3. Grisha
GRISHA
Ihadn't slept. I'd had two hours on the couch in the security office, maybe less, the kind of half-sleep that leaves the body more tired than none at all, my neck bent wrong against the armrest and my boots still laced.
My shoulder had stiffened from an old injury that only ever announced itself when I pushed past a certain number of waking hours, and by dawn I could feel it in the joint every time I turned my head, a dull complaint keeping time with my pulse.
I'd spent the night reviewing gate footage frame by frame, looking for the thirty seconds where a man in dark clothes had crossed two motion sensors along the east wall without tripping either one, before I caught him at the base of it myself.
Thirty seconds I still couldn't explain.
My eyes felt sanded down at the edges, and the coffee I'd been drinking since four had gone past bitter into something closer to punishment.
Sasha's office smelled like that same coffee left too long in the pot, and beneath it, the stale must of a room that had been occupied all night without a window cracked.
Papers sat stacked at precise right angles on the desk, exactly as his father used to keep them, and the framed photograph on the shelf behind him, three generations of Sorokin men squinting into some long-ago summer, had gathered a fine skin of dust along its top edge that nobody had bothered to wipe in weeks.
I stood in the doorway with my jacket still creased from the chair I'd slept in, and somewhere under the fatigue, quieter than it should have been this close to the date, I felt the old weight starting to gather at the base of my skull, the one that never missed a year, invited or not.
"Sit," Sasha said, not looking up from his desk.
"I'll stand."
He looked up then. Sasha had inherited his father's stillness, the kind that made rooms quieter when he walked into them, but none of his father's patience, and this morning it showed in the flat line of his mouth. "You didn't sleep."
"I'll sleep when we know who was in my gallery last night."
"Our gallery." He said it mildly, the correction of a man who didn't need to raise his voice to make a point stick. He slid a folder across the desk, thin, a single sheet inside that I didn't bother reading yet. "The consultant. Volkov."
"I met her at the gate."
"You're going to meet her a lot more than that." He leaned back, and the chair creaked under him. "Effective now, you're on her. Personally. Not a rotation, not a man posted outside a door. You."
The anniversary was tomorrow, if I let myself count it honestly, though I'd stopped doing that arithmetic out loud years ago.
Elena used to say I counted things the way other men drank, quietly, alone, and too often, and standing there with my shoulder aching and my eyes gritty, I felt the date pressing at the back of my thoughts, patient, unhurried, certain of its welcome, same as every year.
I was running on no sleep. Someone had gotten within thirty feet of a room full of things worth more than most people's lives.
And now I was being handed a babysitting assignment on top of it.
"We have four men on the wing," I said. "Cameras in every corridor. She doesn't need a shadow, she needs a guard rail."
"She needs both, and I want the second one to have a face I trust." Sasha stood, buttoning his jacket, already moving toward the part of his day that didn't involve me. "Nowhere she goes that you don't."
"Including the bathroom?"
He didn't smile, but something in his eyes came close to it, the closest Sasha got to finding a thing funny. "Use your judgment."
I found her twenty minutes later in the gallery wing, already three paintings further down the row than when the assistant had left her that morning, and the first thing I noticed wasn't her face.
It was the sound. Her heels on the marble floor had a rhythm to them, quick and even, click click click, the sound of someone who walked like she was late for something even when she wasn't. She didn't hear me come in.
She was talking to herself, low, half a sentence about foxing on a mat board, and she had a loupe pressed to her eye and a pencil behind her ear and another one, I noticed, tucked into the twist of her hair like she'd forgotten it was there.
"You're shorter without the car door between us," she said, without turning around.
"You knew I was here."
"I heard the door. You breathe like a man trying not to be noticed, which is its own kind of noticeable.
" She turned then, and her eyes went over me the way they had at the gate, fast, cataloguing.
"Are we doing this again? The whole silent-menace thing?
Because I have forty paintings to get through and a very specific number of hours in which to do it. "
"I'm not here to slow you down."
"Then why are you here?"
"Security."
"You were security at the gate too. From a distance.
Now you're standing close enough that I can smell your coffee.
" She turned back to the painting, already moving on, and I understood in that moment that keeping two steps behind her was going to be a full-time occupation in itself.
She didn't work the way I expected. I'd pictured hours per painting, careful, plodding.
Instead she moved down the row like she was reading a book she already half knew, loupe up, loupe down, a note scratched, a photo taken, three sentences of observation dictated into her phone in a voice that didn't slow for punctuation.
At the third frame past the door she stopped, tilted the painting an inch off the wall with two fingers under the bottom rail, and ran her thumb along the back edge of the stretcher before I could tell her not to touch it.
"Somebody's swapped this canvas onto an older frame," she said, half to herself, already turning it back flush.
"The wood's a hundred years older than the paint.
Somebody wanted this to look like it had always hung here.
" She said it as casually as another person might comment on the weather, and set the frame level again without waiting for a reaction, and I found myself staring at the piece for a long second after she'd already moved past it, recalculating something I hadn't known needed recalculating.
By midday she'd cleared more of the wing than I would have believed possible, and every so often she stopped dead in front of a piece and went silent for a full minute, and those silences unsettled me more than the talking did.
It was in front of a small oil, a hunting scene with dogs in the foreground, that she asked the question that put a cold hand on the back of my neck.
"This one's not in the insurance file the estate manager sent over. Neither is the river landscape two down. Where'd they come from?"
"Family acquisitions. Before my time."
"Your time being what, a decade? Two?" She glanced at me, quick, not unkind, just precise. "Because the provenance on both of these hits a dead end around the same year, and I've seen that particular kind of dead end before. It usually means somebody didn't want the paper trail to keep going."
"I handle security. Not acquisitions."
"That's not a no."
"It's the only answer I have."
"It's really not, though." She smiled, and it wasn't friendly exactly, more like she'd caught something and was deciding whether to keep it or throw it back.
"You went stiff before I finished the sentence.
I've interrogated better liars than you, Mr. Security, and they at least had the decency to make eye contact while they did it. "
I said nothing, and the silence answered for me, plain as anything I could have said.
She let it sit there a second, watching me not react, and then shrugged and moved on to the next frame like she'd filed the moment away somewhere I couldn't see.
I told myself it didn't matter what she filed.
That was one of several lies I told myself that day.
By the time the wing closed for the evening, my legs ached from a day of standing and my head ached from a day of watching a woman who never seemed to stop moving. I logged her out at the main house, watched the golf cart carry her toward the guest lot, and told myself the day was over.
It wasn't.
I did a last pass of the east corridor near midnight, the house gone quiet in the particular way it only gets after the staff has cleared out and the family's retired upstairs, no televisions, no footsteps, just the low hum of the climate system keeping the paintings at the right humidity.
The restricted storage room sat at the end of that corridor behind a door with no window in it, and when I turned the corner I saw light bleeding out from underneath it, a thin gold line across the dark floor.
I opened the door on a shaft of hallway light cutting clean through the dark room, dust hanging motionless in it like something suspended in water.
For a moment neither of us moved. The light caught the side of her face and the crates stacked along the far wall and nothing else, the rest of the room folded into a darkness so complete it swallowed the sound of my own boots on the threshold.
She stood in the middle of that beam with her bag already over her shoulder, too composed for someone who'd just been caught, and the quiet held a beat longer than it should have, long enough that I heard my own pulse before either of us said a word.
"That door was locked for a reason," I said.
"It still is." She didn't flinch, didn't reach for an excuse. "I'm very fast."
I'd seen her hands drop something into her bag half a second before the light hit her, quick enough that most men would've missed it. I hadn't missed it. "Show me your hands."
She held them up, empty, palms out, entirely too pleased with herself. "See? Nothing up my sleeve. I'm a magician's disappointment."
"You picked that lock."
"I found it unlocked." At my expression, she tilted her head, unbothered.
"Fine. I found it locked and I have a particular set of skills that my grandfather insisted every self-respecting appraiser should have, in case a client ever tried to hide the good stuff from her. Which happens more than you'd think."
"This isn't a client hiding inventory. This is a restricted room in a private residence, and you broke into it after hours."
"I catalogued three shelves before you interrupted me.
You're welcome, by the way. Some of what's back there hasn't been photographed in twenty years.
" She stepped past me toward the door, close enough that I caught the smell of dust and old varnish clinging to her sleeve, and stopped just short of the threshold, turned back like she'd only just noticed something. "You've got a scar on your jaw."
"I'm aware."
"Old one. Clean line, no jagged edge, so not a fight, or at least not a fair one.
Knife?" She studied it openly, the way she'd studied every canvas that day, like a thing to be assessed rather than a face to be polite about.
"You've got the kind of face that makes people stop asking questions before they get the answer.
I bet that's useful in your line of work. "
"It's late."
"That's not a no, either." She smiled again, that same catching-and-keeping look from the gallery, and for half a second, standing in a doorway with dust still turning slow in the light behind her, I felt something pull at the corner of my mouth that I hadn't given permission to move.
I didn't let it get there.
"Go back to the guest house, Miss Volkov," I said. "I'll walk you."
"I know the way."
"Not tonight, you don't."
She looked at me a moment longer, weighing something, and then walked past me into the dark corridor without another word, her heels finding the marble again, click click click, already three steps ahead.