Chapter 18
NIKITA
Two days later, after an afternoon flight south, Piper walks into the Palm Beach ballroom on my arm.
She fought me on this trip in a way she hasn’t fought the others, pushed for a hard cap on the hours, a chair kept near the wall, and a car that stays running.
I read it as nerves after the necklace and the near-grab at the last event, and I gave her every condition because caution in Piper is a thing I want to encourage, not question.
She enters as Mrs. Rusakov, the grieving widow.
I enter beside her as Nikolai Volkov, the estate’s security adviser.
For the length of one breath, I forget we’re working.
She’s in the dark green Vera chose, the one with the concealed pockets she liked, and she wears the widow like other people wear their own skin.
She reads the room in the first three steps, exactly as I do, noting the exits, the money, and the two men near the terrace doors who are security and pretending not to be.
A month ago, I’d have called that professional.
Tonight, I watch her do it and feel something closer to pride, which is a word I haven’t had cause to use about another person in a long time.
“Adrian’s collector is the man by the Rothko,” she says under her breath, smiling at someone across the room who thinks she’s smiling at him.
“He has gray hair and a younger wife, and he’s drinking water because he wants to remember tonight.
Adrian flagged him, and Platon confirmed him.
He buys through a foundation in Vaduz that ties to two of Shilov’s shells. ”
“You read the brief.”
“I read every brief. It’s the least I can do for the man who cooked me a meal.
” She takes a flute of champagne off a passing tray and doesn’t drink it, holding it as set dressing.
She’s been off alcohol for weeks, the same as she’s weakened her coffee, and I’ve put it down to a stomach that hasn’t recovered from the schedule I keep her on.
We work the room as we rehearsed it. She draws people in while I stand at her shoulder as the quiet associate.
Within the hour the collector by the Rothko drifts into our orbit, because Piper makes herself the most interesting person in any room she chooses.
He talks about provenance. She talks about it better.
I watch him decide she’s the real thing while Platon, across the room with a drink he isn’t touching, gives me the small two-finger motion that means the recording is clean.
That should be the whole night. Instead I keep finding reasons to touch her.
None of them are large. A clasp on her shoulder slips, and I fix it, my fingers at the back of her neck a half-second longer than the repair needs.
A man’s questions turn from provenance toward where the family kept the Rusakov pieces these last four years, and I steer her toward the bar with a hand at the small of her back before she has to invent an answer.
The terrace doors stand open to the water, and when the ballroom presses too close, I walk her out to the quieter air for two minutes that have nothing to do with the job, both of us looking at the boats instead of each other, saying nothing, and it’s the best two minutes I’ve had in a room full of enemies in years.
“You’re doing the thing,” she says on the balcony, still watching the water.
“What thing am I doing?”
“The thing where you keep inventing reasons to stand between me and the room.” She turns, and the light off the water catches the side of her face. “You fixed a clasp that wasn’t broken. I checked.”
“It was loose.”
“It was fine, Nikita.” She isn’t angry. There’s something careful under it instead, the thing she does when she’s decided to let me see her notice. “A month ago, you’d have let me handle the room alone because handling rooms is what I’m for. Tonight you keep pulling me out of them.”
I don’t have a good answer, because the true one is that I’ve stopped being able to watch a stranger lean toward her without wanting my hand somewhere she can feel it. I settle for a version of it.
“A month ago I was pretending you were an asset,” I say. “I’ve stopped pretending. It turns out I’m not good at standing across a room from you.”
She holds my eyes for a moment, and whatever answer she expected, it wasn’t that. She takes my arm again, and we go back inside. A few minutes later, Adrian finds me by the terrace doors.
He arrives while Piper is fifteen feet away making the collector’s wife laugh.
He comes toward me unhurried and already talking, with a glass of something amber.
“I wanted a word away from the table,” he says, close enough that no one else hears, angling us both toward the water so the room sees two men admiring the view.
“I’ve picked up chatter I don’t like. Two separate contacts in the last week have asked me questions about the Rusakov estate that they shouldn’t know to ask.
One of them used a phrase that made my skin crawl.
He asked whether the family was as dead as the paperwork claims.”
I keep looking at the water. “I need the rest of that thought, Adrian.”
“I mean someone is circulating a theory that you survived.” He looks at his glass.
“I don’t know its source and don’t like that I don’t know.
I’m telling you because you should have it, and because I’d rather you hear it from me than from a man across a table who’s already decided it’s true.
” He glances at me then, one quick read, the look a lawyer gives a witness to see whether a question hit home.
“You didn’t blink just now. That tells me it isn’t news to you. ”
“It’s news that it’s circulating.” That much is true. “You find me the source, Adrian, and you do it quietly, before it stops being chatter.”
“I’m already looking.” He sets a hand on my shoulder, the picture of an old family friend, and moves off toward the bar, and I stand at the water for a moment longer and try to name what just happened.
A trustee bringing me a genuine threat looks exactly like this.
A cautious lawyer checking whether his warning got through looks like this too.
I can’t tell whether the extra attention means anything.
Without evidence, the distinction is useless, and I hate that I’ve started looking for one.
Platon reaches me before I’ve finished the thought. He carries two drinks, hands me one I won’t drink, and speaks without moving his mouth much, a habit he learned in worse rooms than this.
“Callum’s off his pattern,” he says. “Three times this week, he’s left the Riverdale apartment on foot, without a detail or notice, and stayed gone four and five hours. He comes back on his own. He won’t say where he’s been to the men across the hall, and they don’t have the authority to hold him.”
I set my glass down before I answer. “Since when does Callum walk out of a protected location alone?”
“He started around the time we tightened everything else.” Platon’s voice stays level.
“It could be nothing. He could be seeing a woman, drinking somewhere, or just resenting the guards and taking an hour that’s his.
He could also be walking straight to a handler who uses him without ever telling him what he’s giving away.
I can’t tell you which from here. What I can tell you is that every hour he’s off the grid is an hour I can’t account for, and he’s the loosest thread we have with a direct line to her. ”
I look across the room at Piper. She laughs at something the collector’s wife says and rests one hand lightly on the woman’s forearm, entirely in control of a conversation she’s turning into leverage. She has no idea her brother spent five hours yesterday somewhere none of us can name.
I decide, in the space of a breath, that she gets through the ballroom before I tell her the night has changed.
“I want a soft tail on him,” I tell Platon. “I want to know where he goes before I decide it’s a problem. He can’t make the tail, and Piper doesn’t need to know about it tonight.”
“I already arranged the tail. I wanted your sign-off.” He drinks, finally, a small swallow. “There’s one more thing, and you’re not going to like the delivery.”
He turns so his back is to the room and slides something into my hand below the level of the tables, cheap and warm from his pocket. It’s a burner phone, the throwaway kind that costs nine dollars and ends up in a river. The screen is already lit.
“A waiter brought it to our table,” Platon says. “Said a gentleman asked him to deliver it to Mr. Volkov, then couldn’t describe the gentleman when I asked. Someone unlocked it before it reached me. I’ve looked. I need you to look.”
I look.
The photograph fills the screen. It’s me, in three-quarter profile, coat collar up, stepping through the side door of the Water Mill mansion into the dark.
The high, close angle places the photographer near the garden wall, holding steady.
Someone took it within the last two weeks.
I know because I’m wearing the coat I bought ten days ago, the dark one Piper said made me look like a spy in a play with no budget.
Under the photograph sits one line of text.
Dead men should stay dead.
I ran the Rusakov family for a decade without allowing anyone to photograph me.
Private family pictures from before I took over still exist, and a portrait hangs over the staircase at Water Mill, but almost no one in a room like this ever saw them.
A handful met me, but they saw a younger man four years ago, before I deliberately changed my appearance.
That is why Nikolai Volkov can stand beside a dead man’s estate and stay a stranger.
Four years without a current image kept the resemblance to speculation.
The photograph on this screen turns speculation into proof.
The photographer stood inside my own perimeter, at my own house, and knew which door I use and when I’d use it.