Konstantin
The session runs four hours and eleven minutes, and I feel every one of them, because that is what a man in love turns out to be: a creature made entirely of the time until he can go home.
The gavel falls. The chamber rises. I am already moving up the aisle while the last of the formalities die behind me, shrugging off the ceremonial weight of the thing, reaching into my coat for the phone I am not permitted to look at while the session sits.
It lights up like a struck match.
Eleven missed calls. Grigor, my head of security, who does not call me eleven times for anything short of nuclear war. A string of messages I read while walking, and the corridor goes strange and narrow around me as I do.
Sir, the Dowager has dismissed the nanny.
Sir, she's been removed from the residence. Vehicle en route to the airport.
Sir, the Princess is asking for her and will not be calmed. Please call.
Sir — international departure, 18:40. I can hold nothing without your word. Call me.
I stop walking.
I have killed men and felt less than I feel reading the time 18:40 on a screen in a marble corridor.
I have a clock in my head, the way I have a clock for everything, and it tells me it is 18:02, and the airport is across a city choked with winter traffic, and my mother has spent two days teaching me to feel safe precisely so she could do this in the one window I could not reach.
She didn't lose our argument. She let me win it, so I'd stop watching the door.
Something happens to me that has not happened in three years. The cold I'm named for, the cold I built the whole of myself out of — it stops being a wall I hide behind and becomes a thing I can use. I am, all at once, perfectly, lethally clear.
"Grigor." He picks up before the first ring finishes. "Where are you?"
"North service entrance, sir, with the car. I didn't think you'd want the motorcade."
Good man. "Eighteen-forty, which terminal."
"She's on a commercial flight. He routed her commercial, sir. Economy." Even Grigor's flat soldier's voice has something in it at that. Economy. My mother put the woman I am going to marry in a middle seat on a public aircraft like luggage with a barcode, to make a point about what she's worth.
The point I take from it is different than the one she intended.
I am in the car in ninety seconds. As we pull out I make exactly one other call, and my mother answers on the second ring, serene, expecting me, ready with whatever gentle reasonable poison she's prepared.
"Konstantin. You'll want to talk, and we should, but calmly—"
"Listen to me very carefully, Mother, because I will say it once.
" My voice is the temperature of the glass she taught me to be.
"You hired her. You do not get to remove her.
You have confused running my household with running my life, and you will not make that mistake twice.
Whatever you told her, and I know you told her something, you are going to spend the rest of your life unsaying it.
Starting tonight. Starting the moment I bring her home. "
A pause. The first crack I have ever heard in her. "She's an American orphan with nothing—"
"She is the mother of my children in every way that has ever mattered to them, and if that flight leaves with her on it, you will not see your grandchildren grow up." I let that land the way she let happy land at my breakfast table. "You taught me that line, Mother. I was always your best student."
I end the call. I do not feel the cold of it. I have somewhere to be.
***
The winter-clad city it congeals, it glitters, it stands in my way.
Grigor drives like a man who has decided the law is a suggestion, lights and siren now, the wrong side of three boulevards, and I sit in the back with my hands very still on my knees and run the only equation that matters.
Thirty-eight minutes. Traffic. A girl who thinks she's doing the right thing, which is the most dangerous kind of girl to be chasing, because she won't fight to stay, believing it's a kindness.
She thinks she's saving Lena. She thinks she's saving me. She has no idea that the saving had already happened, weeks ago, in a study, when a half-starved stranger looked at me like I was a man instead of a monument and turned a key I'd had painted shut for thirty years.
Hold on, I think to her, across a city, like she could possibly hear it. Don't get on the plane. Be difficult. For once in your life refuse to be easy to leave.
We come into the terminal approach at 18:31 and I am out of the car before it fully stops. The cold hits me and I don't feel it, and two airport officials see my face and the security detail behind me and decide, as one organism, not to be an obstacle.
Rank is a blunt instrument. Tonight I will use all of it.
Doors open. A manager materialises, white-faced, already nodding before I've finished the sentence.
“The 18:40, hold the doors, hold the aircraft, hold the entire airport if you have to, by order of the crown,” and we move through the building like wolves on the hunt.
Gate forty-one. The last call already sounding, soft and terrible, in two languages.
And there she is.
At the back of the queue, small in a coat that isn't warm enough, one sad suitcase and three new ones she doesn't want, a boarding pass crushed in a hand gone white around it.
She turns, because the whole gate has gone quiet and still the way a room does when a Tsar walks into it, turning toward the silence, toward me, her face coming around pale and tear-streaked and disbelieving.
And for one held breath, across thirty feet of airport, we simply look at each other.
Neither of us has said a word yet.
I have crossed a city to make sure the first one is mine.