Chapter 17
Polina
I did not sleep.
That wasn’t entirely true. I had drifted somewhere between two and four, the shallow unrestful place that wasn’t sleep so much as a brief suspension of consciousness and had come back from it to the same locked room and the same locked truth and the same ceiling I had been staring at since my father’s footsteps had receded down the corridor.
My mother had been twenty-nine when she died.
I was twenty-four.
I had lain in the dark and done the arithmetic and let it mean what it meant and then I had gotten up at five-thirty and showered and dressed with the deliberateness of someone preparing for something they intend to see through.
Not armor exactly. I had spent too many years treating composure as armor and the armor had its limits and I had found them last night on the floor of this room.
This was something different. This was the clarity that came after the worst kind of truth had finished arriving and you were still standing and you understood, with a certainty that had no room in it for performance, exactly what you were going to do next.
I was going downstairs.
I was going to tell my father no.
The thought of it was not frightening. That was the thing I kept returning to as I sat on the edge of the bed and watched the city come pale and gray through the curtains—the absence of fear.
I had been afraid of him for so long that the fear had become structural, load-bearing, so built into the architecture of my daily life that I had stopped distinguishing it from the air.
And then last night he had told me about my mother with a silence that was louder than any words, and something in the architecture had simply…
given way. You could not be afraid of a man you had already seen all the way to the bottom of.
I knew what he was now.
I went downstairs at eight after Dimitri unlocked the door.
He was in the dining room. Coffee, phone, the morning papers arranged with the precision of a man for whom even small rituals were a form of control.
He looked up when I entered and his expression was the one I had been expecting.
The patient one, the one that assumed a night of reflection had produced the correct result and was waiting for me to confirm it.
I sat down across from him.
“I won’t marry Roman Davidof,” I said.
No preamble. No good morning, no careful approach, no layering of context to soften the landing. I had spent twenty-four years using language as cushioning and I was finished with it.
He set his phone down.
“Polina.” The patient tone. The one that treated my refusal as a symptom rather than a position. “You’re upset. Last night was difficult. I understand that. But you will see when you’ve had time to—“
“I won’t,” I said. “I’ve had time. I’ve had the night and I’ve been awake for most of it and my answer is the same at eight in the morning as it was when you locked my door. No.”
Something shifted in his face. The patience thinning. Beneath it, not rage, not yet, something that was the precursor to rage in a man who had spent decades training himself not to show it. The thing underneath the cold face. The actual man.
“You are my daughter,” he said. “This is not a negotiation.”
“You’re right that I’m your daughter. You’re wrong that this isn’t a negotiation. Everything is a negotiation. You taught me that.”
His jaw tightened. “You will do as I say.”
“I won’t.” I held his gaze. “I know what you are. I know what you do. I know what happened to my mother.” My voice was completely steady and I was not surprised by it this time.
I had earned this steadiness, had paid for it on the floor of a locked room, and it was mine.
“You don’t have anything left to threaten me with that frightens me more than what I already know. ”
He stood up.
That was new. In twenty-four years of confrontations across breakfast tables and study desks and the formal parlors of houses I had never been allowed to call home, he had never stood up.
He had always conducted his authority from a seated position, the deliberate stillness of a man who understood that the most powerful person in a room was the one who didn’t need to move.
He was moving now.
“You will go to Moscow,” he said.
He was already moving around the table. I stood because sitting felt like a concession I was not prepared to make.
We faced each other across its length with the unmistakable sense of a situation no longer proceeding according to plan.
Like two people who had finally run out of the language they had been using as distance.
“You will meet Davidof. You will conduct yourself as my daughter, and you will do your duty to this family. I have arranged it, and it will happen.”
“There is a man,” I said. “His name is Jared Kane.”
Silence.
I had said it out loud. To Dottie, in a restaurant, with guards at the door.
I had said it there first, but this was different.
This was saying it here, in this room, to this man, with full knowledge of what I was doing.
I was putting Jared’s name between myself and my father like something I was choosing to stand behind. Like a declaration.
The silence stretched.
My father’s expression went through something I had never seen on his face.
Not the cold. Not the hot-before-cold. Something more complicated.
A rapid series of calculations running behind his eyes, assessments being made and discarded, a man processing information he had not expected and was now fitting into a picture.
“Jared Kane,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then something settled in his face that was worse than the anger would have been. Not cold exactly… knowing. The expression of a man who has just been handed an advantage he had not anticipated.
“Jared Kane is not who you think he is,” he said quietly.
I kept my face still. “I know exactly who he is.”
“Do you.” He said it without inflection, which was the most frightening way to say anything.
“He is not a man who found you by accident, Polina. He is a man who was looking for you. There is a difference.” A pause, precisely weighted.
“Ask him what he was doing at the Barnes Foundation. Ask him why he really wanted to get close to you.”
Something moved in my chest. Cold. Fast.
I did not let it reach my face.
“You’re trying to turn me against the one person—“
“I’m trying to tell you the truth.” His voice had the quality it only had when he was not performing.
The flat, declarative tone of a man stating a fact he found neither pleasant nor unpleasant, simply accurate.
“A truth you deserve to have. Whether you choose to believe it is your business.” He straightened.
“It changes nothing about Moscow. It changes nothing about Davidof. It simply means that the man you are sacrificing your future for may not have been entirely honest with you about the nature of his interest.”
I said nothing.
My hands were completely still at my sides.
“The only way I’m going to Moscow is over my dead body.”
Ivan looked at me across the table.
“That,” he said softly, “is not an expression I would use lightly in this family.”
The specific quality of the words. The specific quality of the silence that followed them.
My mother’s face. Twenty-nine. A mountain road.
Before either of us could say another word, Vlad appeared in the dining room doorway. He looked at my father, not at me. He had stopped looking at me since yesterday, which was its own kind of information.
“Sir.” His voice was even. Professional. “There is a man at the front gate. He says his name is Jared Kane.”
The dining room went very still.
I watched my father’s face. Watched the calculation run, faster than I could follow, variables assessed and weighted and discarded in the time it took me to draw a breath.
His eyes moved from Vlad to me and in them I saw something I had not seen before, something that in a different man might have been called uncertainty but in Ivan Morozov was the specific quality of a situation not proceeding according to plan.
Then his face closed.
“Get her things,” he said to Vlad. “The car, now. She goes out the back. She is on a plane to Moscow tonight.”
“Father—“
“Now, Vlad.”
Dimitri appeared behind Vlad in the doorway.
They crossed the room and I felt a hand close around each of my arms and I did not fight it—not yet, because fighting in the dining room with my father watching accomplished nothing and I was not going to waste the only move I had on something that couldn’t work.
I let them move me.
Through the kitchen, past Molly who pressed herself against the counter with her eyes down and her hands shaking, out the back passage and into the gray morning air.
A black car waited in the rear drive, engine already running.
Dimitri opened the rear door. I got in because the alternative was being put in, and I had some choices left and I intended to use them strategically.
The door closed.
Vlad got in the front. Dimitri walked around to the other rear door.
I looked at the seat between us. Looked at the door handle. Looked at the distance between the rear drive and the front gate where a man whose name I had just said out loud in my father’s dining room was standing on the other side of a wall.
Dimitri’s door opened.
He was halfway into the seat when I moved.
Not toward the door, there wasn’t time for the door.
The dividing screen between the front and rear of the car was a solid panel, not glass, which meant Vlad couldn’t see what was happening behind him.
I had noted this the first time I’d been put in this car three weeks ago, because I noted things, because my mother had taught me that knowledge was the thing they couldn’t take from you.
Dimitri’s elbow caught the headrest.
I caught the door handle.
The door swung outward.
Dimitri swore in Russian and grabbed for my arm.
I pulled against his grip with everything I had and the grip held and for one suspended awful second we were simply two people locked in opposition, and then the car lurched forward.
Vlad reacting to the sound, pressed the accelerator by instinct, and the movement broke Dimitri’s balance and mine simultaneously and the world tilted.
The impact arrived before I heard it.
The front of the car met the cement pillar of the rear gatepost with a sound like a gunshot and everything stopped.
Silence.
Then: pain in my temple where it had hit the window. Dimitri’s weight against me. The smell of deployed airbags from the front seat and the sound of Vlad swearing and the distant sound of the front gate alarm and somewhere further, the sound of voices.
I pressed my hand against my temple. Looked at it. Blood, not much, not serious.
I looked at the car door, now sprung slightly open from the impact.
I looked at Dimitri, dazed and blinking beside me.
I am not getting on that plane.
Not alive.
I got my shoulder against the door.