Chapter 6 #2
His gaze found her, and the temperature of his attention changed by a precise, deliberate degree, the way a blade is angled to catch light.
“Sir,” he said to Demetri, without looking away from her.
Then, to Nica, with a courtesy that had something heavier moving underneath it: “Ms. Sokolov. We have been expecting you.”
Something about the phrasing was all wrong. Not unwelcoming. Just — strange, as if her arrival were the answer to a question that had been asked in this house for a very long time.
“This is Caelen Aldrith,” Demetri said. “He manages the estate.”
The word manages did not fit the man it was attached to. Whatever Caelen Aldrith did in this house, Nica didn’t think it was scheduling the landscapers.
A woman appeared behind him, and Nica lost the next thought in her head.
Pale-blond hair swept into a knot. Gray-blue eyes she had no name for.
Ivory cashmere over dark trousers, and the strange impression that she carried her own light — not glowing, exactly, but the air around her looked softer, the way air looks softer near a fire.
She crossed the entry hall with both hands already extended, and the same silver-green vines wound across her inner wrists before vanishing beneath her sleeves.
“Veronica,” she said, and her accent was faint and musical and like nothing on any continent Nica could name.
“Nica.”
“Nica.” The woman repeated it as if testing whether it suited her, and, apparently satisfied, took both of Nica’s hands in both of hers.
They were cool — which should not have felt strange, except that Demetri ran too warm, and the contrast made something prickle at the back of Nica’s neck.
“I am Lirien. You are safe in this house, Nica. I want you to hear me say it, and I want you to believe it, because the rest of us are about to make very certain of it.”
It was not the kind of welcome one offered a consultant.
And then Demetri said her name — “Nica” — and turned, and spoke again in a different voice. Quieter. The kind of quiet that fell over a room like a hand laid against the back of the neck.
“This is Veronica Sokolov.” His eyes moved across the hall — to Caelen, to Lirien, to two figures Nica only now registered standing deeper in the shadows of the great room, very still, oriented toward her, still and intent, unwilling to be seen. “She is under the protection of this house.”
He said it as simply as he’d said everything else.
And she did not understand why the sentence made her heart race — a weight that was not about her, or not only about her, that seemed to settle on every person in the room except her.
Caelen’s chin lifted. Lirien’s hands tightened once around Nica’s.
Deeper in the room, one of the still figures bowed its head, and somewhere below the floor, beneath the crash of the sea, Nica felt rather than heard a low answering vibration, as if the house itself had registered the words and agreed to them.
I imagined that part.
Lirien didn’t so much release her hand as transfer her — seamless, practiced, as though she had steered frightened people across this threshold for longer than seemed possible — into the warmth of the entry hall.
Stone and old beams darkened with age. A fire in a hearth large enough to stand inside, throwing heat and the resin-sweet smell of burning cedar across the room.
Rugs underfoot worn soft as moss. Cliff-face windows throwing ocean light across walls hung with art plainly gathered over a very long time rather than arranged to impress.
And in an alcove, glimmering under its own small light, a Russian icon.
Nica stopped. Her feet had crossed the hall before her brain approved the decision.
The Mother of God looked out from beneath a darkened layer of varnish, one hand raised.
Twelfth century. Thirteenth at the latest. Novgorod school, and not a reproduction.
She leaned close without touching. The gold leaf had been repaired at least twice, and along the lower border, half hidden by the frame, ran three Cyrillic characters in forms no living church had used in centuries.
“Do you know it?” Demetri asked behind her. Always behind her. Always watching. She could feel the weight of that attention on her back like a hand between her shoulder blades, and her body warmed under it in a way that had nothing to do with the fire.
“It’s not in any public catalog I’ve ever seen.”
“It would not be.”
“Where did you get it?”
His gaze moved to the icon. “Russia. North of Moscow. A long time ago.”
“You’re terrible at this.”
“At what?”
“Answering an ordinary question like an ordinary person.”
From somewhere behind them Caelen made a small sound — a cough, possibly. Demetri looked at the icon and said nothing, and Nica bent again to the lower border, to the old letters nearly swallowed by the frame, and read the part of the family name the gilt hadn’t hidden.
“Vas—” She stopped. Straightened. “Vasiliev.”
The silence that followed had a texture to it.
“Family piece,” she said. It was not quite a question.
“Yes.”
“How old?”
“Very.”
She looked at him — at the flat, controlled composure she was beginning to be able to tell apart from genuine calm — and decided, for tonight, to let it go.
“Come,” Lirien said gently. “Your rooms are upstairs. You’ll want to see the locks before anything else, and then you’ll want to eat, whatever you tell us to the contrary.”
Rooms. Plural. Of course.
Nica followed her up a broad staircase of stone and dark iron while Demetri and Caelen spoke quietly below.
She caught only two words — outer wards — before Caelen lowered his voice.
The second-floor gallery curved around the entry hall, tall windows facing nothing but fog and dark.
The house should have creaked; old houses always creaked.
This one made no sound at all beyond the distant fire and the sea, as though it were holding its breath, or listening.
Lirien stopped before a set of double doors. “These are yours.”
Nica stepped inside and nearly turned around.
A sitting room in pale blues and warm cream, a low fire behind glass, French doors to a private balcony, and beyond an archway a bedroom with a bed large enough to qualify as real estate.
Her bag had already arrived, set on a bench at the foot of it.
She looked behind her; the driver hadn’t followed them up.
“How did—”
“Staff stairs,” Lirien said.
“Right.”
A small table by the window held soup, bread, cheese, tea, and a plate of sliced pears.
No silver domes, no twelve-course display — food a person might actually eat after finding a knife on her pillow.
The smell of the soup reached her, something with dill and butter in it, and her stomach clenched with a hunger she’d been too frightened to feel.
Nica’s throat tightened, and she hated that more than she’d have hated champagne and caviar.
Champagne she could have refused. This she wanted, and wanting things had always been the dangerous part.
On the bedside shelf, where another house would have set a guest novel and a carafe of water, stood books in Russian — a Pushkin she’d have wept over in a shop, a first-edition Tolstoy she recognized from three years of handling its like — and on the dresser, in the old gold-ground style, an icon of Saint Nicholas.
She stood looking at it and felt something she hadn’t felt since she was six years old, standing in Baba Yelena’s apartment for the first time after her mother died: the sense that someone had known she was coming.
That someone had been waiting. That someone had taken the trouble to make a stranger feel she’d come home.
It frightened her more than the knife had. The knife she understood.
“The controls are here.” Lirien touched a discreet panel beside the door. “This locks the outer doors to the suite. Once you engage it, no one can enter. Not staff. Not Caelen. Not Demetri.”
Nica stared at her. “Not Demetri?”
“Especially not Demetri.”
“He owns the house.”
“He owns the walls. These rooms belong to you while you are here.”
Something in Nica’s chest shifted — a tiny movement, barely there, still dangerous. Lirien showed her the balcony lock, the communications panel, a small silver disk set into the wall beside the bed. “This contacts Caelen or me directly.”
“What about Demetri?”
Lirien’s smile was soft, and faintly wicked. “You will not require a device to summon Demetri.”
Nica’s face heated. “I didn’t mean—”
“Of course not.”
Lirien opened one more door, onto an office lined with bookshelves and a broad worktable under museum-quality lights, already arranged with archival supports, weights, gloves, lenses, photography equipment. At the center rested a familiar acid-free box.
The manuscript.
Nica crossed the room. “You brought it here?”
“Demetri had the collection moved to secure storage,” Lirien said. “This is the only item he allowed inside the residence.”
“Allowed?”
“He considers it dangerous.”
“It’s a book.”
“So I have been told.” Lirien’s expression remained pleasant — and entirely unhelpful.
“You all do that,” Nica said. “Speak as though you’re answering while carefully avoiding any useful information.”
“Living with Demetri has had an unfortunate effect on us.”
From the doorway, Demetri said, “I can hear you.”
Lirien did not turn. “You were intended to.” She touched his shoulder as she passed on her way out — not deferential, affectionate — and his face softened, only for an instant, and then she was gone, and Nica was alone with him.
Not alone in the house. Alone enough that the air seemed to draw tight.