Chapter 11
Polina
My father had said nothing on the way home.
That was worse than an interrogation. His silences had texture.
I had learned to read them the way sailors read weather, by the particular quality of the air pressure before the storm.
Tonight’s had been dense and watchful, the silence of a man cataloguing information rather than reacting to it.
He was building something in his head. I didn’t know yet what it was.
My shoes were off before the bedroom door closed. I dropped onto the edge of the bed and immediately stood up again. Sitting felt passive and passive felt dangerous when my mind was moving this fast.
I paced.
The gala ran on a loop whether I wanted it to or not.
The moment across the room when our eyes had met and the bottom had very nearly dropped out of my composure.
The dance, his hand at my waist, the city noise of the room falling away, the low-voiced conversation that had been somehow both practical and the most intimate exchange I’d had with another person in years.
The balcony, and the way he’d said Polina, my actual name, not the club name, not Miss Morozov, just my name, quietly, like it was something he’d been holding and had decided to put down carefully.
I pressed my fingers against my mouth and made myself stop pacing.
I didn’t know if he was coming.
That was the part I couldn’t settle. I hadn’t said yes.
I hadn’t said no. I had said something between them, the diplomatic non-answer of a woman trained from birth to neither commit nor refuse outright, and he had looked at me with those dark eyes and said I’ll find a way and I had let him believe that finding a way was something I wanted.
Which I did. That was the problem. I wanted it with a directness that I found alarming.
I went to the window. The city below was doing its indifferent late-night business, cabs and distant voices and the particular quality of urban quiet that was never actually quiet.
My reflection floated in the glass above it, composed, as always, the image and the interior having very little in common.
I had given him nothing. No invitation. No confirmation, no clear instruction. He had no way of knowing which room was mine, or which side of the house, or—
A sound from the balcony.
I turned. My heart knew who it was before the rest of me caught up.
The balcony door, the one with the mechanism that had never quite worked properly since last winter, the one Vlad had put on a maintenance list that had never been addressed, moved.
Then opened. A figure stepped through with the unhurried ease of someone who had not found the process particularly difficult.
He was still in the gala suit. The tie was undone, hanging loose.
We looked at each other across the room.
“How,” I said. It wasn’t quite a question. My voice was steadier than I had any right to expect.
“I’m resourceful.” He said it in the tone of a man closing a subject rather than opening one. His eyes moved over me, once, quickly, and then he looked around the room with the brief assessment of someone clocking exits and variables before he could stop himself.
I noticed that. Filed it somewhere.
“You actually came,” I said.
“I said I would.”
“You didn’t say that, actually. You said you’d find a way.
Which isn’t a commitment, it’s a—“ I stopped, because he was looking at me with that expression, the focused, quiet attention, and I was aware that I was talking because I was nervous and he had already noticed and was waiting for me to finish.
“It’s a commitment,” he said. “To me, it’s the same thing.”
The room settled into something that wasn’t quite silence.
He crossed to the small chair near the window and sat. Not on the bed, not claiming space he hadn’t been offered, just settling into the room with the calm of someone who intended to stay for a while. It was a small thing. It mattered more than it should have.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him and tried to remember what I was supposed to be cautious about.
“My father,” I said. “He noticed. At the gala. The look between us.”
“I know.”
“He didn’t say anything tonight, which is—“ I exhaled. “His silences are never nothing. He’s deciding something.”
Jared nodded. Not dismissively. It was the nod of a man receiving information and treating it as such. “What does he typically do when he decides something?”
“He acts,” I said. “Quietly. By the time you see it happening, the shape of it is already fixed.” I looked at my hands. “He’s been doing it to me my whole life, and I still can’t always see it coming.”
“Your career,” he said. Not a prompt exactly. More like an opening, held out without pressure.
I looked up.
“Dottie mentioned you worked in the arts,” he said.
The careful version. I understood, instinctively, that he was giving me the choice of whether to go further.
I went further. Couldn’t have said exactly why. Maybe the lateness of the hour, maybe the particular quality of being looked at rather than managed, maybe just the accumulated pressure of years of not saying things to anyone.
“Art history degrees,” I said. “Two of them. I’ve spent four years building toward a curatorial career.
Applications, connections, interviews that I arranged myself carefully around my father’s schedule.
” A pause. “Three positions. In eighteen months. Each one closed before I could reach it. By the time I understood what was happening he’d already redirected the path. ”
“He blocked them.”
“He would say he was protecting me. He would say the organizations weren’t suitable or the timing wasn’t right.” I heard my own voice, very level, the way it got when I was holding something that had too much weight to be put down carelessly. “He would be lying.”
Jared was quiet for a moment. Not the social quiet of someone waiting for their turn to speak. The real kind.
“What would you do,” he said, “if he weren’t in the picture? If you could do anything, starting tomorrow, what would you do first?”
Nobody had ever asked me that. That was the thing that hit me when the question landed. Not the question itself but the fact of it, the simple direct what do you want that I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had aimed at me without an agenda attached.
“I’d call the Barnes,” I said. No hesitation.
It was out before I’d decided to say it.
“The Barnes Foundation. I’d call the curatorial department tomorrow morning and I’d ask for a meeting and I’d make my case in person because my work is good enough, and I am good enough, and I have been waiting for someone to tell me I’m allowed and nobody is going to tell me that so I’d just—“ I stopped.
He was looking at me with an expression I hadn’t seen on him before. Something had shifted. The composure was still there, but underneath it was something warmer and less managed that I didn’t have a precise name for.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “You would.”
I looked away first. Out the window, at the city, at the middle distance where feelings could be examined without being seen examining them.
“It’s a nice thought,” I said.
“It’s not a thought,” he said. “It’s a plan. You just stated it in the present tense.”
“Jared—“
“The Barnes would be lucky to have you.”
The simplicity of it. No qualification, no someday or maybe or if things were different. Just the statement, flat and certain, as if it were an established fact he was reminding me of rather than a reassurance he was offering.
Something cracked open in my chest. Quietly. Irrevocably. I didn’t let it show.
“You don’t know my work,” I said.
“I know how you talked about that Sif painting the first night at Midgard,” he said.
“I know how you moved through the Barnes tonight before you found me. I watched you for thirty seconds before you saw me. You weren’t performing appreciation.
You were actually there.” He held my gaze. “I know enough.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again.
He had watched me for thirty seconds. He had noticed what I looked like when I wasn’t performing. He had filed it and kept it and offered it back to me now, at an hour when all the defenses I’d built were running low on whatever it was they ran on.
“You’re dangerous,” I said.
The corner of his mouth moved. “So I’ve been told.”
“I mean that seriously.”
“I know.” The almost-smile faded into something quieter. “So do I.”
The room was very still. Outside, nothing moved.
Vlad’s room was at the end of the east corridor and Dimitri’s rotation wouldn’t bring him past this wing for another hour.
My father’s suite was on the opposite side of the house and all of it information I knew with a specificity that told me exactly how much of tonight I had planned while pretending I hadn’t.
He stood. Crossed the room to where I was sitting on the edge of the bed and stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to look at him. He didn’t touch me. Just looked down at me with those dark, careful eyes and waited.
“The Barnes,” he said quietly. “Remember that you said it.”
“I’ll remember,” I said. Neither of us moved. The room felt smaller than it had a few minutes ago. Not because of the walls. Because of everything that had just been said.
“Good.”
His hand came up slowly, giving me every opportunity to move, to redirect, to say something sensible, and tucked a strand of hair back from my face with a gentleness that was somehow more devastating than anything precise or deliberate could have been. His fingertips brushed my jaw. Stayed.
I turned my face into his hand. Couldn’t help it. Didn’t try very hard to.
He leaned down and kissed me.
Not the careful social press of a man at a gala.
This was unhurried and warm and thorough, the kiss of someone with nowhere else to be and nothing to perform for, and I felt it in every place the evening had left me raw and open.
My hands found his jacket again, the lapels, the same grip as the balcony.
Holding on, not pulling away, just holding on while the room tilted gently on its axis.
He pulled back just far enough to look at me. His thumb moved along my jaw.
“I’ve wanted to do that properly since the balcony,” he said quietly.
“That wasn’t proper?” I managed.
“No.” His eyes were very dark, very close. “That was restrained.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“I want more of that… unrestrained.” His eyes deepened, twin pools of fire held my gaze.
Jared dipped his head, his teeth capturing the shell of my ear.
My dress suddenly gone, leaving me in nothing but a G-string slick with my excitement, and a barely-there lace push-up bra.
He stepped back and gazed up and down my body appreciatively.
He sucked in my lobe and then released it.
“If that is your wish, Hecate.” He tore off his coat and flung it in the direction of a chair.
He toed off his shoes and those followed along with his socks, the undone tie and finally the shirt.
It was my turn to gaze appreciatively up and down.
The man didn’t have an ounce of body fat and the way his hips dipped into that delicious V before disappearing into his boxer briefs…
His cock jutted out within the confines, and I dropped to my knees. It was my turn to draw a reaction from him. I tugged his shorts down, his cock sprung free, bobbing at the perfect level. I wrapped both hands around his length and opened my mouth.
I held the tip on my tongue and ran it seductively around the crown.
Jared’s eyes rolled back in his head, but his hand shot out and gripped my hair.
He tugged my head closer, forcing me to drop my hands.
So maybe I wasn’t in charge after all. The need racing through me was strong enough that I didn’t particularly care.
“Open for me, Polina,” Jared said as he coaxed his swollen head in further. I softened my throat on his command and swallowed his thick shaft.
“So good,” He said through gritted teeth. He thrust his hips, and I focused on not choking as he battered the back of my throat. I loved it, being on my knees in front of a powerful man who drove me crazy with desire.
Jared tugged my head back off his cock. “Bed now,” he quietly ordered.
I climbed to my feet and got on the bed. Before I could get comfortable, he had me flipped over and dragged to the edge of the bed. “Chest down.” His tone was a little ragged, maybe he was as desperate as me.
I was open to him now, there was no hiding his effect on me, or my need for him.
“Please.” I uttered one word, and that’s all it took.
Jared filled me with a single savage thrust. I buried my face in the blanket to keep from screaming and alerting my guards. His hands gripped my hips painfully, his fingertips leaving impressions that would last for days.
I was so close to tipping off the edge. Reaching between my legs, I tickled his balls. His response was to thrust harder and I loved it. The harder the better as I chased an orgasm. But before I could release, he’d turned me around and placed my knees on his shoulders.
“I want to watch you fall apart,” he said in way of explanation. “Come for me, Polina.”
The simple command pushed me off that edge and into oblivion. I convulsed around his shaft and moments later, Jared smothered a shout as he filled me with his release.
When he finally pulled out of me, I collapsed forward on the bed. He dropped down beside me, his ragged breath loud in my ear. It was hard to keep my eyes open, but knowing he wouldn’t be here when I woke up, had me pushing back the exhaustion.
Feeling him behind me, here, in my bedroom, was unexpected. A gift you could say, and one I wanted to keep opening. For the first time in a very long time, the future felt like something I might choose for myself.
That was my last thought before drifting off.