Sold to the Bratva King novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Her Own Lawyer

Halle gets her first phone and jeans with Zoya, answers the probate judge herself and wins, and Kent leans in on her deaf side to demand his coat back.

"My lawyers will bury him," Matvei said in the car.

"No."

He turned his head. I don't think people said that word to him often.

"If your lawyers stand up for me, the judge sees your money," I said. "He sees a Russian gangster's maid. I want my own."

"I'm not a gangster. I'm a shipping executive."

"Your friend in the foyer had a gun under his arm."

"Shipping is a dangerous industry."

Zoya, in the front seat, read his lips in the mirror and laughed so hard she had to put her head on the dashboard.

On Monday I sat in a legal aid office in Downtown Crossing for three hours.

The lawyer they gave me was a tired young woman with a coffee stain on her cuff.

I told her how to get it out. Then I told her everything else.

She listened, wrote four pages, and said, "Can you talk to a judge the way you just talked to me?"

"I've never talked to a judge."

"Good. They'll hear that."

On Tuesday Zoya took me shopping.

She texted the whole time, even standing right next to me.

NO. PUT THE BEIGE DOWN. YOU ARE NOT A CARDIGAN.

I bought two pairs of jeans, three T-shirts, a black jacket, and sneakers that didn't belong to anyone before me.

Then Zoya marched me into a phone store.

The man behind the counter asked for my ID. I put it down on the glass, and my hand didn't shake.

Twenty minutes later I owned a phone. Zoya's number was the first one in it.

Her first text was a picture of Matvei asleep on a couch with his mouth open.

FOR EMERGENCIES, she wrote.

At the bank I opened an account and put nine hundred dollars in it. I kept a hundred in my pocket.

The ATM gave me a card with my name pressed into the plastic.

Zoya signed something slow, so I could follow it. She pointed at me, then made a fist and lifted it.

"What does that mean?"

She typed it. STRONG. ALSO THE SIGN FOR "YOU OWE ME LUNCH."

Thursday night I read my father's will at the kitchen table in the warehouse until two in the morning.

Matvei came down for water around midnight and stopped in the doorway.

"Do you want help?"

"I want to understand it myself."

He nodded once and went back up without the water.

Friday the probate court in Canton smelled like floor wax.

Wrong wax, too. Someone was using a paste wax on vinyl tile, and it was yellowing in the corners.

Parker and Lindsey sat at the front table with a lawyer in a suit that cost more than the courtroom.

Lindsey wore her pearls and a sad face.

Kent sat in the back row with his camel coat folded over his knees.

Matvei sat at the back too, on the other side, with his hands loose on his thighs.

Parker went first.

"My sister is simple, Your Honor. We kept her home for her own protection. She can't read a contract. She can't handle money. Last week a known criminal walked her out of our house, and she went with him like a puppy."

Lindsey dabbed her eyes. "She's never even used a telephone."

The judge was an older man with reading glasses on a cord. He looked at me over them.

"Ms. Atwater. Your lawyer tells me you'd like to speak for yourself."

I stood up. My knees were water.

I turned my right side toward the bench, the way I always do.

"Your Honor, I can read. I read the newspaper to my brother every morning for six years while he ate breakfast, because he didn't like to get ink on his hands."

Somebody in the gallery snorted.

"I've handled money since I was twelve. I did every grocery receipt in that house. I can tell you what they spent on lobster last Saturday. It was four hundred and twelve dollars."

The judge's mouth twitched.

"And I have a phone now." I held it up. "I got it Tuesday. I have three contacts and one of them is the pizza place."

That time the gallery laughed out loud.

"My father's will, article six, section two," I said. "My half of the property and the business is held in trust until I turn twenty-one, and then it passes to me outright. Not to my guardian. To me."

I didn't look at the paper. I didn't need to.

"I turned twenty-one thirteen months ago. My brother didn't tell me. He signed my name instead."

Parker's lawyer stood. "Objection, that isn't before the court."

"It is now," the judge said dryly.

He looked at Parker for a long time.

"Mr. Atwater, this petition says your sister can't manage her affairs. She just recited a trust clause from memory and made my clerk laugh. Petition denied."

The gavel cracked.

Lindsey made a little noise.

I walked out into the hallway on legs that didn't feel like mine.

My lawyer hugged me. Zoya grabbed both my hands and signed STRONG so hard her rings clacked.

Matvei stood a few steps back and said nothing at all.

Out on the courthouse steps, the wind came in hard and cold.

Someone leaned in close on my left side.

Warm breath on my deaf ear. Words I couldn't hear.

I knew the smell before I turned. Cigarettes and the cologne Parker gave him every Christmas.

Kent smiled at me and stepped around to my good side, slow, so I'd hear every word this time.

"You took the can, Halle," he said. "I want my coat back."

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