Chapter 19
Polina
The apartment was nothing like what I expected.
At least, from the outside.
I had been constructing something entirely different during the drive. Something ostentatious. A penthouse wrapped in glass and steel. The sort of place wealthy men acquired because wealth eventually became a competition with itself.
Instead, the building sat quietly among the others on the street, expensive without advertising the fact.
The architecture was clean and understated.
Large windows reflected the late afternoon light, and the entrance looked more like it belonged to people who valued privacy than people who wanted to impress strangers.
This was where Jared had brought me.
Or hidden me.
Or abandoned me.
I wasn’t entirely sure which.
I had a cut on my temple held closed with a butterfly bandage that a federal paramedic had applied with brisk efficiency in the rear drive of my father’s house.
I had no luggage. I had the clothes I had put on that morning with the intention of telling my father no, the burner phone in my jacket pocket, and approximately nothing else.
For a moment I didn’t move.
The last twenty-four hours had been a succession of doors opening into realities I hadn’t known existed. Federal agents. Arrests. Confessions. Freedom.
The word still felt theoretical. The car stopped.
The driver came around and opened my door.
I stepped out into a parking garage so clean it looked almost architectural. Soft lighting. Concrete. Glass. Security cameras positioned with deliberate precision.
Not my father’s style.
My father’s security had always been designed to remind people it existed.
This felt different.
Competent enough not to need the reminder.
The elevator required two separate credentials before the doors would open.
I watched the process in silence.
Jared stood beside me, close enough that I was aware of him without looking.
I had spent the drive trying not to think about him.
The effort had been largely unsuccessful.
The elevator climbed smoothly.
When the doors opened on the fourteenth floor, floor-to-ceiling windows immediately pulled my attention toward the skyline.
Philadelphia stretched beyond the glass.
Alive.
Moving.
Ordinary.
For the first time in my life, nobody was telling me where I had to be in it.
I stood there longer than was reasonable.
The city moved below me with complete indifference to my existence.
Cars crossed intersections.
People hurried along sidewalks.
Somewhere, meetings were starting. Someone was walking a dog. Someone was late for dinner. Someone was making a decision that would alter the shape of their life and nobody around them would ever know it had happened.
Ordinary lives.
For years I had imagined freedom as something dramatic.
A declaration.
A rebellion.
A door slammed hard enough to echo.
Instead, it looked remarkably like traffic.
Like a city full of people deciding where to go next without asking permission.
The realization was unexpectedly disorienting.
Tomorrow I could leave this building and walk in any direction I chose.
No driver.
No security detail.
No explanation.
Nobody waiting for a report when I returned.
The thought should have felt exhilarating.
Yet it felt enormous.
Because freedom, it turned out, wasn’t the absence of walls.
It was the absence of instructions.
For the first time in my life, nobody was handing me a map.
A man waited near the elevator. Tall. Broad shouldered.
Massive without being thick. The kind of build that came from discipline rather than size.
His eyes were a piercing blue-black that almost looked like a bruise housed in an aquiline face that gave off a bird of prey vibe.
His square jaw with a slight divot was very Romanesque and his entire look was one I’d expect to see on an emperor from long ago.
They were a study in contrast. Jared was beautiful and elegant in a way that was no less intimidating.
But where this man had a predator vibe, Jared was dangerous because of his intellect.
The man was a strategist and master manipulator.
But no. No less dangerous than the man who stalked toward us now.
“Gabriel.” Jared nodded his head once.
He clapped Jared on the back in a gesture that was familiar. Camaraderie.
“Polina.” He extended his hand. His grip was warm and brief and made no attempt to be anything other than what it was. “Welcome. You’re safe here.” The words felt foreign. A language I understood but had never expected to hear directed at me.
Two words I had not heard directed at me in—I tried to calculate when I had last been told I was safe and found I couldn’t locate the occasion.
“Thank you,” I said. “For making accommodations available on such short notice.”
“The apartment is yours for as long as you need it,” Gabriel said. “Security handles the building. If you need anything, call.”
I followed them in.
Gabriel handed me a key card.
“Access for the building, elevator, garage, and apartment.”
I turned it over in my hand.
A key. Nobody had ever handed me a key that wasn’t really someone else’s.
The simplicity of it felt oddly significant.
Gabriel led us through the space with the efficient familiarity of someone who knew every inch of it.
The apartment opened into a living area framed by floor-to-ceiling windows.
The skyline stretched beyond the glass, Philadelphia turning gold beneath the late afternoon sun.
A charcoal sectional faced a wall of built-in shelving.
Wood, stone, and steel softened what could have felt impersonal into something unexpectedly warm.
“The kitchen’s stocked,” Gabriel said.
It was.
The refrigerator was full. The cupboards organized. Coffee, tea, bottled water, fresh fruit arranged in a bowl on the island.
Someone had anticipated needs I hadn’t had time to think about yet.
“The building has twenty-four-hour security. The elevators require credentials. Visitors need approval.”
Not my father’s kind of security.
Nobody was explaining restrictions.
Only options.
Gabriel opened a door off the main hallway.
“The office.”
A desk overlooked the river.
Another door.
“Guest room.”
A third.
“The primary bedroom.”
The room was larger than my entire suite at home. Soft gray walls. A king-sized bed. More windows. More sky.
The ensuite bathroom was finished in stone and glass with a soaking tub positioned beside the window.
I stopped.
Gabriel glanced toward it.
“Rose liked that feature too.”
For the first time, something resembling amusement touched his expression.
“I can see why.”
He nodded once.
“I’ll leave you to settle in.” Gabriel exited with Jared.
The apartment fell quiet after they left.
Not empty.
Just mine.
***
“We’re here.” I allowed the women entry to the building and took a long breath, letting it out slowly as I waited for them to arrive.
I opened the door and Dottie swept into the room, carrying a tray of coffees with enough outrage to power a small city.
Behind her came two more women, one I was sure was Raia from the brief descriptions Dottie’d given me, and the beautiful, gentle smile from her almost perfect Madonna lips.
The other I had no idea, but she was tiny. Probably half a foot shorter than me, but the confidence that poured off her in waves told me she was someone of some substance. She held wine bottles in her hands and held them up like it was an obvious choice for 11:30 AM.
“Oh, thank God,” she said, setting everything on the kitchen counter. “You’re alive.”
“I’m beginning to suspect everyone knew where I was except me.”
“Correct.”
“You don’t seem troubled by that.”
“I am troubled by many things,” Dottie said. “Mostly men. And your father. And apparently international organized crime, which was not on my bingo card this month.”
I stared at her.
She stared back.
“Hi. I’m Raia.” The beautiful woman with the long wavy hair held out her hand. We were about the same height, but where she was almost waiflike, I was all curves. More Jessica Rabbit than runway model.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Raia, I’m Polina, but I’m sure you knew that already.”
“The pleasure is mine,” Raia said warmly.
“Start talking.”
“Dottie—“
“No.”
She held up a hand.
“You disappeared.”
Another finger.
“You were nearly kidnapped.”
Another.
“You have somehow become involved with a man who sounds increasingly like a character written by someone with unresolved trust issues.”
I opened my mouth.
She pointed the coffee at me.
“Don’t interrupt. I’m building a case.”
Despite everything, the group of us laughed and I felt suddenly freer than I ever had. This was real. I was here, with women I could talk to and no one was going to barge in. Take my phone. Send me home. Or derail my life ever again. The enormity of it settled over me.
“Hi. I’m Mari. I’ve been hovering in the background verbally kicking Jared’s ass to fix his shit. Here we are.”
Oh, I liked her. I liked her very much.
“Jared. He had the chance, the computer, the drive, the access he needed. He was in your father’s study in the middle of the night with everything he’d spent eighteen months working toward right in front of him.
” Her voice was even, not dramatic, just the clean delivery of a fact.
“He put the drive back in his pocket and walked out.”
I already knew this. He had told me himself, in the rear drive of the house with blood on my face and agents moving through the rooms. I had heard it and I had filed it and I had said I need time because I did need time and the knowing and the believing were not the same thing yet.
But hearing it from someone else was different. Someone with no stake in whether I believed it. Someone telling me because it was true, not because she needed me to forgive him.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“He told Declan,” she said. “The night he came to get you. He told Declan everything, the operation, Khaos Inc., all of it. We know, Polina. All of us. And none of us know quite what to do with the fact that Jared Kane, who has spent eleven years making sure nothing sticks”—her voice held something warm and slightly exasperated, the tone of someone describing a family member they knew too well—“sat in front of the thing he’d been working toward for a year and a half and chose a woman he’d known for three weeks instead. ”
The room held the weight of that for a moment.
The way Mari described it put things in perspective in a way Jared never could have.
“He remembered the Barnes,” I said.
Not quite to her. To the table. To the wine glass Dottie had handed me after dumping the coffee down the sink.
To the simple fact of a man sitting alone in a locked-out room at four in the morning writing The Barnes.
Tomorrow. Don’t wait for permission on a torn piece of notepaper and tucking it beneath my phone.
“The Barnes Foundation?” Raia said.
“I told him—“ I stopped. “In the dark. I told him I’d call the Barnes if my father weren’t in the picture. It was nothing, just… I said it once, in passing, and he”—I looked up—”he wrote it in the note he left. Like it mattered.”
The women were looking at me with expressions that were both soft and slightly amused, like women watching someone arrive at a conclusion they’d already reached.
“It did matter,” she said. “That’s the point.”
I pressed my lips together and looked out the window.
“I have a contact,” Mari said, her voice shifting to something more practical, the tone of a woman who understood that sometimes the most useful thing you could do for someone was hand them something concrete to hold.
“At the Barnes Foundation. Her name is Dr. Ellison. She’s on the curatorial committee.
I’ve done some fundraising work with her.
” She paused. “If you wanted an introduction. A real one, through the front door, with someone who would take your work seriously. I could make that call.”
I looked at her.
“He described your knowledge of the collection,” she said.
“How you moved through it that night. And I’ve looked at your academic work.
Jared mentioned your degrees and I may have done some research.
” A small unapologetic smile. “You’re more than qualified.
You were always more than qualified. You just kept getting your exits closed. ”
My throat tightened. I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum and looked at the ceiling and told myself that I was not going to cry in front of women I’d just met.
“He remembered,” I said again. Quietly. To myself, mostly.
“He did.”
I sat with it for a moment. The Barnes. The interview I had been reaching toward for four years while my father quietly redirected everything away from it.
The thing I had said in the dark in a voice that surprised even me with its certainty, and the man who had heard it and kept it and left it under my phone like a promise.
I was not forgiving him yet. I needed to sit with the beginning of us—my name given to him by another, the operation, the calculation that had walked through Midgard’s doors the same night I did and decide what it meant.
Whether it changed the thing itself or only the context of it.
Those were questions for days I hadn’t had yet.
But I was making a decision. Not about him, about myself. About the Barnes and the interview and the career I had been told, in a hundred quiet ways, I was not allowed to have.
“Yes,” I said. “Make the call.”
Mari smiled, a real one, the full version, warm and unguarded.
“Good.” She stood and reached for her phone. “One more thing.”
“What?”
She looked at me with the direct eyes of a woman who had made her own difficult choices and was familiar with the view from the other side of them.
“There’s a place. Asgard. You might have heard of it, through the club world.
It’s private. Sacred, almost, to the people in Jared’s circle.
It’s where the important things happen.” She paused.
“If you wanted to reach out to him. Not a text, not a phone call. Something that meant something.” She held my gaze. “I could arrange access.”
I thought about a man standing at a gate at eight seventeen in the morning because I had told him not to come and he had come anyway.
About deeply inconvenient. About a note under a phone and a drive left in a pocket and the expression on his face in the rear drive when he had held on and I had let him.
I thought about my mother, who had never gotten to choose.
I thought about what it meant to be her daughter.
“Arrange it,” I said.