Chapter 16 The Photographs #2
The apartment building. Fourth floor. I took the stairs. Faster than the elevator, which was slow, which was old, which was the kind of elevator that belongs in a building where a woman with four locks on her door pays too much rent for too little space.
Her door. I had the key now. A copy Pavel had made from the set she kept in the leather folder at work. I opened the deadbolt. The knob. The second lock. The chain was off. She'd been in too much of a hurry to set it.
The apartment was dark. Late afternoon light through the east-facing window, grey, thin. The ramen smell. The coconut shampoo. The French perfume.
And water. Running. The bathroom.
I walked across four hundred and twelve square feet. Pushed open the bathroom door. The one with the sliding bolt she'd installed herself, the bolt that was unlatched, the lock that had failed to do the one thing locks are supposed to do: keep people out.
She was in the shower.
Fully clothed. The black dress from this morning.
The one she'd bought herself. The one that meant the cardigans were over, the hiding was done, the woman was emerging from the chrysalis of wool and shame.
She was sitting on the floor of the shower stall.
Knees drawn to her chest. Arms wrapped around her legs.
The water running. Cold. I could tell because her lips were blue and her skin was white and her whole body was shaking with the tremor that happens when a person has been sitting under cold water long enough for the body to start shutting down.
Her phone was on the bathroom floor. Outside the shower. Face up. The screen still on. The photographs still there. All four. Maeve asleep. Maeve exposed. Maeve unaware. Dmitri's fingers on her cheek.
She was crying. Her face buried in her knees.
The sound muffled by the water and the fabric of the dress.
She was speaking. Words I couldn't understand.
Prayers, maybe. Curses. The kind of thing a woman says to herself in a shower with cold water turning her lips blue because a man she ran from three years ago just sent her photographs of her own sleeping body to remind her that running doesn't work.
That he still has pieces of her. That he can send those pieces to anyone.
To his brother. To the Bratva. To the world.
I stepped into the shower.
Fully clothed. The Tom Ford jacket. The white shirt.
The trousers. The shoes that cost three thousand dollars and would never recover from this.
I stepped into the water and it hit me like a fist. Cold.
The kind of cold that stops your brain. The kind that reduces thought to its most primitive function. Breathe. Hold. Stay.
I sat down behind her. On the shower floor.
The water pouring over both of us. My back against the tile.
My legs on either side of hers. I put my arms around her.
Pulled her against my chest. Her back to my front.
The wet fabric of her dress against the wet fabric of my suit.
Her body shaking so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
She made a sound when I touched her. A sound I'd never heard from her before.
The sound that lives below language. Below Gaeilge.
Below French. Below English. The sound a human being makes when the last pretense of strength collapses and the only thing left is the animal underneath.
Raw. Broken. The kind of broken that doesn't come from fists or throats or bruises.
The kind that comes from having your body stolen while you slept and distributed to strangers and sent to the man you're sleeping with now by the man who slept with you then, with a note that reduces you to a word that means garbage.
Leftovers.
I held her.
I didn't speak. Didn't say her name. Didn't tell her it would be okay, because it wouldn't be okay, and lying to a woman sitting in a cold shower was a cruelty even I couldn't commit.
Didn't tell her I'd kill him, because telling her would have been performance, and this moment required the opposite of performance.
This moment required the thing I was worst at.
Presence. The simple, devastating act of being in a room with a person who is in pain and doing nothing except staying.
I stayed.
The water ran. Cold turned to colder. Her lips went from blue to purple.
I pulled her tighter. Felt her hands find my arms. Her fingers gripping the wet fabric of my suit sleeves.
Holding on the way she held on to everything.
The desk. The windowsill. The safety pin.
The leather folder. Always gripping. Always bracing.
A woman who had spent her entire life holding on to things because the things she didn't hold on to got taken.
I wasn't going to be taken.
I was the one who takes. The Bratva king. The man who breaks desks with his bare hands and threatens old men with slow deaths and installs cameras in women's apartments because the watching has become a religion and the religion has become a need and the need has teeth.
But right now, in this shower, with this water, with this woman shaking against my chest and speaking Gaeilge I couldn't understand into her own knees, I was none of those things.
I was just a man. Sitting on a bathroom floor.
Holding a woman who was cold. Getting ruined.
My suit, my shoes, my hair, my jacket, everything that made me Viktor Kotov dissolving under water that was turning us both to ice.
The cruelty cracked.
I felt it happen. In my chest. In the place where the stone had lived, then melted, then reformed into something I still wouldn't name.
The crack ran through it like a fault line.
A fissure in the architecture of the man I'd built over forty-five years.
The man who didn't comfort. Who didn't soften.
Who held too tightly because holding gently required a skill set he never developed.
The crack didn't shatter me. That would come later. That would come in a warehouse with a gun and six men and my brother on his knees. That was the shattering. This was just the crack. The hairline fracture that runs through a structure before the structure knows it's compromised.
I held her tighter.
She turned in my arms. Pressed her face into my chest. The wet shirt.
The cold fabric. The heartbeat underneath that was hammering harder than hers, though she'd never know it, because the day Maeve Brennan learns that Viktor Kotov's heart races is the day the empire admits it has a fault line, and empires don't admit fault lines. They just break along them.
Her lips moved against my chest. Gaeilge. Still. Quiet now. The crisis passing. The shaking slowing. The body beginning the long process of returning to a temperature that allows thought.
I reached behind me. Found the handle. Turned off the water.
The silence was louder than the shower.
We sat in it. Two people on a bathroom floor. Soaked. Cold. His suit destroyed. Her dress ruined. His hand bleeding through a wet handkerchief. Her phone on the floor with four photographs that would never be unseen.
She looked up at me. Her face. The freckles vivid against the white of her cold skin. The green eyes red. The lips still blue at the edges.
She didn't speak.
I didn't speak.
There was nothing to say. Nothing in English.
Nothing in French. Nothing in Russian. Nothing in the Gaeilge I still couldn't understand.
Some moments exist in the space between languages.
In the silence where words haven't been invented yet because the feeling is too new, too raw, too ugly to fit inside any mouth.
I just held her.
The man who always had a threat. A line. A Russian proverb about weakness delivered at the precise moment of maximum damage. The man who spoke five languages and understood twelve more. The man who always, always had the right words.
Had nothing.
Just arms. Just a chest. Just the willingness to sit on a cold bathroom floor in a ruined suit and hold a woman who was shaking because his brother had reduced her to four photographs and a word that meant garbage.
The cruelty cracked.
It didn't shatter.
But the crack was there. Running through me like a river through stone. And the woman in my arms was the water. Slow. Relentless. Carving a path through rock that had taken forty-five years to harden.
I held her until her lips turned from blue to pink.
Then I held her longer.