32. Tasha
TASHA
Isat with the laptop closed for almost an hour before I let myself open it, the guest cottage dark except for the small lamp by the bed, because some part of me still wanted to believe that not opening it meant not having to know for certain.
Grisha sat in the chair by the window, not hovering, not pretending to read the file in his lap either, just present in the particular way he'd learned to be present since the garage, close enough to reach if I needed him and far enough that I never once felt managed.
He hadn't told me how to do this. He'd only asked, once, whether I wanted him in the room at all, and I'd said yes before I finished deciding why.
"You don't have to be gentle with him," he said, when I finally reached for the laptop. "Whatever you need to say to get the truth out of him, say it. We can worry about the rest after."
"I know." My hands were cold around the mug of tea I'd made twenty minutes ago and hadn't touched once, the steam long gone, and I wrapped both palms around it anyway because it gave me something to hold that wasn't my own pulse.
"I just need to hear him say it. Not read it in a login report. Hear it."
I opened the laptop and typed his name into the call window before I could talk myself out of it again, and the screen went that particular shade of blue that meant it was reaching for him across three thousand miles of cable and satellite, ringing once, twice, and then his face filled the frame, too close to the camera, badly lit from below by whatever lamp he had angled wrong on his desk.
"Tasha." He said my name like a man testing whether the floor under him was still there. "Hey. Is everything okay? You never call this late."
"Don't." The word came out flatter than I meant it to, flat enough that whatever he saw in my face made him go very still on the screen, the easy, familiar warmth draining out of him in real time.
"Don't do that. Don't sit there and ask if everything's okay like you don't already know exactly why I'm calling. "
He didn't answer right away. He looked down, off camera, at something I couldn't see, and when he looked back up the badly lit angle caught the exact moment his face stopped pretending.
"How long?" I asked.
He didn't dodge it, and some small, useless part of me had almost hoped he would, because a lie was something I could have hated cleanly. The truth was going to cost more.
"Four months." His voice had gone thin, tinny through the connection, stripped of the easy warmth a year and a half of trust had built between us.
"Gambling debts. Bad ones, the kind that stop being about money and start being about what happens to you if you don't pay them.
They found me before they found you. Before any of this started, before the trunk, before any of it. "
"You could have told me."
"And said what?" His laugh came out broken, no humor left in it at all.
"Sorry, the people paying my debts want your paintings?
Sorry, I've been feeding a stranger photographs of the two pieces that turned out to matter most in your whole family's history, and I had no idea that's what I was doing until it was already too late to stop?
There wasn't a version of that conversation that didn't end with you firing me and me still owing the same people the same money, except now I'd have done it for nothing. "
"You could have told me anyway. You could have let me help you instead of letting me find out from a security audit.
" My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated that it did, hated that four months of quiet betrayal still had the power to make my throat close up like this was simple grief and not something so much more tangled than that.
"I trusted you with things I don't trust most people with.
I sent you photographs of paintings that held my own grandfather's second life hidden inside them.
I told you about the trunk before I told half my own family. "
"I know." He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes for a second, and when he dropped them his face had gone raw in the particular way that only comes after a person stops managing how they look.
"I know exactly what I did with your trust, and there isn't any way for me to explain the gambling or the debt or how fast it all spiraled that makes any of it okay.
I'm not calling myself a victim here. I made the bet.
I made a lot of bets, actually, for longer than I want to admit, and I kept telling myself I could fix it quietly before anyone had to know, the same way you probably tell yourself things are fine right up until they very obviously aren't."
Something in that landed harder than I expected, an echo I didn't want to hear out loud, of a man who'd spent decades doing exactly the same thing with a notebook and a trunk and a daughter down the hall.
I sat with it a moment, the mug going fully cold in my hands, and understood with a kind of tired, unwelcome clarity that I was furious at Sergei for the same choice, dressed up in a different kind of fear, that I had just spent a whole night forgiving in someone I loved.
"What did they actually ask you to send?" I kept my voice level, because Grisha had been right, we needed the truth more than we needed my anger to have somewhere to land right this second.
"Photos, at first. High resolution, insurance grade, of specific pieces.
Then condition reports. Then whatever I could get on the provenance research you were running, especially anything touching the ledger once you started mentioning it to me.
" He glanced off camera again, guilty, and came back.
"I didn't know what I was feeding into at first. I told myself it was one collector doing quiet due diligence before an offer, which happens more than you'd think in this business, and I let myself believe it because believing anything else meant admitting how deep I already was. "
"When did you figure out it wasn't that?"
"Once the requests got specific enough to matter.
The river piece. The hunting scene. The marks you found.
" He said it plainly, no more hedging left in him.
"By then I'd already sent enough that stopping felt pointless, and starting a fight with the people I owed felt like something that could get worse than money taken from me. "
Grisha shifted in his chair, not speaking, but I felt the question in it anyway, the same one sitting heavy in my own chest.
"Does he know you're talking to me right now?" I asked. "Kessler. Does he suspect I found out?"
"No." Sergei's answer came fast, immediate, the only thing all night that hadn't needed a second of thought. "No, I swear it. Nobody's told me to reach out, nobody's asked about you tonight, this is just you calling and me answering because I owe you that much even now."
I looked at Grisha, and he gave the smallest nod, the kind that wasn't instruction so much as agreement already reached between us without needing the words for it.
"Then here's what happens next," I said, and felt something in my chest steady itself, the shaking in my hands settling into something closer to purpose.
"You're going to keep doing exactly what you've been doing.
Answering him. Sending him what he asks for.
Except from now on, everything you send goes through me first, and what you actually send is whatever we decide he should believe. "
"You want me to keep spying on you."
"I want you to spy for me instead of against me, which is the only version of this where you don't end up in a cell next to whoever he's got running the rest of his network.
" I said it evenly, watching his face for the moment it landed.
"You owe me the truth, Sergei. This is how you start paying it back. "
He was quiet a long moment, and when he spoke again his voice had steadied into something almost like relief, the sound of a man who'd been drowning long enough that even a harder kind of rescue still counted as air.
"Tell me what you need me to send him."
Grisha leaned forward then, into the frame beside me for the first time, and Sergei's whole face changed at the sight of him, wary in a way that told me he finally understood exactly who he'd been crossing this whole time.
"We'll tell you exactly what to send, and when," Grisha said, his voice quiet and even, no threat in it that needed saying out loud.
"You do this clean, you do it exactly as we tell you, and you get a chance to walk away from this owing nothing to anyone.
You slip once, you warn him, you freelance even a little, and there won't be an outcome here that ends well for you. Are we understood?"
"Yes." No hesitation in it at all. "Whatever you need. I mean it."
We ended the call a few minutes later, the screen going dark and the cottage falling back into its small, lamp lit quiet, and I sat there a moment with the cold mug still between my hands, feeling the strange, uneven mix of everything at once, the betrayal raw and real, and underneath it something almost like relief that we finally had a way to use it.
"You did that well," Grisha said, watching me instead of the blank screen.
"I don't feel like I did anything well. I feel like I just made a deal with the person who's been feeding Kessler pieces of my own life for four months.
" I set the mug down, finally, and pressed both palms flat against my eyes for a second, breathing through the part of this that still wanted to cry properly instead of strategizing.
"I keep thinking about what he said, about telling himself he could fix it quietly before anyone had to know.
That's my grandfather. That's you, before the garage.
That's apparently everyone I let close enough to matter, all of them convinced silence is a kindness right up until it isn't."
"Maybe it's not about who does it," Grisha said, quiet. "Maybe it's about who finally stops."
I looked at him a long moment, at the man who'd spent eight years perfecting exactly that particular silence and had only just now started learning to set it down, and understood that whatever came next, at least we were finally doing it the same way, together, out loud, instead of each of us carrying our own separate, quiet lie into the same room.
"We use him," I said. "We feed Kessler exactly what we want him to believe, and we let Sergei buy himself back one piece of false information at a time."
"Agreed." Grisha reached over and took the cold mug from my hands, setting it aside, and wrapped his fingers around mine instead, warm where the ceramic hadn't been.
"Whatever it costs him to earn his way out of this, it's a better ending than the one he was heading toward before you picked up that call. "
"It's a better ending than the one I almost gave him too," I said, thinking of every version of this conversation I'd rehearsed in the dark before opening the laptop, most of them ending in nothing but shouting. "I wanted to scream at him. I still want to, honestly, somewhere underneath all this."
"You can still want that and have done the right thing tonight instead." He pressed his mouth briefly to my temple, unhurried. "Both things get to be true. You don't have to pick."
I let myself lean into him then, finally, the tension I'd been holding since Pavel said Sergei's name out loud draining slowly out of my shoulders, and thought that if there was one thing this whole strange, tangled month had taught me, it was that almost nothing in my life was ever going to be simple enough for only one feeling at a time.