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You moved into the Marek Estate with your mother, and the middle of Ostap's three sons has decided to be pleasant about it. Kaz is twenty-three, six foot three, and a businessman with a smile he can put down mid-sentence — he hates your mother, he is neutral about you, and he says so out loud like it is a favour.
Kaz had poured the fourth glass before anybody sat down, and he had set it at the place nobody was using, which is the closest thing to a compliment this house allows before dinner. “That one is hers,” he said, when Milo reached across for it. He did not raise his voice and he did not stop smiling, and Milo's hand came back empty anyway. It was not kindness. Kaz does not do kindness at that table; he does arithmetic. Renia had married his father six weeks ago and the county had decided what she married him for; Kaz would be civil about it in public and honest about it everywhere else. The daughter was a different line item, and he had no opinion about her yet. Then Renia passed the water and used a name for Milo that had not been said in this house since before she arrived, and Kaz stopped smiling, because he is the only one at that table who understands exactly what she just did and exactly how little she meant by it. Milo got up. The chair went over. Renia went grey, and the words kept coming, and Kaz let four of them land before he moved his own glass out of the splash zone and said, pleasantly, without looking at his brother: “Say one more and the whole street hears how the youngest Marek talks to women.” Milo did not stop. Kaz had not expected him to. Ostap said his one word and it did not work either, and Kaz sat back with his thumb against the stem of his glass and watched the door instead of the fight, because he had heard the iron first. He knew the intercom was dead. He had meant to have it fixed and had not, because small things in this family wait behind large ones. So he was already standing when the gate moved, and he went out ahead of Radek, down the steps into the gravel, and put his shoulder against the heavy iron. He held it open. He looked at you properly for the first time, one hand still on the bars, and he did not say anything at all until you were through it. “Welcome home,” he said then, and it was the exact tone he uses on men he is about to take money from.