Chapter 19
MOLLY
“What’s his problem?” I ask Vet rhetorically as Igor stomps past my desk.
She shrugs. “He’s irritated. Probably the spy problem.”
I blink twice. “What spy problem?”
She clicks her tongue before saying, “Pavel didn’t tell you, or are you playing dumb?”
“We have a spy?” I don’t mean to whisper it.
“It would seem so.” I’ve never heard Vet sound guilty about anything. Not even when she told me she had skinned a guy. “I’ve been busy. But I should have figured it out already.”
“You mean, we don’t know who it is?”
“Da. The spy, or rather, the mole, I suppose, is undetected as of yet. But I’m on the case. It’s only a matter of time before I find him. Or her. Or them.”
I stare at Pavel’s door. Why the hell hasn’t he told me?
“Because he doesn’t want you frightened, most likely.”
“Did you just read my mind?”
“Your face is easy to read, Molly. I told you.”
This is making my head hurt. “When did he find out?”
“To my knowledge, shortly before your nuptials. Igor told him.”
“The wedding? His men moved me into the house in Southampton. They touched my things! They… I see them every day.” I look at my desk, my mind reeling.
The Vasiliev account is open on my screen, a column of figures I was in the middle of reviewing.
The figures are still there, patient and indifferent, waiting for me to return to them.
I look at them for a moment and think about the fact that I come to this office every day and sit at this desk and manage the legitimate face of my husband’s empire, and the illegitimate face—the one with informants and courtyard conversations about Fedor and thermal cameras on apartment buildings—is communicated to me through my bodyguard rather than through him.
“Vet.”
“Da.”
“You should not be the person telling me these things.”
She meets my eyes with the level gaze that never flinches. “No. I should not. Somebody higher ranking than me should be telling you.”
We both know who she means, and I appreciate that she doesn’t defend him.
Vet doesn’t say things that aren’t true in order to make a situation more comfortable.
It’s one of the things I rely on her for and one of the things that makes her, despite her history and her occasional terrifying competence with firearms, genuinely easy to be around.
I get through the rest of the workday by applying myself to the figures on my screen with the focused energy of a woman who needs somewhere to put her feelings and has chosen spreadsheets.
It’s not the most emotionally sophisticated coping mechanism available to me, but it’s effective, and it produces clean results, which is more than can be said for most things today.
The drive to Southampton is quiet. Pavel has something on his mind, something he presumably doesn’t want to say in front of his driver.
He asks me twice during the drive if I’m alright, which tells me he can read my silence, which is an odd feeling.
It’s strange to be known on any level, but he’s always been good at reading me, even since before we started hooking up.
“I’m fine.” It’s true in the narrow sense that I’m not distressed, and false in the broader sense that I have things to say and am saving them for a location that doesn’t have a witness in it.
The tree line opens to reveal the ivory colonial-style mansion. The grounds are immaculate in the late afternoon light, and the quiet settles over the property like something earned rather than imposed.
I have been living here for two weeks now, and I have not stopped finding it beautiful, which surprises me every time because I didn’t expect to be the kind of person who responds to grandeur.
Never have been before now. But the moment I walked into this house, I felt like I had come to my fantasy home.
I never want to leave it. Not even when I’m mad at my husband for continuously keeping me in the dark.
His men are present in the way they are always present—visible enough to be a deterrent, positioned with the practiced efficiency of people who have been doing this long enough that it has become instinct rather than procedure.
I have learned their faces. Dmitri at the east gate, who nods at me now with contained respect.
Sasha, near the garage, younger, who still looks mildly startled every time he sees me, as though my presence in his employer’s life continues to be information he is processing.
Others whose names I am still learning are distributed across the property.
Pavel goes directly to his office when we come inside, which is his habit—the transition from the car to the house runs through the office, through checking messages and reviewing whatever Igor has left for him, before he surfaces into the domestic portion of the evening.
I have learned a great many things about him in two weeks of shared space that the months of the affair did not fully prepare me for. An affair is curated in ways that a marriage is not, and the uncurated version of Pavel Strakov is both more surprising and more interesting than the version I knew.
He’s also more infuriating. I give him ten minutes, then time’s up.
His office in the mansion is a different room from the one in the city, but it has the same quality. Ordered, serious, the room of a man who works hard. No distractions tolerated.
Too bad.
He’s at his desk when I come in, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, reading something on his screen with the focused attention he brings to everything.
He looks up when I close the door behind me, and something in his expression shifts as he registers the closing, which tells me his read of my silence in the car was accurate and that he has been expecting this.
“How can I help you?”
“Vet told me about the informant.”
He leans back in his chair. “I see.”
“She shouldn’t have had to.” I come to stand in front of his desk rather than sitting, because sitting feels like a negotiating position, and I am not negotiating.
“She told me because she understood that I needed to know, which is the correct instinct. The problem is that the information should have come from you.”
“The problem is the informant.”
My gaze narrows without my consent. “The problem is you’re always keeping important things from me!”
“I didn’t want to worry you—”
“Pavel.” His name comes out with more edge than I intend, and I let it.
“Someone in your organization may be watching me every day and is probably feeding that information to a man who has already used my existence as a threat to your face. That is not a worry. That is my life. I deserve to know what is happening in my own life.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “There are aspects of my role,” he says finally, “that are not appropriate to bring into our home. Things that belong to that part of my life and not to this part. I am handling it. I will not bother you with trifles.”
“Someone I see every day, who might be spying on me and everything I do, is not a trifle! It’s not a work problem that stays at work. You don’t know who it is. That person could be here, in our home!”
“Yes, they could be. They could also be at the office. If you knew, what would you do differently?”
“I…” I’m not sure. “I would know to be careful around them.”
“Hence why telling you is a bad idea. Forgive me, Molly, but you are still a civilian when it comes to these things. You don’t know the games I must play—”
“Then teach me! For God’s sake, Pavel, I’m out here with my neck exposed, and you think that’s a good thing?”
Another heavy sigh from him. It sounds like disapproval. “You did not grow up in this world. There are things it is hard to explain.”
“Aren’t I worth explaining them? Even if it’s hard?”
“Of course you are. I’m not saying this right—”
“Who is it? Do you have suspects? Vet didn’t know.”
He sits back, and I see the day on him. “Vladimir Cheski.”
The whiner. I never liked him, but a spy? That seems out of his realm. He’s a little pathetic, always complaining, and as I count the reasons why he’d make a bad spy, I realize those are the reasons he’d be a great spy.
He’s a low-level goon who knows he won’t amount to much. What easier way to advance his financial situation than to spy?
“Oh.”
Pavel shrugs. “Yeah. Oh. Now, what will you do with that information? Are you appeased?”
He’s cranky. He’s tired. I know what his life costs him, and I am not without sympathy for that.
But I am cranky and tired too. I’m also his wife, and the word means something beyond the protection it provides, and I will not be managed out of my own life by a man who loves me and is wrong about this.
“No, I’m not appeased.” Without meaning to, I find myself standing over him.
“I am not one of your men. I am not someone you protect by keeping me in the dark. That is not protection—that is control, and you are smart enough to know the difference, and I think you are good enough to not want to do it to me.”
The room is quiet. He looks at me for a long moment, and I hold the look, and the silence between us has the quality of something that is about to tip in one direction or another.
Then he stands, and I track him with the awareness I always have of his movement in a room, the gravity of him when he’s in motion and has decided something, and I keep my ground because keeping my ground is the whole point of this conversation.
He stops in front of me. Close enough for me to smell his day-old cologne. Those pale blue eyes look directly at me and do not look away. “You’re right.”
My mouth opens, but I don’t know what to say. I was prepared for several versions of this conversation, and that was not one of them. “I—yes. I know.”
“From now on, I will tell you. When there are things you need to know, I will tell you myself. You have my word.”
I look at him for a moment, recalibrating. “That’s it? You’re just—agreeing?”
“You made a sound argument.”
“I had more arguments prepared.”