Chapter 6
Margaret: are you at the estate
Nica: there’s a private road. and iron gates. and no house numbers
Nica: also a butler who looks like a shampoo ad
Margaret: photograph the manuscript binding before you do anything else
Nica: margaret i think something is very wrong here
Margaret: photograph the binding, Veronica
The house did not look like a prison.
Nica decided, as the black SUV climbed the last curve through the fog, that this was probably the point.
Real cages didn’t announce themselves. They came with warm light behind tall windows, and a man who carried your suitcases, and a voice that said you are safe now in a register your whole body wanted to believe.
She had a smear of someone else’s blood drying brown on the cuff of her good blouse, and she could not stop seeing the knife.
It had been lying on her pillow. Not dropped, not forgotten — placed, centered, the point aimed at the headboard, on a bed whose mattress had been opened corner to corner with something very sharp.
Her drawers pulled out and overturned. Her books swept to the floor.
The broken lock on her own front door had still been swinging when Demetri stepped past her into the wreckage, gone so still she’d felt the temperature in the room drop.
He’d looked at the knife for exactly one second, then turned to the two men who’d appeared from nowhere behind him and said, in a voice with no heat in it at all, “Find them.” Both men left without asking a single question.
She hadn’t seen the rest clearly, and that was the part that frightened her now — not the violence but the gaps in it.
There had been more men in the stairwell.
A sound she had no word for, a crack and a roar of displaced air.
Demetri putting his body between her and the dark, and a blade catching the bad hallway light, and blood — his blood, a great deal of it, soaking through the shoulder of his shirt — and then his hand pressed flat over the wound, and then, somehow, no wound at all by the time he’d folded her into this SUV.
Human bodies don’t do that. She knew it the way she knew her own name. She’d been telling herself a great many comforting, threadbare things for the last twenty minutes, and that was the one that would not stick.
Now she sat beside him with her bag at her feet and her laptop clutched against her ribs, and the fog moved between cypress trunks twisted by a century of Pacific wind, and somewhere below them the waves struck rock with a deep, steady violence she felt through the floor of the car.
He’d offered to have someone pack the rest of her things; she’d declined.
He’d offered a hotel; she’d asked whether the hotel would be safe — and he’d only looked at her, which had been answer enough.
And under all of it, threaded through the fear like a wire she couldn’t cut, was the fact of him beside her in the dark of the car: the heat coming off him across the seat, the cedar-and-scorched-air scent of him that her body had decided meant safe even while her mind was still filing him under dangerous.
She hated that her nerves and her wanting had gotten so tangled she couldn’t pull them apart.
Out of habit, because her hands needed something to do, she reached for the pendant at her throat. She didn’t realize she was touching it until she realized he’d gone still in the seat beside her.
Alarm drew her hand back down to her lap. He looked away, out at the road, and when he spoke his voice was soft, as though afraid of startling her. “May I ask about your necklace?”
She glanced down. The pendant had slipped free of her collar, the cobalt and cream bright even in the gray light.
“It was my grandmother’s.” For now, that was all she was willing to give him.
“I mean the maker. I recognize the enamelwork.”
She turned to look at him. “What?”
“The color palette, the border technique.” He kept his eyes on the road.
“There was a family of jewelers in Petersburg in the late Romanov period — the Morozov workshop, I believe, before the revolution changed everything. They used that exact cobalt. Very few hands could manage that quality of work. It’s an extraordinary piece. ”
She looked down at the pendant. She’d known it was old.
She’d known it was beautiful. She’d spent three years cataloguing decorative arts and had never once been able to place it, because the enamelwork sat above the level of her knowledge — and she’d never had the courage to have it formally assessed, afraid the assessment would confirm it was worth more than everything she owned by several orders of magnitude.
“You know what workshop it came from,” she said. “Just by looking.”
He glanced at her, brief and dark and intense, and something in that glance snagged low in her belly before she could stop it.
“I’ve been looking at Russian work for a very long time.
That piece belongs in a museum case. That it’s around your neck instead, and was your grandmother’s, and she gave it to you —” something shifted in his voice “— I’d like to know everything about it, if you’re willing to tell me. ”
She studied his profile. She’d never told anyone about the pendant; she wore it every day and no one ever asked, because no one in her life had ever looked at her the way this man looked at her. Like she was interesting. Like she mattered. Like the small ordinary facts of her were worth collecting.
“She said it was all that was left of where we come from,” Nica said. “It belonged to her grandmother, and to hers before that. She pressed it into my hand the last Christmas before she died.” She paused. “I’ve worn it every day since. It’s the only thing I have left of her. Of any of them.”
“Then it is exactly where it belongs,” he said quietly.
She looked at him. His profile gave nothing away — the composed jaw, the long nose, the mouth that didn’t smile easily — but something in the set of his shoulders had changed, gone taut and careful, and she had the sudden, irrational sense that the man beside her knew more about the small enamel oval at her throat than she’d ever known herself.
They’d crossed the Golden Gate twenty minutes ago.
When the fog thinned she’d seen the city behind them, San Francisco reduced to distant lights across black water — her apartment over there, her bed, her books, the chipped blue mug Baba Yelena had used every morning — and then the bridge gave way to redwoods, and a private road closed over them, single-laned and unmarked, threading between trunks so enormous they made the SUV look like a toy.
The air that seeped in through the vents changed with the trees: colder, greener, resinous, the deep wet smell of a forest that had never once been cleared.
A pair of iron gates appeared ahead, set between stone pillars. No guardhouse. No keypad. No cameras she could see. They simply opened as the vehicle approached, silent and smooth, then closed behind it with a finality she felt between her shoulder blades.
“Motion sensors?” she asked, because she needed to say something ordinary.
“Something like that,” Demetri said.
Beyond the gate the road curved, and ended, and the house appeared out of the fog, and Nica forgot to breathe.
It rose from the very edge of the cliff in pale stone and dark glass, three long stories angled toward the Pacific — not the cold glass box she’d half expected from a billionaire.
Old stone walls formed the heart of it, edges softened by time and climbing ivy, modern wings extending from either side.
The oldest part looked as if it had stood on this cliff long before there was a San Francisco across the water to look back at it.
A copper roof gone green with age. The whole western face was glass, floor to ceiling, and through it, past the house, there was nothing at all — only the open Pacific, the horizon, the fog lifting off a sea that crashed against the rock far below.
“Wow,” she said, helplessly.
The SUV stopped beneath a covered stone entrance.
The driver opened Demetri’s door first — of course he did — and Demetri stepped out, then turned and offered her his hand: long fingers, neat nails, a faint pale line across his palm that might have been an old scar, though she’d watched a far worse one close on his shoulder not two hours ago.
No. I did not watch that. The hallway light was terrible and I was panicking, and human bodies do strange things under stress. They do not heal in minutes.
She looked up. He waited — didn’t reach into the car for her, didn’t take her elbow, didn’t turn her hesitation into a performance — so she put her hand in his.
Heat closed around her fingers, and her pulse stumbled.
Every time. Every damn time he touches me, my body behaves as though it’s never met a man before.
His thumb pressed once against her knuckles, a small deliberate pressure that she felt travel all the way up her arm.
Then he released her, too soon, which was good.
Which was a relief. Which she was absolutely not disappointed about.
The great front doors opened before they reached them, and Nica’s first thought, before she could stop it, was that the people waiting inside were too beautiful to be entirely safe.
The man stood in the doorway as though he’d grown there — tall, lean, so perfectly composed he made Demetri look almost careless.
A charcoal suit, a black shirt, dark hair swept back from a face that seemed carved rather than born, with pale green eyes the precise color of light through a deep forest. Not a line on him anywhere.
And yet he felt older than the stone under her feet, older than the trees along the road, and when his sleeve shifted at the wrist she saw a faint pattern wound across the skin beneath — vines, silver-green, almost glowing — that were not, she was abruptly certain, any kind of tattoo.