Chapter 37
ELENA
Four days after Roman brings me home from the Kessler facility I am sitting on the couch in the main room with a blanket over my lap.
There’s a cup of chamomile going cold on the table in front of me that I haven’t touched because I can’t look at chamomile right now without thinking about eleven mornings of a woman standing in my kitchen putting something in it.
So I’m just looking at it and not drinking it when Roman comes in from his study and sits down across from me and looks at me looking at the cup.
“Ask me,” he says.
I look at him. “What?”
“Whatever you have been sitting with for three days. Ask me.”
I look at the cup for another moment. Then I look at him.
“Who were those men?” I say. “The ones in New Jersey. The ones who took me.” I pause. “Who are you, Roman? Really. Because I have been working for you for two years and I have been married to you for weeks and I have been carefully not asking this question for all of it and I’m done not asking.”
He looks at me for a long moment.
Then he leans forward, elbows on his knees, and he says, “My father brought me to a building on 48th Street when I was sixteen years old. He stood me in the lobby and he told me to look around. He said this is what we are.” He pauses.
“I didn’t understand what he meant until I was twenty-nine.
The night the man who ran our organization put a key in my hand and told me it was mine. ”
I look at him. “What organization?”
“The Bratva,” he says. “Russian organized crime. I am the Pakhan. The head. Every operation, every decision, every man who works under this name answers to me.”
The room goes very quiet.
I stand up.
I don’t mean to stand up, my legs just do it, and I take three steps toward the window and I stand there with my back to him and I look at the city and I think about two years of correspondence I managed, names on documents, meetings I scheduled, the men who came through his office, the calls I routed, the things I carefully did not examine.
I turn around.
“The council,” I say. “That is not a business council.”
“No.”
“Kostya.”
“My right hand since before I took the position.”
“The men at our wedding. Pavel. Gregor.”
“They have been with me for years.”
I press both hands against my stomach, the babies there, real, present, and I look at Roman sitting across from me with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on me, steady, giving me the time I need to process it, and I think about the man in the wire-rimmed glasses asking me for a name from inside the Petrov organization and the terror of not knowing what I was in the middle of.
“The men who took me,” I say. “They were asking me for a name. Someone inside your organization who had been coordinating with them.” I look at him. “Was that real?”
“Yes. His name was Renko. He has been dealt with.”
“Dealt with,” I repeat.
Roman holds my gaze.
“Have you killed people?” I say.
He doesn’t look away. “Only when they deserved it.”
I stand there, and I look at him, and I think about that answer, the flatness of it, the complete absence of apology in it.
I wait for the fear to arrive, and it does, a cold fear, but underneath it is something else that I did not expect.
Two years of carefully unexamined suspicion confirming itself.
The feeling of a picture whose edges I have always been able to see, finally showing me its center.
I start pacing.
I can’t help it. I walk to the window and back and to the window again. I say, “Oh my god,” at least twice, and Roman watches me from the couch without moving, and I stop in the middle of the room, and I look at him.
“Grigori Volkov,” I say. “He was the one behind all of this.”
“Yes.”
“He’s the reason I was taken.”
“He arranged it. He is no longer a problem.”
I look at him. I think about what no longer a problem means. I press my hands harder against my stomach, and I breathe.
“The chamomile,” I say. “Someone put something in it.”
“A woman named Irina Volsk. She was on the household staff. She has been dealt with.”
I close my eyes for a moment. Eleven mornings. I drank it every morning because Mara switched me to chamomile. I liked it, it made me feel calm, and it was doing the opposite the entire time.
I open my eyes.
“Roman.”
“Yes.”
“I need you to tell me everything,” I say. “Not a summary. Everything. From the beginning. Your father, the building, the key, all of it. I need to understand what I am inside.”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he says sit down and I sit down, and he begins.
He talks for a long time.
His father was Bratva before him, a mid-level operative who rose through the organization over thirty years on intelligence, loyalty, and the kind of patience that builds things slowly.
He brought Roman into it the way Bratva sons are brought in, gradually, through proximity, through watching, through understanding the structure before being handed any piece of it. Roman was sixteen in that lobby.
He was nineteen the first time he understood what the organization actually required of the people inside it. He was twenty-two when his father died, and he stepped into the vacancy his father left, not at the top, not yet, but close enough to see it.
The Pakhan position came seven years later.
He tells me about the council, twelve men representing the major factions of the Russian Bratva network in the northeast, each with their own operations, their own loyalties, their own histories, all operating under the umbrella of a structure that has existed in this city for longer than either of us has been alive.
The territories, the businesses, the architecture of how legitimate operations and illegitimate ones coexist inside the same corporate structure, the same correspondence I managed for two years.
I sit across from him, and I listen, and I think about every document I ever filed.
He tells me about Grigori, fourteen months of coordinated operations against him from the inside, the intelligence leaks, the Marchetti syndicate, the council maneuvering.
He tells me about the meeting in New Jersey and what they wanted from me and why they believed I had it, and I think about the man with the wire-rimmed glasses saying you know everything and the terror of knowing I did not.
He tells me about Irina and the compound and eleven mornings, and I watch his face while he tells me this part, and his jaw is set in the way it sets when he is controlling something that would otherwise surface, and I understand, looking at his face, that this is the part that cost him the most.
When he finishes, the room is quiet.
I look at my hands in my lap.
“I worked for you for two years,” I say. “I managed everything. Every call, every meeting, every name on every document.”
“Yes.”
“You kept me outside it deliberately.”
“Yes.”
I look up at him. “Why?”
“Because you were not supposed to be in it,” he says.
“Because I wanted one part of my life that was separate from it.” He pauses.
“Because from approximately the third week of your employment, I understood that you were someone I needed to keep away from this world, and I was not ready to examine why.”
I look at him.
He looks back at me.
“Roman,” I say carefully. “What are you telling me?”
He stands up.
He crosses the room and sits beside me on the couch, close, and turns toward me, looking at my face the way he looked at the ultrasound screen, without the control he usually keeps over his eyes.
“I’m telling you that the arrangement we made is not what this is anymore,” he says.
“For me. I don’t know when it changed. Somewhere between the masquerade and the penthouse, and every morning in between.
I’m telling you that I am in love with you and I have been for longer than I’ve been willing to say it, and I’m saying it now because you almost didn’t come home, and I’m done keeping it inside. ”
I look at him.
He looks back at me, and he doesn’t look away, and he doesn’t take it back, and his eyes are doing what they did in the hospital room, open in a way I have only seen a handful of times, a man who has put down the thing he has been carrying and is standing in front of me without it.
I think about two years of sitting outside his office. Two years of burying something in professionalism and discipline, and the daily practice of wanting something I told myself I could not have.
I reach up, and I put my hand against his jaw.
He goes still the way he went still the first time I did this, that one second of complete stillness, and then he turns his head slightly and his eyes drop to my mouth, and I lean in and close the distance, and I kiss him.
Not the way he has kissed me before. Not urgent, not careful.
Just present, just the two of us in this room with everything finally said, his hand coming up to the side of my face, warm, steady.
I close my eyes, and I kiss my husband, and outside the windows the city does its indifferent evening thing, and in here it is just this.
His other hand finds my waist and pulls me closer, and I go, and the kiss deepens, and I think, very briefly, that I have been wanting to do this since long before I ever allowed myself to admit it.
Then I stop thinking entirely.