Chapter 30 #2
Irina catches me outside the library. The removed portrait leans against the corridor wall between us, its painted family staring upward from knee height. "Walk me through the drawer," she says. "Only what you touched or saw."
I describe the catch under the wooden lip, the stiff paper bending when I pulled, and the way the card lay above everything else once I freed it. Nothing inside the drawer had been overturned, with my charger still coiled near the front.
"He knew where you would look before the deadline," Irina says.
The thought makes my fingertips cold again. "Konstantin left the room for twenty minutes. The card could have been there before he went."
"The bedroom log excludes every credential I expected to find. Then I was looking for the wrong credentials."
Her gaze travels toward the library door, beyond which Anton speaks to a transport officer.
"The replacement emergency authority belongs to the relocation group," she continues. "My husband supervises that group. Several people can issue beneath his approval, but every path begins close to him."
I refuse the easy reassurance that Anton loves her too much to lie. Konstantin loves me, yet love didn't prevent him from turning my routine into an operation. "Follow what bothers you," I say. "I'll trust your judgment even if the evidence points to your husband."
Irina's eyes meet mine. Fatigue has finally broken through the composure she carried in at breakfast.
"That is what I'm afraid of." She returns to the evidence room carrying the exact port copy herself.
Larissa waits until the others leave before sinking into the chair beside mine. Her pale hair falls over one shoulder, bright against black wool. Usually, she enters a private room by telling me what a man likes done with a tie or a desk.
Today, she folds her hands.
"What do you want?" she asks.
The plain question brings tears closer than comfort would.
"I want Grandma and the baby safe. I want a husband who doesn't borrow my voice when mine might say no." I look down at the narrow silver band on my finger. "I also want to stop loving him long enough to know what I would choose without it."
Larissa's hand closes around mine. She offers no trick for controlling a man through desire.
"After my husband died, everyone decided what kind of widow I should become," she says.
"Half wanted a grieving ornament. The other half expected a scandal before the funeral flowers browned.
I chose my own pleasures, but people still speak as if my life is advice for theirs. "
"What do you want now?"
Larissa blinks, then squeezes my hand. "A friend who asks me that more than once."
"Done."
"Also lunch. Dasha has mistaken toast for a personality."
The joke doesn't erase anything, though it lets me breathe without crying. We find Dasha in the hall supervising three trunks, two children, and a guard trying to explain why a wooden rocking horse requires inspection.
"Tell them it isn't hollow," Dasha says when she sees me. "They believe everything with a stomach contains explosives."
The guard turns the painted horse upside down. A small compartment opens under its belly, releasing three crayons and a dried piece of toast onto the carpet.
Dasha closes her eyes. "I withdraw the objection."
Her older child begins to cry over the confiscated toast. I sit beside him while the guard swabs the compartment and then ask him to choose which crayon should approve the inspection report.
He selects purple. By the time the rocking horse is returned, Dasha has the trunks tagged without needing to manage grief over toast as well.
"At the estate, help me choose their rooms?" she asks. "Everyone else will choose for security. I need someone to remember they're children."
"I can do that."
At twelve forty, the convoy leaves.
Anton personally checks the single-use credential on my car before handing the tablet to the dispatcher. My driver, escort, destination, and vehicle number turn green in separate boxes. A second guard confirms them at the gate.
Konstantin rides in another car. His absence from the seat preserves the distance neither of us knows how to resolve.
Halfway to the estate, nausea rises through the moving warmth of the cabin. I close my eyes, pressing my fingers beneath my ribs while the road bends along the frozen lake.
At the next security stop, my door opens.
Konstantin stands outside holding a packet of plain crackers and the black coat he forgot to fasten. Snow settles in his dark hair. Without speaking, he passes me the crackers, then waits until I eat one.
"Better?" he asks.
"A little."
His knuckles graze my palm when he takes the empty wrapper. The contact lasts less than a second, yet my body follows it after he steps away.
We reach the estate in an early blue dusk.
The glass conservatory rises from the old house in dark panes framed by snow.
Wedding flowers are gone, leaving bare citrus trees and a floor scrubbed clean of celebration.
Inside the main rooms, furniture waits beneath linen covers while portable heaters warm the halls for our arrival.
Magnificence remains visible through absence, each empty space showing where flowers, musicians, and pools of light once filled the house.
Galina removes the cover from a carved table her father once used, touching the wood before directing staff toward the family rooms. Dasha's son races up the staircase until his mother calls him back, while his baby sister watches from her arms. Irina takes the estate office with the evidence files, and Larissa claims the room across from mine without asking whether I want company.
I help Dasha choose a room with one narrow bed and a crib under painted rafters.
The windows face the inner courtyard instead of the lake, satisfying security, while an old brass speaking tube beside the wardrobe delights her son.
His voice travels through the wall into a downstairs pantry, where a startled guard answers the first experimental shout.
Dasha laughs. The sound fills the room with ordinary life, brief but stubborn. She tucks the rocking horse beside the beds and thanks me as if I did more than remember what the room was for.
Konstantin stops at the foot of the stairs. "Your rooms are in the south wing," he says. "Mine are below. The connecting corridor stays guarded."
"Thank you."
Formality hurts more than anger did, because love remains inside every careful word.
Night gathers across the lake while the household settles into the place where our marriage became public. With the cars hidden inside garages and the lower curtains drawn against the cold, the estate looks empty from the snow-covered shore.