Chapter 9
Polina
The restaurant Dottie had chosen was the kind of place that didn’t take reservations, had handwritten menus on a chalkboard, and smelled gloriously of garlic and fresh bread.
It was tucked into a narrow South Philadelphia street between a dry cleaner and what appeared to be a very small accounting firm, and it was absolutely perfect in the way that only places completely unbothered by their own existence could be.
I had suggested somewhere quieter. Dottie had sent back three laughing emojis and an address.
Vlad and Dimitri took a table by the door without being asked, which was its own kind of practiced humiliation.
The smooth, automatic choreography of men who had been managing my public appearances for so long that we had all stopped pretending it was anything other than what it was.
The owner, a small woman with extraordinary eyebrows, looked at them, looked at me, and made the calculation in about four seconds.
She seated them without comment and brought them water and bread without being asked, which told me she had seen this particular arrangement before and had decided that efficient accommodation was better than curiosity.
Dottie was already at the corner table when I arrived, wearing a yellow dress that should not have worked and absolutely did, with hoop earrings the size of small planets.
The moment she spotted me, her face lit up.
Nobody looked at me like that. Like they were simply glad I’d shown up.
“Girl.”
She was on her feet before I reached the table, pulling me into a hug before I could arrange myself into a proper greeting. Warm and unselfconscious, she smelled of something expensive and cheerful.
Then, as if remembering something, she added, “Oh. Raia sends her apologies. Erik got pulled into something at Midgard and she ended up playing crisis manager.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“Tuesday,” Dottie said with a shrug. “It sounds like Tuesday.”
“Mmm.”
She sat back down and studied me with the focused attention of a woman who made it her business to notice things. “Something’s loose.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Yes, you do.” She picked up her menu with the air of someone who had already decided what she was ordering. “You walked in here like a person instead of a portrait. It’s a good look on you.”
I opened my own menu and did not examine that observation too closely.
Dottie ordered for both of us with cheerful authority, something with pasta, something with wine, bread that arrived almost immediately as though it had been waiting, and then settled her chin in her hand and looked at me with the patient expectation of a woman who had decided this lunch had a purpose and was prepared to wait me out.
“The guards come everywhere?” she asked. Casual. No pity in it. That was what made it possible to answer.
“Everywhere.” I broke a piece of bread. “My father’s preference.”
She glanced toward Vlad and Dimitri, back to me.
Said nothing. Just nodded once, the small nod of a woman filing something away without making it a moment and reached for her wine.
That was all. No widened eyes, no careful sympathy, no “oh how awful” dressed up as concern.
She simply registered it, accepted it, and moved on, and the relief of that was so disproportionate to the gesture that I had to look away for a moment.
“So,” she said. “Two scenes with our mysterious sadist.”
“We’re starting there.”
“Honey, we started there the moment I saw your face.” She pointed her fork at me with zero apology. “Two scenes. Private room at Valhalla. And before you tell me it’s complicated, I already know it’s complicated. Everyone’s life is complicated, that’s not information.”
I almost smiled. “You’re very difficult to deflect.”
“I practice.” She tilted her head. “How are you feeling?”
It was such a simple question. How was I feeling. Not what happened or what does it mean or where is this going. Just how was I feeling, present tense, right now in this restaurant with bread on the table and two bodyguards by the door.
“Strange,” I said honestly. “Like something has… shifted. And I don’t have the right framework for it.”
Dottie nodded slowly. “Strange good or strange scary?”
“Both. Simultaneously.” I looked at my wine. “I don’t understand it. Two encounters with a man I barely know and I feel—“ I stopped.
“Safe?” Dottie offered quietly.
I looked up at her.
“Yeah,” she said, without triumph. “That one sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?”
“It doesn’t make sense. Logically. He’s practically a stranger. I know his club name and approximately nothing else. Why would I feel—“
“Because he paid attention.” She said it simply, like it was obvious, which perhaps it was to everyone except me.
“Real attention. Not the kind that’s looking for something or managing something.
The kind that’s just… actually there.” She swirled her glass.
“That’s rarer than it should be. Your nervous system knows the difference even when your head hasn’t caught up yet. ”
I sat with that for a moment.
“What do you know about him?” I asked. “Outside the club.”
Dottie’s expression did something interesting, a small brightening, a shift into the particular pleasure of someone who has good information and has been waiting to be asked for it. “Master Loki. Real name Jared… Jared Kane.” She watched my face as she said it. “You didn’t know that.”
I knew the first part as he’d added the name to his text message. Now I had the second part. Kane.
Somehow together, it felt more dangerous than Loki.
I turned it over silently. It suited him in a way I couldn’t immediately explain. Less theatrical than Loki, more specific. Something with weight to it.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“He’s one of the original owners. Him and Erik—Master Thor—and a handful of others, they built Midgard and Valhalla from the ground up.
College friends, all of them, been thick as thieves for years.
” She broke off a piece of bread. “Outside the club he’s some kind of business consultant.
Private work, very hush hush, travels a lot.
Honestly none of us know exactly what he does.
He’s the mysterious one of the group.” A small laugh. “Which, once you’ve met him, tracks.”
Consultant. It fit the surface of him. The precision, the expensive suits, the quality of attention that felt professional even when it wasn’t.
But there was something underneath the consultant exterior that I hadn’t been able to name, something that moved like a man who was used to reading rooms for reasons beyond preference.
I filed it under things I notice and probably shouldn’t think too hard about.
“He’s never done two scenes with the same woman,” Dottie continued, in the tone of someone delivering significant news.
“Not in all the years I’ve known him. He does one scene, exceptional by all accounts, and then he’s gone.
Very pleasant about it. Just… gone.” She looked at me meaningfully. “He is not gone.”
“He might simply find the operational challenge interesting,” I said. “I’m not exactly a straightforward situation.”
Dottie stared at me for a long moment.
“The operational challenge,” she repeated.
“It’s a reasonable—“
“Polina.” She looked past me then returned her gaze to mine.
“Honey. You are sitting here in a restaurant with two bodyguards by the door, telling me that a man who has never in eleven years taken a second look at anyone is texting you from a private room before he leaves the building—“ she had told me that, earlier, with enormous satisfaction—”and your theory is operational challenge.”
When she said it like that, it did sound somewhat unconvincing.
“You’re in trouble, honey,” she said, not unkindly. “I can see it from here. The question isn’t whether you feel it. The question is whether you’re going to let yourself have it.”
The table was quiet for a moment. Outside the window Philadelphia went about its afternoon. People with ordinary lives making ordinary choices without a shadow at the door to remind them that every movement was monitored and catalogued.
“How do you trust someone,” I said slowly, “in a world where everything is a transaction?”
Dottie was quiet for a beat. It was a different kind of quiet than her usual. Less the pause before wit and more the pause before something real.
“You don’t trust the world,” she said. “You trust the person.”
I looked at her.
“I know that sounds simple,” she continued.
“And I know your world is not simple. But trust isn’t a policy, it’s a choice you make about a specific individual with the specific information you have about them.
” She glanced briefly, deliberately, toward the door.
“Some people earn it. Some people don’t.
The trick is learning to tell the difference.
Not deciding ahead of time that nobody can. ”
I thought about two scenes in two very different rooms and a man who had read me with the precise and unhurried attention of someone who wanted to understand what he was looking at. Not to use it. Not to manage it. Just… to know.
Or at least that was how it had felt.
I was aware that feelings were not intelligence.
The food arrived. We ate. Dottie steered the conversation into warmer waters with the practiced ease of a woman who understood that some things needed time to settle before they could be examined further.
She told me about Raia, her best friend, Erik’s partner, a woman who had walked into Midgard with less than nothing and had found something real in that world when her outside life was falling apart.
She talked about the group with the warm, unselfconscious ease of someone describing family.
Not the family you were assigned but the kind you constructed deliberately, person by person, from the people who actually showed up.
I listened and felt something quiet and hungry stir in my chest. The longing wasn’t for him, exactly. It was for that. For a table of people who knew your whole story and sat with you anyway. For belonging that didn’t come with conditions attached.
“Your friend Raia,” I said. “She was new to the lifestyle when she met Erik?”
“Completely. Never set foot in a club before the night I dragged her in.” Dottie smiled at the memory. “Scared half out of her mind and absolutely determined not to show it. Sound familiar?”
“I managed perfectly well.”
“Baby, everyone’s scared their first time.” The smile softened into something genuine. “What matters is that she didn’t let it stop her. And the people she found there? They became her people. Her family.” A beat. “That world can do that, when you find the right corner of it.”
My phone moved against the table.
I looked down. A message from a number I had saved under no name… just the Philadelphia area code and the knowledge of whose it was.
Last night was exceptional. I don’t say that. To anyone. I want you to know it.
I read it twice. Something happened in my chest that I didn’t have immediate vocabulary for. A warmth that was simultaneously wonderful and terrifying, the feeling of a door opening in a house you’d assumed was fully mapped.
I was smiling before I finished reading it.
I looked up. Dottie was watching me with an expression of serene satisfaction, her chin back in her hand, like a woman whose hypothesis had just been confirmed by the data.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to say something extremely pointed.”
“I was going to say,” she said composedly, “that you should probably text him back.” A pause.
“And also that his name is Jared and you should use it at some point because Master Loki is a very sexy name for a club but it is not how you think about someone who texts you things like that when the room is empty.”
I looked at the message again.
She was not wrong.
“My situation doesn’t exactly lend itself to—“ I gestured vaguely toward the door, toward Vlad and Dimitri and everything they represented.
“I know.” Dottie leaned forward, dropping her voice, eyes sharp and warm at once.
“But here’s what I also know. I have been around those people for years: Jared, Erik, all of them.
When they decide something matters, they are not deterred by complications.
Not one of them.” She held my gaze. “Leave it with me. Between Raia, Erik and the rest of us, we’ll figure something out. ”
I looked at her, at this woman I had known for approximately two weeks, who had folded me into warmth without condition or agenda, who had sat across a table from my bodyguards and not made it a thing, who had just offered me something nobody in my life had offered me in a very long time.
An ally.
“You’d do that,” I said. Not quite a question.
“Honey.” She picked up her wine with a smile that contained entire multitudes. “I live for this.”
Vlad caught my eye with his habitual blank expression and I felt the familiar small burn of it, the reminder, never quite ignorable, of what my life actually was. I looked away.
I typed back: Exceptional is a generous word from someone with your level of experience. Should I feel special? Or sorry for you that less than exceptional women came before me?
I sent it before I could edit it into something more composed.
Three seconds later: I’ll let you decide.
I pressed my lips together and looked up at Dottie, who was watching my face with unabashed delight.
“Well?” she said.
“He’s annoying,” I said.
“Mm hm.” She raised her glass. “To annoying men who text you from empty rooms.”
I raised mine.
“To annoying men,” I agreed. The smile stayed with me long after the wine was gone.