Chapter 12
NIKITA
Later that week, I take Piper to a salon off Madison, third floor, no signage, a door that only opens for names submitted before arrival, to get a dress for the private-viewing gala.
I called ahead under the Volkov name, and the woman who runs the place, Denova, has dressed three generations of women who could not risk being photographed shopping in public, so she asks no questions when four of us arrive and only one of us intends to try on anything.
Piper stops just inside the door and prices the room on sight, and I catch the exact moment she notices that the bolts of silk against the far wall cost more than the car that drove us here.
This is a place built for women who are never rushed. There are no registers, price tags, or music. Only long tables of folded cashmere in colors that don’t have common names and a wall of shoes displayed like relics.
A girl in a plain gray shift sets down a tray of espresso, cappuccino, and sparkling water without being asked and disappears before anyone acknowledges her.
Piper watches her go, then counts the staff, marks the exits, prices the merchandise, and runs the math she learned on the other side of doors like this one, working out how she’d take the room if she had to.
“I don’t need any of this,” she says.
“You need all of it.” Vera is already moving toward the racks, peeling off her gloves.
“You’re about to walk into a room full of people who have spent their lives learning to spot the one guest who doesn’t belong, and right now, you’re wearing a widow assembled from whatever the house could spare and your own bad instincts.
Stand there. Don’t touch anything until I tell you. ”
Piper looks at me. I keep my face neutral. Vera insisted on coming, and I let her, because Vera has forgotten more about this world than I ever learned, and the alternative was leaving Piper to face the gala without the right wardrobe.
Angelina came for a different reason. She’s settled into a chair by the window with a cappuccino, watching me instead of the clothes. She isn’t here for the dress. She’s here to watch me watch Piper.
Denova begins bringing things out. The first gown is the wrong move on purpose, something bright and obvious that Vera dismisses with a flick of two fingers before it’s fully off the hanger.
The second is closer. By the fourth, Piper has stopped protesting and frozen, enduring it on purpose, and Vera circles her with pins between her lips and a running commentary that never once softens.
“The shoulders are wrong. She has no shoulders to speak of, so we stop pretending she does and cut to make it look deliberate.” Vera turns her by the elbow. “The gray washes her out. She needs depth or she disappears, and that invites questions.”
“You could ask her opinion,” Angelina says from the window.
“She has no opinion worth having on this. That’s why we’re here.” Vera pins a fold at the waist without looking up. “She wears black, not the funeral black, the other one. Bring the silk with the weight to it.”
I say nothing, because Vera criticizing is Vera at her most predictable, and I’ve stopped listening to the words.
She dismisses every choice out loud. She selects with her fingers.
The pieces she actually pins are the ones that armor Piper without announcing it, a structured neckline that leaves her throat open and still makes her look like she belongs in the room, a cut that allows movement, with deep, seam-set pockets for what Platon will want her to carry.
Vera is dressing a Rusakov wife to survive a room, though she would sooner swallow the pins than admit that’s what she’s doing.
I’ve seen her do this exactly once before.
She dressed my mother for a benefit the winter I turned fifteen, in this same salon, arguing the entire time that Izabelle had chosen the wrong earrings.
Watching her circle Piper now, correcting a hem she’s already corrected twice, I can’t tell whether she’s protecting Piper or protecting the Rusakov name from walking into that gala looking like a fraud.
Vera has always made the two look identical.
“Turn,” Vera says, and Piper turns. “Again. Stop rolling your shoulders forward. You’re not apologizing to anyone in that room.
If you slouch they’ll read it as guilt, and a widow with nothing to hide stands like she owns the floor she’s grieving on.
” She tugs the fabric straight across Piper’s back.
“Better. You have a decent frame under all that defensiveness. Someone should have told you that years ago.”
It’s the closest thing to a compliment I’ve heard leave Vera’s mouth in a decade, and she buries it inside an insult so fast that Piper almost misses it. Almost. Piper catches it, holds it, and says nothing, and her knowing to say nothing tells me she’s started to understand Vera.
Then Denova brings out the black silk, and Piper steps behind the screen. When she comes out I forget, for a moment, what I came here to manage.
The dress is plain on purpose, a single unbroken line from her shoulders to the floor, with no ornament anywhere on it. It works better than anything with ornament could.
Piper stands in it looking like she was born to a family that numbers its silver, and the lie I’ve been telling myself for three weeks stops feeling like a lie for one dangerous second. She looks like…feels like…my wife.
Mama’s collection is still scattered across three continents under false provenance.
Five pieces of a six-piece set sit in a storage account I can’t audit without exposing myself.
My mother’s belongings are somewhere in the world being admired by people who don’t know her name.
I’m standing in a designer’s salon watching a forger in black silk and thinking that I would burn the entire structure down before I let anyone take her too.
I have no defense prepared for the thought, and it doesn’t wait for one.
The rest of it comes together around the dress, and before Denova can start pulling shoes, I ask, “What do you need to be able to do in it?”
Piper turns, obviously caught off guard that I asked instead of decided. “Run. Reach the transmitter without a production. Sit down without help, so I don’t look like I was dressed by a committee.”
“Then we build it around that.” I say it to Denova, but I’m watching Piper hear that the room just reorganized itself around her answer instead of mine.
Denova brings shoes, and Piper rejects the first two pairs before she’s touched them, holding up a heel and telling Vera she isn’t wearing anything she can’t run in.
Vera, who spent an hour insisting Piper had no opinions worth having, selects a lower block heel without a word of argument, which is its own admission.
The coat comes with concealed inner pockets.
Piper slides her hands into them and freezes for a second, and the tension finally goes out of her shoulders after a whole morning of holding it.
She likes the pockets. Not the price or the label, but the pockets, the proof that someone built a beautiful thing she can actually put her hands in and carry what she needs.
It’s the first thing in this salon she hasn’t had to endure.
Denova takes the evening wrap to the back to alter so it will sit right over the transmitter Platon wants on her, and a clutch comes with a rigid frame that can take a hit.
Every beautiful thing in the room is also a piece of equipment.
Piper watches every alteration and marks what each piece is really for, clearly dressing for the same gala I am, the one underneath the one on the invitation.
“Nikolai.” Angelina uses the cover name. “A word?”
She stands and walks toward the fitting rooms without checking whether I follow, which is a thing our mother used to do.
I follow, which is a thing I always did with Mama.
She stops in the narrow hallway where the mirrors end and turns to face me, and her gray eyes, the same gray as mine, hold a settled certainty.
“I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually hear it instead of managing me.” She keeps her voice low.
“Do you hear yourself when you talk about her safety?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You do. You’ve said the word protected six times since we got in the car.
You bought her a car-length of security fabric and called it a wardrobe.
You’re about to spend more on a necklace than most people’s houses cost, and you’ll tell Platon it’s positioning.
” She folds her arms. “I watched Papa do this. I was small, but I remember it. He used to dress Mama for his events like she was part of the display, something beautiful he owned and wanted admired, and he called it protecting her too. He said it in exactly your voice.”
The comparison cuts, because I’ve spent my entire adult life making sure I was nothing like Arkadi Rusakov, and my sister has just told me I sound like him, with my mother’s belongings scattered across the world and my mother’s confidante pinning silk in the next room.
“It isn’t the same,” I say.
“Then tell me you’d spend this money on any asset. Tell me that if Platon were walking into that gala, you’d be here choosing the color that brings out his eyes.” She waits, and I don’t answer, because the honest answer would end the argument in her favor.
“You were young when Mama died,” I say, because it’s the only defense I have, and it isn’t much. “You remember pieces of that marriage, not all of it.”