19. Grisha
GRISHA
Iwoke before the light did, the way I always do when I have already made a decision and only need my body to catch up to it.
Tasha was still asleep on her side of the bed, one hand curled against the pillow where my shoulder had been an hour earlier, and I watched her breathe for a while before I got up.
She had not touched me when I came back to bed after the fight.
I had not tried to make her. We had lain there in the dark like two people sharing a mattress out of necessity rather than choice, and that silence had told me everything I needed to know about how badly I had handled the night before, and nothing at all about how to fix it.
I dressed without waking her and walked the gravel path to the main house in the gray hour before the household stirred, going over the plan again the way I go over every plan, checking it for weak points.
I would pull Tasha off the investigation.
I would keep her safe inside the walls. I would find Kessler myself.
It felt clean. It felt like the only plan a man in my position could make.
I had built my whole life on the idea that you protect the people you love by standing between them and the thing that wants to hurt them, and nothing about the last eight years had given me a reason to believe otherwise.
Sasha was already at his desk when I let myself into his study, a cup of black coffee going cold at his elbow and a stack of gala security logs in front of him that he was not reading closely enough.
He looked up and read my face before I said a word, which was one of the more irritating things about a man who had known me since we were both too young to know better.
"You look like a man who slept badly," he said.
"I need to brief you on Kessler." I sat across from him and laid it out the way I would for any operation, flat and sequenced.
The initials Tasha had traced through three separate ledger entries.
The shipping manifest I had gone through myself, alone, three nights running, until the connection showed itself.
The route, the dates, the cargo classification that matched almost exactly to the shipment Elena had been escorting the night she died.
Roman Kessler's name sitting at the bottom of it like something that had been waiting eight years for someone to notice it.
Sasha did not interrupt me once. When I finished he sat back and turned his cup a slow half circle on the desk without drinking from it.
"That's the connection you've been looking for since the day she died," he said.
"Yes."
"And you are telling me this before the gala because the family needs to know, and because whatever happens with Kessler is going to happen close enough to that night that I need to plan for it."
"Yes." I paused, and then I said the rest of it the way I had rehearsed it on the walk over, matter of fact, no room for negotiation.
"I'm also pulling Tasha off anything connected to the investigation from here forward.
She stays on the collection, the paintings, the gala inventory. Nothing that touches Kessler."
I expected a nod. Sasha had never once questioned how I ran security in this house, not in twenty years.
He did not nod.
"No," he said.
"Say that again," I said.
"You heard me the first time." He leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and his voice stayed level, which was worse than if he had raised it.
Sasha raising his voice, I knew how to handle.
Sasha being reasonable at me was a different animal entirely.
"Grisha, she found what your best men missed in a week. Use that. Don't bury it."
"She found a mark on a canvas. That's not the same as being safe around a man who put a bullet in a truck eight years ago."
"She found the mark, and then she found the initials, and then she found the pattern nobody else in this house thought to look for, including you, including me.
" He counted it off on his fingers, unhurried.
"You want to take the one person who has actually moved this investigation forward and put her in a room with a painting because you're frightened.
I understand why. I don't think it's a good plan. "
"It's not about being frightened, it's about being smart."
"It's about both, and you know it." He said it without heat, which landed harder than heat would have.
"You have two weeks before that gala, and a man out there who might already suspect his name is written down somewhere in this house.
You need eyes on this that can read a manifest the way she reads a manifest. Benching her isn't protection.
It's you deciding you'd rather feel useful than actually win. "
I felt the urge to argue with it, and then felt it go nowhere, because I couldn't, not cleanly. "I can put someone else on the paperwork."
"Someone else who took a week to find nothing?
Or my analysts, who took longer?" Sasha shook his head.
"You're head of security in this house because you don't let fear make your decisions for you, that's the entire reason I hired you and the entire reason I've trusted you with my family for twenty years. Don't start now, with her."
That one caught under my ribs and stayed there.
I did not have an answer for it yet, and I did not like sitting across from my oldest friend without one.
I told him I would think about it, which was as close to conceding a point as I was willing to get before breakfast, and I left his study feeling like a man who had walked in certain of his ground and walked out finding it had shifted under him.
I went looking for coffee, and coffee meant the kitchen, and the kitchen meant Baba Olya, who I should have remembered was not going to let me pass through unscathed.
She was at the far counter with her sleeves pushed to the elbow, both hands buried in a mound of dough she was folding and turning with the kind of rhythm that only comes from forty years of doing the same motion without thinking about it.
The whole room smelled of yeast and warm flour, that faint sweet rising smell that had meant safety to me since I was a boy sitting at that same scarred table with a split lip she'd cleaned without asking who'd given it to me.
She did not look up when I came in. She never needed to.
"Grigori," she said.
"Baba."
"Sit. There is coffee, if you can be trusted not to spill it while you sulk."
I did not sit. I poured the coffee and stood by the table, which she took, correctly, as a challenge.
"I heard you and the skinny girl had words last night," she said, still working the dough.
"You hear everything."
"I hear what echoes. That echoed." She turned the dough, pressed the heel of her hand into it, folded it again. "You told her you were taking her off her own investigation for her own good."
"I told her I was keeping her alive."
"Ah." She said it the way she says things when she has already decided you are wrong and is only waiting for you to catch up. "And did she ask to be kept alive that way?"
"She doesn't understand what's out there."
"She understands plenty. She found a dead man's mark on a painting before you ever told her his initials meant anything.
I understand this from you, Grigori, because I fed you soup the year they buried your mother and you would not let anyone within ten feet of you either.
Grief makes men build walls. I know this like I know my own hands.
" She held them up, floured to the wrist, and went back to the dough.
"But you are not grieving now, you are frightened now, and frightened men build cages and call them walls, and call the cages love. "
"That's not fair."
"I did not say it was fair, I said it was true.
" She picked up a wooden spoon from the counter, more out of habit than need, and pointed it at my chest the way she used to when I was twelve and had done something reckless with a stray dog or a car that wasn't mine to drive.
"Men like you confuse a cage for a home.
You think if the door is locked from the outside, she is safe, and you have done your job, and you can sleep.
She is not a bird, Grigori. She does not sing sweeter in a cage. She stops singing at all."
"I'm trying to keep her out of a dead man's business."
"It is already her business. It was her business the day she found that mark, whether you liked it or not.
" She set the spoon down, finally, and squared herself toward me full on, flour on her forearms, on her apron, a smear of it along her jaw where she'd pushed her hair back without thinking.
"You think you are the only one in this house who has buried someone.
You think you are the only one who understands what it costs to lose the people you love.
I buried a husband, Grigori. I did not stop living in the world because of it.
I did not let anyone lock me in a kitchen and call it a mercy. "
That landed somewhere Sasha's argument hadn't reached, somewhere older and rawer, and I felt my jaw tighten the way it does when I am losing an argument I still believe I am right about. "So I should just let her walk into danger because it's her right to."
"I did not say that either, and you know it, and I will not stand here and let you put words in my mouth to make yourself feel righteous.
" Her voice sharpened, not unkind, but done coddling me.
"You are not choosing between locking her up and throwing her to the wolves.
There is a whole world between those two things, and a smart man, which you are, when you are not being an idiot about a woman, would find it. "
I stood there with my coffee gone cold and no argument left that felt honest. Sasha had taken the strategy out from under me.
Baba Olya had taken the excuse. What remained was the thing I had been avoiding since the night before, that I had built the whole plan around my own fear and called it her safety, and both of them had seen it plainly enough to say so to my face.
"She'll hate anything that looks like a leash," I said, quieter now.
"Then don't build her a leash. Build her a partner.
" Baba Olya went back to her dough as if the conversation were already finished, which, for her, it was.
"Now go find her before she decides for herself that she doesn't need your permission for anything, because that girl has more spine than you're giving her credit for, and you will lose more than an argument if you wait much longer. "
I found Tasha in the sitting room off the kitchen, curled into the corner of the old couch with a folder of photographs on her knees that she was not really looking at.
She glanced up when I came in and her face did the careful thing it had done since the fight, guarded, waiting to see which version of me had walked through the door.
"I talked to Sasha," I said. "And Baba Olya, apparently, has opinions about cages."
A short laugh escaped her, involuntary, and it eased the tightness behind my ribs more than anything Sasha or Baba Olya had managed. "She usually does."
I sat down across from her instead of beside her, because I wanted her to see my face while I said it.
"I'm not pulling you off the investigation.
You were right last night. It's not my call to make alone.
" I let that sit a second before I kept going, because the rest of it mattered as much as the first part.
"But I need something from you too. Not alone, not ever again, not with this.
Someone with you when you're working the archives, someone who knows the layout when you're anywhere near town.
We build the rules together, and you don't go around them because you decided you know better in the moment. "
She turned it over in her head, weighing it the way she weighs everything, carefully, before she gives an answer. "I can work with someone shadowing me. I can't work locked in a room." She said it steady, not a concession so much as a boundary she meant to hold.
"I know. That's not what I'm asking."
"Then we're actually agreeing on something."
"Looks that way."
She set the folder aside and stood, and I met her halfway across the room.
I put my arms around her in the kitchen doorway, the smell of Baba Olya's bread still warm in the air behind us, and she held on the way you hold on after a fight nobody quite won, both of us worn down and relieved just to be standing in the same doorway instead of on opposite sides of one.
Her hand found mine and laced through it, and I held on to that more than anything else in the room, the plain, solid fact of her hand in mine, and for one morning I let that be enough.