39. Grisha
GRISHA
Three days after Frankie's apartment, I stood in the compound foyer watching my family's version of a war room take shape around a coffee table, and understood, not for the first time, that we were about to walk into a ballroom armed with cocktail conversation and hope.
Baba Olya's cooking had colonized the entire ground floor.
I could smell it from the front door, garlic and dill and something with paprika thick enough to taste, none of it belonging to any dish I'd ever seen her make for fewer than fifty people.
"Grisha." Fedya came through the archway holding a laminated sheet the size of a serving tray, edges rounded, corners reinforced with actual metal grommets, like he expected someone to hang it from a flagpole. "Final floor plan. Color coded."
"I can see that." Six colors, at least, maybe seven if I counted the one that looked more like a smudge than an intentional choice. "What's the yellow?"
"Catering staff movement patterns. I tracked them from last year's event photos." He said it the way another man might announce he'd cured something. "I labeled the exits."
"How many exits does this building have?"
"There are two." He tapped the laminate with one finger, proud, entirely straight-faced. "I labeled them twice, for redundancy."
I looked at Tasha across the foyer, who had stopped what she was doing to watch this exchange with the particular delight of a woman collecting material she planned to bring up for the rest of my natural life, and found no help there at all.
"Redundancy," I said.
"In case one label falls off." Fedya nodded, satisfied with himself in a way I had learned, over three years, not to argue with.
"I also color coded the security rotation, but I ran out of markers, so purple is doing double duty as both Pavel's shift and structural hazards. Try to remember which is which."
"That seems like an important distinction to keep separate."
"I agree. I ran out of markers."
Tasha crossed the foyer and studied the diagram over my shoulder, close enough that I felt the warmth of her before I registered the question in her voice. "Where's the viewing room?"
"Second floor, east corner, marked in..." Fedya squinted at his own work. "Blue. I think. It might be structural hazard blue. Or shift blue."
"So there's a chance the viewing room is also load-bearing?"
"Only one way to find out." Fedya said it with total confidence, rolled the diagram back into a tube, and walked off toward the kitchen like a man who had just delivered exemplary work, which, in its own chaotic way, he had.
Tasha waited until he was out of earshot before she looked at me, one eyebrow raised in the exact expression she used on badly authenticated paintings. "You hired that?"
"I promoted that. He started in the motor pool."
"That tracks."
Dmitri came through a moment later carrying a tray of earpieces, counted and recounted twice before he set them down on the hall table, and something about the sight of him reminded me of a debt I'd left unpaid for months.
"Before tonight," I said, catching him before he turned back toward the security wing, "I owe Tasha something. And you, honestly."
Dmitri went still in the particular way of a man used to being blamed for things and bracing for one more. "Sir?"
"The auction record. The one you pulled for her back in the gallery wing." I did the math and didn't love the answer. "Months ago. I asked you to find it and hand it over without telling her where it came from. I never told her that part either. It's overdue."
Tasha's eyebrows went up slowly, the diagram forgotten entirely. "You what?"
"I asked him to help you, and then I let you spend a week wondering how a security guard had a Kessler Gallery consignment record sitting on his desk like a magic trick.
" I made myself say the rest of it plainly, because that had become the only way I did anything with her now.
"I wanted you to have the record. I didn't want you to know I was the one clearing your path, because some part of me still thought managing things from a distance counted as help instead of exactly the thing you'd spend the next two months telling me it wasn't."
"I knew that record was too easy," Tasha said, half laughing, half something sharper. "I knew it."
"I'm sorry, sir," Dmitri said, and to his credit he did not look sorry at all, only mildly relieved to have the secret off his own ledger. "He asked me not to say anything. Old habits made that an easy order to follow."
"They're not old habits anymore." I looked at Tasha instead of at him, because that was who the sentence actually belonged to. "That's the whole point of tonight."
"Apology accepted," Tasha said, "on the condition that you never do it again, and that Dmitri gets a raise for excellent record keeping."
"I'll take the raise." Dmitri was already moving, and he disappeared toward the security wing with the tray, considerably lighter for having finally set the thing down.
Baba Olya found us before we'd finished laughing about it, materializing out of the kitchen doorway with a plate in each hand and the ferocity of a woman who had decided, unilaterally, that no one was leaving this house on an empty stomach regardless of what the evening required of them.
"Eat," she said, pushing a plate at Tasha before Tasha had fully turned around. "You cannot fight anyone on an empty stomach. This is a fact. I fed men before the war on this exact theory and every one of them came home."
"I'm not fighting anyone tonight, Baba Olya. I'm standing in a viewing room."
"Standing requires strength also." She turned the same look on me, and I accepted the plate without argument, because years of watching men try to argue with her had taught me it cost less time to simply eat. "You. You especially. You look like a man who has not slept."
"I've slept."
"You have slept like a man who has not slept." She said it with total finality, the subject closed, and moved on to intercept Sasha before he'd made it three steps past the stairs, a plate already loaded and aimed at his chest like a weapon he had no defense against.
Fedya reappeared just long enough to get intercepted the same way, a plate in his hands before he'd finished explaining that he'd already eaten twice. Baba Olya did not consider that a relevant fact.
I ate standing at the hall table, watching the house do what it always did in the hour before something dangerous, everyone finding a task small enough to hold onto so the large thing waiting at the end of the night didn't have room to take over completely.
Fedya was recounting exits that hadn't changed since he counted them the first time.
Pavel was running comm checks with a patience he didn't usually have for anything.
Tasha, three feet away, was going through her own mental list with her eyes half closed, lips moving slightly, the same way she used to work through provenance records before any of this became about anything other than paint and paperwork.
"Give me two minutes," I told her, when the cars had started pulling around to the front and the house had begun its slow drain toward the door. "I'll meet you outside."
She studied me a second, reading whatever was on my face with an accuracy that had stopped surprising me weeks ago, and didn't ask where I was going. "Two minutes."
"You'll be fine," I said, mostly for myself.
"I know I will." She reached up and straightened my tie, an unnecessary adjustment that gave her hands something to do. "You're the one who looks like he's about to walk into a courtroom instead of a party."
"It's the same room either way tonight."
"Then let's go be terrifying together."
I went out through the side door instead of the front, past the kitchen windows fogged with steam, and found the gap in the hedge without needing light to find it, my feet remembering the path before the rest of me caught up.
The pocket of ground behind the east wall had grown wilder since the last time I'd stood in it, grass gone to seed, the fence sagging another inch toward whatever it was eventually going to become.
I hadn't come back here since the night the radio interrupted us and I'd stood in this same spot after she left it, telling myself the empty garden was proof enough that some things were better kept for one person alone.
The night air was cool enough to feel in my chest, and somewhere past the wall a car door shut, and somewhere closer than that the house was still full of light and noise and people I loved arguing about laminate colors, and I stood in the grass and let all of it settle into something I could carry into a ballroom without it costing me my hands.
"Not alone this time," I said, out loud, to no one, for the first time since I'd stood right here with nothing but a secret and a job I'd trained myself to do without asking permission from anyone, including myself.
Nothing answered. Nothing needed to. I said it because a version of me from three days ago wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't heard it out loud, in my own voice, in the one place on this property that had only ever belonged to me until it didn't.
Then I turned around and went back through the hedge, because two minutes was two minutes, and for the first time in eight years I had somewhere better to be than alone with my own quiet.
The drive passed in a blur I don't fully remember, Tasha's hand in mine the entire way, both of us running through the plan one more time out loud until it stopped sounding like a plan and started sounding like something we actually believed we could survive.
The ballroom, when we finally walked into it, hit every sense at once.
Chandeliers threw gold light over a room already thick with perfume and cigar smoke drifting in from the terrace, a string quartet working through something classical nobody was actually listening to, and money everywhere, in the cut of every gown, the weight of every watch, the ease of people who had never once had to calculate the cost of anything in the room.
Somewhere in a surveillance van two blocks over, Hollis would already be watching a bank of monitors, and Pavel would be running the same rotation through his earpiece that Fedya had spent all week color coding within an inch of its life.
None of that showed on a single face in the room. That was the whole design.
I found Roman Kessler before Tasha did, which was exactly how I'd planned it.
He stood near the center of the floor in a dinner jacket that fit him too well, a glass of something expensive catching the chandelier light, smiling at a woman in emerald silk like he'd known her for years and might not remember her name by morning.
He looked exactly like what he was, someone who believed he owned every room he walked into, right up until the moment someone finally proved him wrong.
He hadn't seen us yet. I felt Tasha go still beside me, her hand tightening once around mine, and I leaned down close enough that only she could hear it.
"Partners," I said. "All the way through it."
"All the way through it," she said back, and let go of my hand only because the plan required it, and together we walked into the room to finish the thing that had started with a coded ledger and a dead courier and had never once, not for a single day since, let either of us go.