Chapter 41
ELENA
The dress is midnight blue, fitted through the waist, and at sixteen weeks, it sits differently than it did the night of the council dinner two months ago.
I stand in front of the mirror, and I look at myself properly for the first time in a while.
The bump is not large, not the kind that announces itself from across a room, but it is there, a distinct curve below my waist that was not there before.
I press both hands against it for a moment the way I always do now, a checking in, a hello, and then I smooth the fabric over it and I look at my face in the mirror and I think about walking back into that room.
The last time I was in Roman’s world I ended up on my knees on the floor of a van in New Jersey.
I pick up my earrings and put them on.
Roman is waiting in the main room in his dark suit.
He looks up when I come in and his eyes move over me once, the full length of me, and they stop at the bump and something happens in his expression that he doesn’t try to manage, a man looking at his wife carrying his children and not having the words for it and not needing them.
“Ready,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, and holds out his hand.
The penthouse dining room holds twenty people comfortably, and tonight it holds nineteen, the inner council and their wives, the senior men, the people who make up the inner architecture of Roman’s world.
I have managed correspondence for most of them, booked restaurants for half of them, coordinated gifts for their wives on occasions Roman would never have remembered without me.
They know this.
What they did not know, until six weeks ago, is what I am made of.
Federov’s wife crosses the room to me before I have fully entered it.
Not waiting near the drinks, not lingering by her husband, crossing the room directly, her hands out, and she takes both of mine and says, “You look beautiful.” She squeezes my hands, and I squeeze back, and I think about the Volkonsky dinner where I had to approach her first and the distance between that night and this one.
Sorokin stands when I approach his group.
He stood when Roman entered the room an hour ago. He did not stand for me at the Volkonsky dinner. He stands now, unhurried, and he says, “Mrs. Petrov,” and inclines his head.
I say, “Good evening,” and I move on. I don’t let the satisfaction of it show on my face until I’m facing the window.
A man named Brukov, who said quite the adjustment at the first function I attended and whose name I have been following for two months, finds me near the end of the evening by the drinks table.
He’s holding his glass with both hands, and he looks at me and he says, without the loaded pause he used before, “Roman made the right call. For what it’s worth. ”
I look at him.
“It is worth something,” I say.
He nods and moves on, and I look out the window at the city sixty-two floors below and I think about a woman who used to stand in this building with a clipboard and a tablet and a set of feelings she kept filed away where they could not cost her anything.
I run one hand over my bump.
All three of us of us made it.
I feel Roman across the room the way I have always felt Roman across rooms, that pull of his attention when it’s directed at something. I look up and find him without searching, standing near the fireplace with Federov and another man I don’t recognize, and he is looking at me.
Not the way he used to look at me across his office, the careful neutral observation of a man managing something. He’s looking at me the way he looked at the ultrasound screen, open, undefended, a man who has stopped pretending the thing in his line of sight does not matter to him.
I hold his gaze for a moment.
He lifts his glass slightly, a half centimeter, the most understated acknowledgment in the history of human communication, and I turn back to my conversation and I don’t smile until I’m facing the window again.
The last guest leaves at eleven and the staff begins their quiet work and Roman comes to stand beside me at the window while I look at the city, and he puts his hand at the small of my back and I lean into it slightly.
“Sorokin stood up,” I say.
“I noticed.”
“Brukov apologized. In his way.”
“I noticed that too.”
I look at the city. “It’s different now.”
“Yes,” he says. “It is.”
We stand there for a moment, and then he says, quietly, “There’s something I need to tell you.”
I look at him.
He reaches into his jacket and puts a photograph on the windowsill between us. A man, grainy, half turned away from a camera, outside a building I don’t recognize. I look at it, and then I look at Roman.
“He has been photographed outside three of our properties,” Roman says. “In the last two weeks. We don’t know who he is yet or who sent him.”
I look at the photograph again. The posture of the man in it, the careful angle, staying just outside the camera’s range.
“Someone moved in,” I say. “After Grigori.”
Roman looks at me. “Yes.”
I look at the photograph for a long moment.
Then I look back at the city, all that light going to the horizon, indifferent and enormous, and I press one hand against my bump, and I think about two heartbeats and a plain gold ring and a man who looked at me across a room tonight like I was the only thing worth looking at.
“Then we deal with it,” I say.
Roman looks at me.
“We,” he says.
“We,” I say.
He looks at the city. After a moment, he picks up the photograph and puts it back in his jacket and his hand returns to the small of my back.