Her grandmother owed a life. Katya is the payment. Katya Orlova was raised for a strange man's house. When the Novgorod bratva finally comes to collect, the debt falls on her graduate year, in winter, in a country she can barely stand. The collector is Ilya Morozov - eldest son of the bratva, three hundred years old, and about to leave her in a safehouse and forget her. On the third night, the safehouse is attacked. Eleven days of siege. One chessboard. Two people who cannot stand each other and are running out of anything else to do. When they reach Moscow, there's a council vote to dissolve the debt and set her free. Katya walks into the chamber intending to take it. She walks out married by choice. The Kuznetsov family isn't done with either of them. Neither is Ilya's own blood.

Lena Sokolova repairs rare books in the shop her grandfather left her. Last year she made the mistake of doing a job for the wrong man - rebinding three ledgers for a brigadier named Kirill Antonov. Four months later, two men shoot up her shop looking for those ledgers, and Kirill arrives after the police leave with a coat for her and no room for argument. He takes her to his apartment, gives her the bed, and tells her the debt is settled when he says it is. She finds something in the third ledger he never returned: six years of theft, signed by his own uncle, blamed on dead men. Eleven weeks, one bed, one pregnancy test bought at nine at night in February, and a pakhan who does not know yet that the woman who repaired his books can read them. Lena presents her evidence to nine men in a room and doesn't flinch. Kirill is promoted. Neither of them wanted it. Their son is born in March.