33. Celine
CELINE
The door closes behind him at six twelve.
I stand in the foyer for a moment after the sound of it, two security men positioned just inside the entrance, the way they’ve been positioned since the breach, and the penthouse around me goes very quiet in a way it has never quite managed before, even in the worst of the last five days.
I didn’t fight to go with him.
I notice this about myself, the way I’ve started noticing most things lately, a small fact held up to the light and examined for what it says about who I’ve become.
Three months ago, I would have argued my way into that car, would have told him I had a right to be there, would have made it a referendum on every decision he’s ever made without consulting me.
Tonight I just watched him leave. I trust the team. I trust Roman. I trust, somewhere underneath everything else that’s still unresolved between us, that Zane will not stop until Lena is safe.
That trust costs something too. I just don’t have the energy right now to examine exactly what.
I try the couch first. Laptop open, a report from Alexei’s office I should be reviewing, and I read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a single word.
I close the laptop. I make tea I don’t drink, the steam rising off it, untouched, while I stand at the kitchen counter, staring at nothing.
I move through the penthouse room to room, unable to settle anywhere for more than a few minutes, my body doing the thing fear does when it has nowhere productive to spend itself. The window in the living room. The hallway. Back to the kitchen.
I have never once, in three months of living in this apartment, felt its size as acutely as I feel it right now, sixty floors of carefully appointed space with nothing in any of it that can tell me whether my sister is safe.
I end up in my room, sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand pressed flat against my stomach where the baby has been quiet for the last hour, which only makes the silence in the apartment feel louder.
I start talking out loud.
Not a whisper. Actually loud, my voice fills the room because the alternative is letting the silence win, and I’m not going to let it win.
“Your aunt Lena,” I say, “is the best person I know. I need you to understand that before anything else, before you’re old enough to understand any of the rest of this.
She has been sick for a long time, and she has never once complained about it the way most people would.
She makes terrible jokes at the worst possible moments.
She held my hand at the hospital and asked me about my hair instead of about her own diagnosis, because she’s always been more worried about everyone else than about herself. ”
My voice cracks slightly. I keep going anyway.
“Someone took her tonight. I don’t fully understand why, except that she’s the easiest way to hurt me, and I’m so angry about that I don’t know what to do with it.
I need you to know that your father is doing everything he can to get her back.
He has people, resources, a whole structure built for exactly this kind of crisis, and I’ve learned, slowly, against every instinct I had at the beginning, that when he says he’s going to fix something, he fixes it. ”
I press my hand harder against my stomach.
“I don’t know how to explain the rest of it to you yet. Not your father, not me, not how complicated all of this is. But I want you to know that whatever happens tonight, you are already loved by people who would do anything for you. Your aunt Lena most of all.”
I sit there for a long moment after I stop talking, the room quiet again, my own words still hanging in the air around me.
My phone buzzes at seven nineteen.
Team in position. No contact yet.
I read it three times. It tells me nothing and everything at once, confirmation that the plan is moving, no information about whether it’s moving toward something good.
I type back a single word, okay, because there’s nothing else useful I can say, and I set the phone down and pick up my laptop instead.
The offshore diagram is exactly where I left it Wednesday night, the Geneva law firm circled in red, a thread I haven’t had the chance to follow properly.
I pull up the public registry again, search the firm’s name against every entity I’ve already mapped, and this time, something connects that didn’t connect before.
The firm isn’t just listed as a correspondence contact for the holding company. They’re listed in a separate filing from four years ago as legal counsel for an entity with Zane’s father’s name attached.
This predates Zane entirely.
I sit back from the screen. This isn’t a structure he built around me. This is older, inherited, a piece of architecture that existed before I was ever a consideration, which changes the shape of everything I thought I understood about why the contract was built the way it was.
I write it down. I don’t fully understand it yet. But it’s something, a real piece of the puzzle finally clicking into place, and for a few minutes, the focus required to chase it down is the only thing keeping the rest of my fear at a manageable distance.
My phone stays silent for the next forty minutes.
I send one text.
Anything?
I get no response for eleven minutes, long enough that I read every possible meaning into the silence before Roman finally answers.
Still nothing. Will update when I have something.
It isn’t reassuring. It also isn’t the worst possible news, and I’ve learned, over the last several hours, that the absence of bad news is the closest thing to comfort available to a person waiting in a quiet apartment for word about someone they love.
I go back to my room. I sit on the bed again, hand on my stomach, and this time when I start talking, my voice comes out quieter.
“I’m scared,” I tell the baby, the words easier to say to someone who can’t judge me for them than they would be to anyone else in my life right now.
“Not just about your aunt. About your father too. About how much I need him to come back through that door tonight, both of them, when I spent the last five days telling him I needed distance from him.” I press my palm flat against the small, steady shape of my own body.
“I don’t know how to hold both of those things at once. That I’m furious with him and that I would fall apart completely if something happened to him tonight. I don’t think those feelings are supposed to live in the same chest, but here they are anyway.”
I sit with that admission for a long time, the apartment silent around me, the city continuing its indifferent rhythm sixty floors below.
My phone lights up at eight fifty-three.
Team has made contact. Stand by.
I read it once. My whole body goes very still, every other thought emptying out of my head except the four words on the screen in front of me.
Made contact.
Not extracted. Not safe. Not over.
I sit on the edge of the bed with the phone in both hands, my heart hammering against my ribs, and I wait for the next message the way I have never waited for anything in my entire life, every second stretching into something unbearable, the silence of the apartment pressing in around me with nowhere left to hide from it.