Chapter 16
ROMAN
I’m going through the Renko deposition notes when my phone lights up on the desk beside me.
I glance at the screen, and then I look at it properly because it is eleven fourteen on a Friday night, and Elena does not text me at eleven fourteen on Friday nights. She does not text me about anything personal at any time on any night, which is what makes the message worth reading twice.
I know it’s late. I was wondering if I could speak with you privately. Tomorrow, if that works, or whenever suits you.
I set the deposition notes down.
Privately. Not about the schedule, not about a document, not about anything she would normally put in a message at this hour. I think about her face this afternoon when I told her about the Volkov directive. The three seconds before she put it away. The hand on the tablet that was not quite steady.
I type back.
Are you alright?
The response comes in under a minute.
Yes. I just need to speak with you.
I look at that for a moment. Then I type.
I’ll send a car. Viktor will be outside your building in twenty minutes.
I put the phone down, and I go to the window, and I look at the city, and I think about the resignation letter and the seven weeks of something she has been carrying.
I pick up the phone and call Viktor.
I do not sit down while I wait. I’m not a man who paces; I have never had the restlessness that makes other men wear tracks in their floors when they are waiting for something.
I stand at the window with a glass of scotch I have not touched, and I look at the city, and I think about nothing specific, which is its own kind of thinking, the kind where your mind is doing something underneath the surface that it’s not ready to show you yet.
The intercom sounds at eleven fifty-two.
“Ms. Vasquez is here,” the door staff says.
“Send her up.”
I put the glass down on the table, move to the entrance, and open the door myself because it is nearly midnight, I have sent away the evening staff, and there is no one else here to open it.
She steps out of the elevator and into the entrance hallway, and she is in her coat with her bag over her shoulder and her hair still up from the workday. She looks tired.
She comes inside.
The door closes behind her.
She doesn’t take her coat off. She doesn’t put her bag down.
She stands in the entrance of my penthouse at midnight with her hands at her sides, and she looks at me with the expression of someone who has made a decision and is on the other side of making it, and there is nothing left to do now except say the thing.
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
The words land in the room and stay there.
I look at her.
She doesn’t look away.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Say that again.”
“I’m pregnant.” Her voice doesn’t waver. “I’m carrying your child. I’m seven weeks gone. You are the only man I have been with. I confirmed it four days ago.”
The room is very quiet.
I stand in the entrance of my own home, and I let those words move through me the way information moves through me when it is significant, slowly and completely, without rushing the processing of it. Seven weeks. Four days ago. The only man.
“Come in,” I say.
She follows me into the main room, and I go to the window because I need something to do with my body while my mind works, and standing at the window is the thing I do. I stand there for a moment with my back to her, and then I turn around.
She’s standing in the middle of the room with her coat still on and her bag still on her shoulder. She’s watching me with the steady composure she brings to every room she walks into, and underneath it, visible to me now in a way it was not visible three months ago, the thing she has been carrying.
“How far along?” I ask.
“Seven weeks.”
“You said that.”
“Seven and a half weeks.”
I look at her. “Why did you say nothing sooner?”
She holds my gaze. “Because I tried to resign so I could disappear before you found out. I had the letter ready the morning you landed.” A pause. “You tore it in half.”
I did.
I think about all of that.
“Sit down,” I say.
She sits.
I stay at the window.
The silence in the room stretches out, and I let it stretch because I need it to.
I am a man who makes decisions, and I make them deliberately and without the kind of haste that produces decisions you have to undo later, and what is sitting in front of me right now is not a simple decision.
It is several decisions at once, layered on top of each other, each one affecting the shape of the next, and I need to see the full architecture of it before I start building anything.
There is an heir. That changes the council’s calculus entirely.
There is Elena. That changes mine.
There is the Volkov directive and the Grigori situation and the Marchetti problem, and a council session that I have been preparing for with one set of objectives that have just shifted significantly.
I look at her sitting in the chair across the room in her coat at midnight with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on me.
“Come back tomorrow evening,” I say. “Eight o’clock.”
She looks at me. “That’s it?”
“I’ll have a proposal for you.”
She holds my gaze for a moment, searching for something in my face, and I give her nothing because I’m not ready to give her anything yet. Whatever I give her tomorrow, I want to give her properly, with full certainty behind it, and I’m not fully certain yet. I am close. But not yet.
She stands. She picks up her bag from where it has slipped off her shoulder. She walks to the entrance, stops with her hand on the door, and looks back at me once.
I look back at her.
She leaves.
I stand in the silence of the penthouse, and I listen to the elevator doors open and close, and then there is nothing except the city outside the windows, indifferent and lit up, sixty-two floors below me, and not remotely interested in what just happened in this room.
I pick up my phone.
I call Kostya.
He answers on the second ring because Kostya always answers on the second ring, regardless of the hour.
“Clear my morning,” I say.
A pause. Just one. “Done,” he says, and hangs up.
I set the phone down.
I go back to the window, and I look at the city, and I start to build.