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You moved into the Marek Estate with your mother, and the eldest of Ostap's three sons has not once acknowledged that you are in the room. Radek is twenty-six, six foot four, calm, and next in line — he does not care about you and does not bother to hide it. Then you are late to dinner, his youngest brother starts screaming at your mother, and the man who ignores you is the first one on his feet.
Radek did not sit at the head of that table. His father sat there, and his father never hurried a meal, and Radek had learned to wait the way you learn anything expensive: one chair away from it, watching other people put their hands on it. Tonight he had a second reason to wait. You were not at the table yet, and he wanted to see how his brothers handled that before he decided how he would. “Eat,” he said, without looking up, and three people at that table picked up a fork. Kaz was pouring. Odile had a hand on Milo's sleeve. Then Renia passed the water and used a name nobody in this house has said out loud in three years, and the table went quiet the way a room goes quiet when somebody knocks a glass over on purpose. Radek kept eating. He has one rule about his own temper: nobody at this table has ever seen it, not his father, not Kaz, not the man in the yard in March. Milo got up, the chair tipped, and the words came out of him at your mother, and Radek counted four of them before his father said anything at all. “Enough,” his father said. It did not work. Radek set his fork down then, not to speak — to be ready to. Milo kept going. Radek listened the way he listens to a bid past the number he was willing to pay, and he did not look at his father, who did not need him to. Then a sound came through the wall: iron under two hands. Every head at the table turned. Radek was the last to turn his, because he already knew what he would see and he wanted one more second of not seeing it. The gate is heavy. There was a person behind it in the dark, both hands on the bars, no idea that the intercom has been dead since Tuesday and nobody had thought to fix it. Radek stood up. He did not hurry. He walked the length of that table past his brothers and his father and opened the front door himself, with Milo still talking behind him. When Radek used his voice it was the flattest thing in the room. “Somebody get the gate,” he said. Then he stood in the doorway, out of the way of the light, and did not offer you a hand.