Chapter 22: The Empty Chair

Luka's POV

They put the dining room back together by dawn.

The aunt did most of it, with a broom and a basin and a look nobody argued with.

Seven old men sat down again at a table with no cloth.

Their suits still had potato on the knees.

The roast was gone. The candles were stubs. There was a bullet hole in the sideboard.

Pavel Orlin sat at the foot with a cup of tea between his hands.

Nobody had told him he could, and nobody told him to stop.

My father stood at the head.

He had not been allowed to sit in his own chair.

Mara stood behind him with her rifle slung, and he held very still.

"Viktor Draganov," said the eldest elder, tapping his cane on the floor. "The table is called, and I call it."

"The table was called by my son," said my father softly.

"The table was called in your son's name by you. We know. We have read the page."

The old man laid the black ledger on the bare wood.

"Eighteen months of the family's money to the harbor crew," he said. "A receipt for the docks, in your hand."

"And a price on your own blood. Is it true?"

I watched my father.

I had known him thirty-two years.

I had seen him weep once, at my mother's grave, and I had never seen him lose.

His pale eyes went around the room, to each man at the table, one at a time.

"It was a decision of the family," he said. "Made for the family, at the family's table."

"Nobody challenges it. That is the rule I kept for thirty years."

"It is," said the eldest elder. "And it is our rule, Viktor. It was never yours."

"Seven men at this table. Say your vote."

He did not give them time to be afraid.

"Strip him," said the man on the old man's right.

"Strip him," said the one beside him, and the next, and the next.

All seven. Three of them had eaten Viktor's lamb for twenty years.

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