Daniel Reed gets out. He looks out of place in the freight yard, his walk rehearsed, his head down, his hands buried in his jacket pockets. Then he goes up, and the door closes behind him.

Grisha lowers the binoculars. “That’s the man from her door.”

“Yes.” I write down the time.

Twenty minutes later, the trailer door opens, and Daniel comes down the steps. Something in him has changed. His shoulders sit differently, and his pace has picked up like he has someplace else he needs to be. He gets back in the gray sedan and sits with both hands on the wheel, looking at nothing for almost a full minute.

Then he drives out through the gate, and Gennady Zorin watches him from the window of the trailer.

“Him or the load?” Grisha asks.

“The load.” Daniel Reed is a problem for later even though my fingers are already twitching towards the gun in my holster at the thought of him going anywhere near Vera.