Chapter 9
ROMAN
My shower runs cold for the last thirty seconds, the way it has for the last thirty seconds every morning for twenty years.
It is not a complicated philosophy. You start the day by doing one hard thing before the day has asked anything of you yet, and everything after that is easier by comparison.
I towel off and dress in the quiet of the bedroom, the city still gray outside the floor-length windows, the penthouse doing what it always does at this hour, which is nothing.
My phone is on the nightstand.
It lights up while I’m buttoning my shirt.
I pick it up and look at the screen. Mila Volkov’s name sits above a string of images that load one after another before I have decided whether I want them, followed by a single message:
This is what you’re missing out on.
She is not subtle. She has never been subtle, which Grigori probably considers an asset and which I consider a flag of a different color entirely. The photos are the kind that make a man put down whatever he is holding and pick up his phone with both hands instead.
She has sent two photos. They’re provocative but not fully nude.
In the first one, she stands in front of a bathroom mirror wearing a tiny black lace bra and a matching thong that barely covers anything.
The bra is pushed down just enough to show the curve of her small, firm breasts and hard nipples.
Her slim, toned body is angled to highlight her long legs and narrow waist, dark hair loose over one shoulder.
The second photo is closer. She has pulled the thong to the side with two fingers, exposing her smooth, shaved pussy. Her slim stomach is tight, and she’s biting her lower lip while looking straight at the camera.
I look at them for a moment.
Then I put the phone face down on the nightstand and go back to buttoning my shirt.
This is the thing nobody in that council room seems to understand when they talk about the Volkov alliance with certainty.
Mila Volkov sending photographs at six forty in the morning is not a woman.
It is a transaction. It is Grigori’s opening position dressed in expensive lingerie, and every response I give to it is a negotiation, whether I intend it to be or not.
Call her back, and I am signaling appetite.
Ignore her, and I am signaling resistance.
There is no version of this where I am just a man looking at his phone.
I pick the phone back up, turn it over, delete the message without responding, and put it in my jacket pocket.
Six weeks until the council session.
Elena is at the curb at seven fifty, which is four minutes earlier than I told Viktor to be there, which means she has been standing outside her building in the November cold for four minutes rather than risk being thirty seconds late.
I notice this the way I notice everything about her lately, which is to say immediately and without meaning to.
She gets in and pulls the door shut, says good morning, and opens her tablet. The day begins with her voice moving through the schedule. I listen and respond, look at her hands on the tablet screen, and think about last night.
Her hands on my desk. The way she looked at me afterward, composed and certain, telling me it could not happen again.
It cannot happen again.
I look out the window.
“Your ten o’clock is Harmon’s legal team,” she says. “They’ve accepted the thirty-day clause.”
“Good.”
“Your twelve thirty is clear. I can have lunch sent up if you’re staying in.”
“I’m staying in.”
She makes a note. The car moves through traffic. She is sitting eighteen inches away from me with her tablet and her composed face and her hair pinned up, and I think about what I am going to do when I get to the office.
I’ve been thinking about it since four this morning, when I woke up and lay in the dark and turned it over for the hundredth time. The laugh through the door. The birthmark. Every careful answer she has given me for three weeks has answered nothing.
Last night in the elevator, the way she stood next to me, giving me nothing, the way she always gives me nothing.
I have been generous with uncertainty. I am done being generous.
“That’s everything,” she says, closing her tablet.
“Thank you,” I say.
She looks out her window. I look out mine. The car moves, and neither of us says anything else.
Gregor has worked my security detail for six years, and he is good at his job because he is thorough, quiet, and does not ask questions he has not been invited to ask.
I call him from my private line at nine fifteen after the Harmon call and tell him I need the masquerade footage. Full coverage. All cameras. Interior and exterior.
He doesn’t ask why.
It’s on my laptop by ten.
I close my office door, sit down, open the files, and start from the beginning.
The estate cameras run on a grid: twelve interior, four exterior, with overlapping coverage and no blind spots, because I designed the system that way eight years ago and have updated it every year since.
The masquerade footage is timestamped and indexed by camera, and I start with the main entrance and work inward.
Three hundred guests arrive between seven and nine. Masks, gowns, suits, the choreography of expensive people at an expensive event. I fast forward through most of it, slowing when the camera catches something worth slowing for.
I find her at seven twenty-two.
She is in a dark blazer and flat shoes, a tablet under her arm, moving through the east corridor. My secretary. At my party. Doing the job I pay her to do.
I watch her work.
She moves through three different rooms in the space of forty minutes, talking to staff, checking setups, and making notes.
At eight fourteen, she has a conversation with Kostya’s assistant near the main staircase. At eight twenty-three, she goes up the main stairs.
I switch to the second-floor corridor camera.
She goes into the guest bathroom at the end of the hall at eight twenty-four.
I note the timestamp and wait.
At nine twenty-seven, a woman comes out.
I sit forward.
The blazer is gone. In its place, a dark emerald dress, fitted, the kind that requires a decision before you leave the house.
The hair that I have never once seen other than pinned flat against the back of her head is loose around her shoulders in long blonde waves.
The mask is ivory and gold and covers the upper half of her face completely.
I know that dress.
I know that hair.
I watch the camera follow her down the stairs and into the ballroom, and I feel something move through my chest that is not quite any single thing I have a clean word for.
I switch cameras. I follow her.
I watch her move through the party. I watch her stop near the east wall, and I watch the woman in the red gown say something to her, and I watch myself cross the room. I watch myself stand between them. I watch myself walk her to the terrace.
I switch to the terrace camera.
We stand there for twenty-six minutes. I cannot hear what is said. I do not need to hear what is said. I was there.
I watch myself take her inside.
I switch cameras again. I follow us up the stairs. I watch my own bedroom door close at ten nineteen.
I watch it open again at four fifty-three in the morning.
She comes out alone. Hair loose, dress on, shoes in her hand. She stands in the corridor for a moment, her back against the wall, her eyes closed, then straightens and walks toward the stairs, disappearing from the frame.
I close the laptop.
I sit in the quiet of my office and look at the middle distance, and let it settle over me the way cold water settles. Not fast. Thoroughly.
She let me take her upstairs, and she said nothing. She sat across from my desk for three weeks and answered my questions, brought my coffee, and managed my schedule, and she said nothing.
She looked me in the eye this morning in the back of my car, and she said nothing.
The thing moving through my chest clarifies into something I recognize now. It is not confusion. It is not hurt. I do not do hurt; that is not a category I have much use for. It is something colder than both of those and considerably more focused.
I stand up.