The Space Between Our Blade

Sunday Dinner

The Volkov house didn't have a dining room. It had a Dining Room, capital letters, the kind of space with a table long enough to seat sixteen and a chandelier that had probably cost more than Ivy's mother's car, and every Sunday at seven o'clock exactly, Lex sat at it across from his father and tried to disappear without actually leaving the chair.

"Coach Orlova tells me you're one-and-two against the Sokolov girl," Nikolai Volkov said, not looking up from the stack of documents he'd brought to the table despite the standing house rule — his own rule — against phones and paperwork at dinner. Rules, in the Volkov house, applied downward, never up.

"Sokolova," Lex corrected, and immediately regretted it, because his father's eyes came up off the page slow and deliberate, the way they always did right before he decided a correction was worth remembering.

"Excuse me?"

"Her name. It's Sokolova. Feminine ending." Lex kept his voice level, the way he'd trained himself to since he was maybe nine years old and had learned, the hard way, that any wobble in his voice at this table got treated like blood in water. "Russian grammar thing."

"You've been paying close attention to her grammar." Nikolai's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. Across the table, Mikhail — twenty, home from university for the weekend, doing his best impression of a piece of furniture — didn't look up from his plate, but Lex caught the small, almost invisible shift of his shoulders that meant he was listening very carefully. "One-and-two, Alexei. In three weeks of training."

"She's good."

"I don't pay for good. I pay for excellent, and I pay for it to be you." Nikolai set down his pen with the specific, controlled precision of a man who had never once in his life needed to raise his voice to make a point land like a slap. "Do you understand what happens to this family's name if a scholarship student from a two-bedroom apartment beats the Volkov heir to a national qualifying spot? Do you understand what that says, to every board member, every donor, every parent deciding whether Kingsley deserves their money next year?"

"It says she's a better fencer than me on a given day," Lex said, and heard, even as the words left his mouth, exactly how much of a mistake they were.

The silence that followed had weight to it, the kind that pressed down on the whole table, and even the housekeeper clearing plates near the kitchen door seemed to move more quietly through it.

"No," Nikolai said, very softly, which was somehow worse than shouting. "It says you haven't worked hard enough. There's a difference, and I'd suggest you learn it before regionals, because I did not build this family's name so my son could hand a piece of it to a girl whose father couldn't hold onto anything of his own."

Something in Lex went very still. "What do you mean, her father?"

Nikolai's eyes flicked up, and for just a fraction of a second — so brief Lex would spend the next several days wondering if he'd imagined it — something crossed his father's face that looked almost like alarm, quickly smoothed away into the same controlled blankness as everything else.

"Nothing," Nikolai said. "A figure of speech. Finish your dinner, Alexei. You have practice at six."

Lex looked at Mikhail, hoping for something — a shrug, an eye-roll, anything to confirm he wasn't the only one who'd caught the strange, sudden current running under the last thirty seconds of conversation. Mikhail was very carefully studying his plate.

"Mikhail?"

"Eat your dinner," Mikhail said, quiet, not unkind, but final in a way that told Lex, more clearly than words could have, that this was a door his brother had decided a long time ago not to open. "It's getting cold."

Ivy's Sunday looked nothing like that, and she was, on balance, grateful for it.

The diner on Fifth smelled like frying oil and burnt coffee, and by six p.m. the dinner rush had thinned into the particular lull that let her actually talk to the regulars instead of just refilling their cups and moving on — old Mr. Abernathy in his usual booth with his crossword, the Delgado family who came in every other Sunday after church, a couple of Kingsley kids she vaguely recognized from the hallway who'd had the good grace not to mention it.

Priya showed up at seven, sliding into a booth with a debate binder under her arm and an expression that meant she had things to discuss.

"Coffee, black, and gossip, extremely specific," Priya said, by way of greeting. "In that order."

"Coffee I can do." Ivy poured a cup and slid into the booth across from her during a lull, because her manager mostly let her sit with friends as long as tables got covered. "What gossip?"

"Marcus Webb — you don't know him, JV soccer, doesn't matter — says his mom's on the Kingsley board with Nikolai Volkov, and apparently Volkov's been asking pointed questions about scholarship program funding this month. Like, specifically. Like, the week after you made varsity." Priya raised an eyebrow over her coffee. "Coincidence?"

Ivy's stomach dropped, quiet and cold. "You think he's trying to get my scholarship pulled?"

"I think rich men who've never lost anything get very creative when they're scared of losing something," Priya said. "I'm not saying panic. I'm saying keep beating his son and keep your grades exactly where they are, because if he goes looking for a reason to make trouble, you want there not to be one."

"Great. No pressure." Ivy wrapped both hands around her own cup, mostly for the warmth. "He probably doesn't even think about me. I'm sure I'm not that interesting to a guy who owns half the donor wall."

"Ivy." Priya's voice went unexpectedly gentle. "You beat his golden son in front of the whole team on day one. Guys like that notice everything that threatens the story they've built about their own family. Trust me, I've watched my dad navigate three different boards. It's always the same species, different zip code."

Ivy didn't say anything for a moment, turning it over. She thought about Coach Orlova's strange, careful pause the first day — you look like someone I used to know — and her mother's hands going still over the diner's books at the sound of the Volkov name, and told herself, again, that it was nothing. Old money families had reputations. Everyone had heard of the Volkovs before Ivy ever set foot at Kingsley. There didn't have to be a reason underneath the reason.

She almost believed it.

"Anyway." Priya softened, reaching over to steal a fry off a plate that had been sitting on Ivy's tray for a table she hadn't delivered yet. "How's training going, actually? You've got that face again."

"What face?"

"The face you make when you're thinking about Lex Volkov and trying very hard to pretend you're not."

"I don't have a face."

"You have several faces, and that's one of them." Priya grinned, unrepentant. "It's fine. I won't push. Just — for what it's worth, whatever this is, be careful. Not because he's a bad guy. Because his family plays a different game than the rest of us, and I don't think you've figured out the rules yet."

Ivy thought about the gold letters on the donor wall, and Lex's carefully economical footwork, and the flicker of something almost like warmth she kept catching in his eyes when he thought she wasn't looking, and the strange, unplaceable dread sitting low in her stomach every time anyone said the name Volkov out loud.

"I'm figuring them out," she said, "one bout at a time."

Priya didn't look entirely convinced, but she let it go, and Ivy got up to deliver the fries she'd been neglecting, and told herself, for the second time in five minutes, that whatever was gathering at the edges of this — Nikolai's pointed questions, her mother's careful silences, the strange gravity pulling her toward a boy she was supposed to be beating, not liking — it was nothing she couldn't handle.

She was, for now, mostly right.