Chapter 9
ANTON
I drive to Keyes before dawn.
The streets of Monaco are empty at this hour.
The harbour is grey. The yachts sit in their slips like sleeping animals and the city hasn’t woken and I haven’t slept and my hands have stopped shaking but only because I’ve been gripping the steering wheel the whole drive and the pressure has forced them still.
The firm’s lobby is dark. The glass doors are locked.
I press the intercom and the night security guard, a man I’ve never spoken to and who’s never seen the version of me that is standing on this pavement, buzzes me in without a question because my name opens doors in this city and tonight I hate that it does.
Kaye’s office is on the second floor. I take the stairs. The corridor is unlit except for the emergency strips along the baseboards, green and clinical, and my shoes are loud on the marble and I don’t care who hears.
Her door is closed. I open it.
She’s there. At her desk. I don’t know why she’s here at six in the morning and I don’t care.
She is sitting behind her laptop with a coffee cup and her reading glasses and her hair pulled back.
Daisy’s aunt., the woman who braided her hair at Thanksgiving, the woman who sent her a first-day card, the woman who put her niece in front of me like a wrapped gift and told me the girl was willing.
She sees me. Her face changes.
Not fear. Not yet. Recognition. The recognition of a woman who has spent years working with men from my world and who can tell, by the set of my shoulders and the absence of my smile and the particular quality of silence I carry into her office, that the man standing in her doorway isn’t the charming twin.
The charming twin is gone. What’s left is the other thing.
The thing my brothers and I became in the years after our father was murdered.
The thing that builds empires and dismantles people and doesn’t blink.
“Anton.” Her voice is professional. Her hands are not. They have moved from the keyboard to her lap. “It’s early. Can I help you with—”
“You told me she knew.”
The office goes still. Not silent, the building hums, the air conditioning drones, the harbour sends its distant wash through the windows, but still, the particular stillness of a room where someone has just understood that the conversation they’ve been dreading has arrived.
“You told me, in the corridor outside the conference room, that your niece was bright and eager and willing to make my experience comfortable. You told me she understood how things work at Keyes. You told me she was in on it.”
“Anton, I—”
“Did she know?”
Kaye’s mouth opens. Closes. Her hands in her lap grip each other, knuckles white, and I can see the calculation happening behind her eyes: what lie will work, what angle, what version of the truth can she offer that will protect her position and her career and her relationship with Jezebel and the architecture of deception she’s built around her own niece.
“Don’t,” I tell her. My voice is low and even and carries no warmth.
“Don’t calculate. Don’t strategise. Don’t find an angle.
I will know. I read people for a living, Kaye, and I’ve just come from the apartment of a young girl who told me the truth three times and I didn’t believe her, and the reason I didn’t believe her is sitting in this chair.
So I am going to ask you once more. Did. She. Know.”
Kaye breaks.
Not dramatically. Not with tears or theatrics.
She breaks the way structures break when the load-bearing wall gives: all at once, from the centre, the professional composure collapsing inward until what’s left is a woman in her fifties sitting behind a desk at six in the morning with her hands shaking and her glasses sliding down her nose and the truth falling out of her mouth in pieces she’s been holding together for years.
“She didn’t know.” A whisper. “Daisy didn’t know anything.
She thought it was a real job. A real firm.
I—I needed the client relationship. You’re the biggest retainer this firm has ever held.
Jezebel was pressuring me to secure you personally and I didn’t have anyone available and Daisy was here, and she was young and pretty and I told myself she’d figure it out.
I told myself she’d understand. I told myself she’d play along because that’s what everyone does, everyone plays along, and I didn’t—”
She stops. Her hands come to her face.
“You didn’t what.”
“I didn’t think you’d actually—” She can’t finish. She can’t say it. She can’t say: I didn’t think you’d fall for her, I didn’t think it would go past a dinner, I didn’t think my niece would end up in your bed believing you cared about her while you were running an experiment on her body.
I stand in her doorway and I let the silence do what my voice cannot.
“She didn’t figure it out,” I tell her. My voice cracks. The first crack, the first fracture in the composure I’ve been holding since I walked out of Daisy’s apartment. “She was exactly what she said she was. And I destroyed her because you lied.”
Kaye flinches. A full-body flinch, as if the words struck her physically, and I want to feel satisfaction and I feel nothing.
Nothing except the memory of a girl who smiled at me in the aftermath, uncertain, hopeful, shy, and the smile was real and I missed it and there is no version of this confrontation that gives me that smile back.
I dismantle her.
Not with violence. I don’t touch her. I don’t raise my voice.
I sit down across from her desk, the same chair Daisy sat in on her first day, and I explain to Kaye Fletcher in clinical, exacting detail what is going to happen to her career.
The retainer is terminated. The referrals I’ve made to Keyes from other clients will be withdrawn by end of business.
The professional connections she has cultivated through the Almazov name will receive calls this week from people she cannot afford to lose.
None of this is illegal. None of this is violent.
All of it is the methodical, systematic annihilation of a woman’s professional life by a man who has the resources to do it and the patience to make it thorough.
When I finish, Kaye is grey.
I stand. I button my jacket. I walk to the door.
“Anton.” Her voice behind me. Broken. “She’s my niece. I love her.”
I stop. I don’t turn around.
“Then you should have protected her from this place. Instead, you gifted her to it.”
I leave.
Her apartment is empty.
I drive there from Keyes. I take the stairs two at a time.
I knock and there is no answer and I knock again and the door opens because it’s unlocked, still unlocked, the same unlocked door I walked through last night, and the apartment is dark and the bed is stripped and the bookshelf is half-empty and the cardigan is gone from the chair.
She packed one bag. The landlord tells me this in the lobby, a small man with kind eyes who doesn’t know who I am and doesn’t care. One bag, that morning, before dawn. She paid through the month. She didn’t leave a forwarding address.
I call everyone. I call contacts and associates and security teams and people who owe me favours and people who owe my brothers favours and I burn through every resource I have and none of them can find a girl from Idaho who left Monaco with one bag before the sun came up.
Blythe finds me.
I don’t know how she gets my number. I don’t know how she knows to call.
She calls at midday, hours after I sat on Daisy’s bed with my hands shaking, and her voice on the phone is hard and cold and carries the specific contempt of a woman who has seen a powerful man ruin something innocent and isn’t impressed.
“She went home. Idaho.”
I close my eyes.
“And if you have any decency left,” Blythe tells me, “you won’t follow her.”
The line goes dead.
I don’t follow her.
THREE DAYS.
I sit in the penthouse with the curtains drawn. I don’t eat. I don’t shower. I drink, but even the drinking loses its purpose by the second night because the whisky doesn’t reach the place where she was and nothing does.
On the second day, Andrei comes.
He doesn’t knock. He has a key, or the concierge lets him in, or he walks through walls. I don’t know. I don’t care. He walks into the dark penthouse and he finds me on the couch where I’ve been for hours and he sits down.
He doesn’t speak.
Andrei doesn’t speak when words are useless.
He sits on the other end of the couch with the scar on his face catching what little light leaks through the curtain edge, and he is the twin who was built for violence and who wields it only in protection, and he protects me now by sitting in my darkness and asking nothing.
We sit for hours. He gets up once, brings water, sets it in front of me.
I drink it. He sits back down. The harbour turns from afternoon to evening outside the curtains.
The city hums. Monaco doesn’t stop because one man is sitting in the dark learning what it costs to be wrong about the one person who mattered.
At midnight, he stands. He puts his hand on my shoulder. One squeeze. He leaves.
I am alone.
And somewhere in Idaho, so is she.
DAISY
The bus station in Nice smells like diesel and coffee and the particular loneliness of people who are leaving places they didn’t choose to leave.
I have one bag. The bag holds three changes of clothes, my toothbrush, the mystery novel I was halfway through, and my passport.
I left everything else. The apartment, the navy dress, the green dress, the espresso cups, the filing system I built at Keyes.
I left it all because none of it was mine. None of it was ever mine.
The bus to the airport leaves soon. From Nice, I fly to Paris.
From Paris, I fly to Boise. From Boise, my mother will pick me up in the truck with the bad heater and the radio that only gets two stations, and she will ask me about Monaco and I will tell her it was beautiful and I didn’t stay and I won’t tell her why.
I sit on the metal bench with my bag between my feet and my hands in my lap and I am very tired. The kind of tired that lives behind your eyes and in your bones and under your skin and has nothing to do with sleep.
My hand goes to my stomach.
I don’t know why. There is no reason for it.
I’m not hungry. I haven’t been hungry in days.
I’m not sick. The nausea from Blythe’s coffee shop has passed.
My hand simply moves, of its own accord, and rests against my abdomen, and I hold it there and it feels like holding something I can’t name yet.
Something that hasn’t announced itself yet.
The bus pulls in. Diesel and dust. I pick up my bag. I board.
Idaho.
TWO MONTHS LATER.
The grocery store parking lot in Cork is hot. August in Idaho is scorching and dry and the asphalt radiates heat through the soles of my shoes and I am carrying two bags of groceries and a gallon of milk and the sun is in my eyes and the world tilts.
It tilts slowly. Then all at once. The asphalt rises.
The milk falls. The bags split and oranges roll under a pickup truck and the sky goes white and my knees go soft and the last thing I hear before the ground meets me is a woman’s voice, distant and concerned, saying honey, honey, are you okay, and I am not okay, and the pavement is warm against my cheek, and my hand is on my stomach.
Chapter ****10