Chapter 13 #2
“My name is Lazar Malenkov.” He says it like we’ve met and like reminding me is a courtesy, but I recognized him the moment I turned.
Platon put his photograph in front of me the night before we flew, five years old and shot from across a street, but the stillness is the same.
“You were reading the card. Most people read the object. Your father read the card too. Dorian always said the object is what they want you to look at and the paper is where the money’s actually hidden.
” He tips his flute a half inch toward the case.
“He was right, of course. He usually was, about paper.”
I keep my face blank. “You have me confused with someone.”
“I don’t think I do, Ms. Voss.” He leaves the name in the open air between us, unhurried, watching what it does to me and finding it satisfactory.
“Your brother closed his shop and stopped answering the people he owes, which is a great deal harder to do than most men manage. Someone taught him how to disappear, or someone did it for him. It’s good that Callum is somewhere safer than the neighborhood his debt used to keep him in.
” He smiles wider, and it stays polite the whole way.
That politeness is the threat. “I’m not here to trouble you.
I collect. I recognize good work when I see it, in silver and in people.
Your family’s name means something to those of us who appreciate craft.
It has for years. It will for a while yet. ”
He knows Callum. He knows the debt. He said Voss out loud in a room full of people who deal in leverage, gently, as a demonstration that he could.
Every word is a receipt he’s showing me so I understand the balance, and the worst part is how correct his manners are, how nothing he’s said would sound like a threat replayed for people who weren’t standing inside it.
“That’s a generous thing to say about a stranger,” I manage.
“We’re none of us really strangers, in the end.
It’s a small world, the people who know what things are worth.
” He sets his flute on a passing tray. “You should look at lot forty-one before the bidding. It photographs poorly, but in person, the workmanship is remarkable.” Lazar looks at the necklace and holds his attention there past courtesy.
“That’s a serious piece. May I inspect it? ”
Then Lazar reaches toward the clasp at my collarbone as casually as if he’s straightening a crooked picture. The gesture is entitled, but the purpose is deliberate. He has used the card holder, Dorian’s name, and Callum to walk Nikita across the room, and the necklace is only the last step.
Nikita reaches us before Lazar’s fingers touch the clasp.
He arrives so fast the air moves, but he doesn’t touch Lazar and he doesn’t say a word.
He’s simply there, a body where a hand was about to be, close enough that Lazar has to take the smallest step back to avoid colliding with him, and I have never seen him this cold.
The two conversations nearest us stop. A woman’s laugh cuts off mid-note.
For a full second, Nikita looks at Lazar like a problem he’s already decided to end, and it’s not the face of a security adviser.
Everyone close enough to see it is revising what they thought they understood about the widow and her quiet escort.
I understand the cost in the same breath: a professional escort wouldn’t look at Lazar that way. A husband would. Lazar has just watched Nikita be a husband, in public, over me.
Platon is there before I’ve finished the thought.
He doesn’t grab Nikita or speak. He just steps into his sightline.
One look reminds Nikita of every warning Platon has given him since I entered this operation.
Nikita lowers his shoulders a fraction. It’s enough.
He replaces the threat with the neutral smile of a security adviser and steps back to my side as if he crossed the room to bring me a drink.
Nikita’s voice is even now, pleasant, but tension still rolls off him. “Malenkov, you’re reaching for Mrs. Rusakov’s jewelry.”
“I was admiring the craftsmanship.” Lazar’s smile hasn’t moved.
He’s gotten what he came for and we all know it.
He relaxes because Nikita has answered the question he came to ask.
“You have excellent taste in silver and in your other choices. I hope you enjoy the auction, Mrs. Rusakov.” He inclines his head to me, precise as a blade.
He uses the married name this time, and it’s worse than Voss was, because he’s showing me he knows both, and which one to use when.
Phones are allowed on the preview floor, because half the buyers photograph lots to send to advisers before the bidding, which is the cover Maren is using.
He’s gone into the crowd before I can arrange my face, and over his shoulder, I catch sight of Maren beside the next display case, her phone at waist height as though she’s texting, angled toward lot forty-one.
She taps the shutter and captures the object, the lot number, and the false provenance.
She used the confrontation to move into position unnoticed.
She has photographed the proof we came to obtain, the wolf’s head under angled light beside a history that never happened.
The bidding on the silver opens twenty minutes later, and Duvall places the first bid on lot forty-one, his paddle up before the auctioneer finishes the description, the red pocket square unmistakable across the room.
Maren catches it, his number, the paddle, and the lot together in one frame, because a collector whose money runs through Callum’s lender bidding on Izabelle’s stolen card holder is a line drawn between two halves of this that we hadn’t yet connected on paper.
She lowers the phone and doesn’t look at me, because she knows better, and drifts back toward the bar and her Belgian dealer as if she’s been discussing hemlines.
We have what we came to get, and it was supposed to cost us nothing.
That isn’t true. Lazar didn’t come for the necklace. He came to make Nikita reach for it first, and now Shilov’s enforcer has seen the weakness he can use to pull Nikita out of hiding.
Nikita places his hand at the small of my back again, light, guiding, and I let him steer me toward the auction floor because leaving now would say more than staying.
My pulse thrums against the necklace, and nausea rises while I force myself to keep walking.
I want to blame it on the flight, the perfume, the champagne passing under my nose all evening, and two hours of keeping my expression neutral while strangers priced everything I was wearing.
“He saw you,” I say, low, for him alone.
He stiffens but doesn’t deny it.
I keep my gaze forward, on the crowd, on the nine guards I counted. “He saw you, and so did I.” His rush to defend me exposes him to me in an entirely different way than it exposes him to Lazar.