26. Katya
Katya
I arrive home earlier than normal, and when I close the door softly, I realize Artem isn't home.
A rarity.
I avoid the place so often that I don't think I have ever been home before him.
And the idea that I'm alone — well — it sparks something inside of me.
Before I can stop myself, I'm inside Artem's office. A place I normally avoid like the plague.
But avoidance has gotten me nowhere, and I'm tired of not understanding everything in my life.
So here I am, stepping into a room that feels incredibly dangerous.
It smells like him. That's the first thing I notice, how much this room seems to be his. It's worse in here than the rest of the house, concentrated, like stepping into the inside of something private.
It's why I stand at the doorway, oscillating between going further inside or making the smart choice and leaving. After all, I doubt Artem left information in the house. He's not stupid, and yet I'm not really looking for anything about the business.
No, I want to know about Irina.
Because her name reminded me that I know nothing about my husband. Everything he'd ever told me was a lie, something designed to convince me to be with him.
He's a stranger, and I'm tied to him.
Plus, if the fucker has a mistress, I want to know about it.
The idea sparks a red-hot anger in me, and I allow it to carry me inside.
The desk is large, dark wood, positioned to face the door. Bookshelves on two walls, a mix of Russian and English titles, some of them military history, some of them things I wouldn't have expected. An antique lamp on a table next to a decanter of something amber on the corner of the desk.
No computer or phone, and as I shuffle files around on his desk, looking at each, I realize there's nothing of note in them, just financial records and blueprints. Lots of big numbers and things I don't totally understand.
Pulling drawers open, I see pens, paper, and even a highlighter. It's all ridiculously mundane and frankly boring.
So much so that I feel the balloon of hope — that I'd finally get some answers — deflate. That is until I see something across the room.
It's small. Minor, really. Just a pair of books slightly off-kilter. I wouldn't have even noticed them had everything else in the space not been meticulously kept.
I get up, walk toward the bookcase, and smirk. "Well, well," I mutter to myself, pulling the books back. They give way as a group, and I laugh. "How very James Bond."
Behind the book decoy is a safe. State of the art. Very high tech.
I wrinkle my nose as I see the fingerprint pad. "Shit," I mutter, irritated. There's absolutely no way I could get into this, which means it probably holds everything that I need.
"Find anything interesting?"
I don't scream. I'm proud of that. I do turn around quickly, stumbling into the bookcase as I do.
Artem is in the doorway. Jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, one shoulder against the frame. His expression is not angry — it's more controlled than that. His eyes move from the desk to the safe, and I know that I've been caught.
"Hi honey," I say, sarcastically. There's no reason to pretend I was doing anything other than snooping.
Artem looks at me for a long moment, those icy eyes of his making my stomach clench, in fear and something else.
Then he pushes off the doorframe and walks into the room.
I hold my ground because stepping back would be like scenting the water with blood.
Artem is a predator, and I am not going to play the role of prey.
He comes around the side of the desk, not fast, not aggressive, just deliberate, and stops close enough that I have to tip my chin up slightly to hold his gaze.
He reaches past me and pushes the books back into place.
His arm brushes mine, and I inhale sharply, hating how even a small touch makes my nerve endings fire up.
"This is not for you." His voice is quiet, dangerously so.
"It's in my house."
"My house," he corrects.
I snort. "My mistake. I thought what was yours was mine. After all, we are married."
"This is business." His eyes drop to one of the files on his desk, and it makes me wonder if I'd missed something under my nose. When he looks back at me, I doubt it. Artem isn't stupid. He's not going to leave things out in the open. "You shouldn't be in here."
"You shouldn't have married me," I tell him, deflecting. "Guess we are both guilty of bullshit we shouldn't have done."
He smiles. Barely, the smallest adjustment of his lips, like a door opening a crack and then catching.
His gaze moves over my face with a slowness that makes my skin prickle, and I am acutely, unhelpfully aware of how close we are.
The edge of the bookcase presses into my back.
He leans forward, pressing his hands on either side of me against the bookcase, crowding me, boxing me in with his body.
"Katya." My name in his mouth, low, with something underneath it I don't have a word for yet.
He reaches up, and his thumb traces the line under my eye. The dark circle I couldn't quite cover this morning. His touch is light. Almost nothing, and yet it causes me to shiver.
"You're not sleeping."
"No."
There's no point in denying it. It's obvious.
His thumb stills against my cheekbone. We are very close and neither of us is pretending otherwise and the air between us has changed into something I don't know what to do with, something that pulls rather than pushes, and I hate that I feel it, and I feel it anyway, and?—
His phone rings.
The sound is jarring, loud in the quiet of the office, and I feel him still completely. He holds for one second — I count it — before he steps back and reaches into his pocket.
He looks at the screen.
Something crosses his face. Fast, unreadable. He answers.
"Da." A pause. His eyes cut to mine. He doesn't speak, just stares at me, making my stomach clench. "We'll be there." He switches to English, then ends the call.
I watch him. "What."
He looks at me, and his expression is careful in a way that means he's deciding something. "Viktor collapsed," he tells me. "He's been taken to the hospital."
The floor does something underneath me. Not dramatic, just a shift, a small seismic thing, the world rearranging slightly around a piece of information I wasn't prepared for even though I should have been.
He's been ill. He told me as much, and I'd seen it with my own eyes.
He looked to be aging rapidly every time I saw him.
"Is he—" My voice comes out smaller than I intend.
"Alive," Artem tells me. "For now."
I look at the floor. I think about Viktor's hands on my shoulders at the door. The way he said vnuchka in that voice that goes soft at the edges. The cologne that smells like my father's study, like Sunday mornings, like a version of family I've spent years trying to file away.
I hate him. I do. I haven't stopped hating him.
But he is the last one.
My father has been gone for years. My mother as well. My grandmother passed just a month after her. Viktor Popov, for all his sins, for all the choices he made that I will never forgive, is the only living person on this earth who shares my blood.
And the thought of that ending is something I wasn't ready for.
I realize my hands are shaking. Slightly. I press them flat against my thighs.
"I'll take you," Artem says, his voice soft.
I look up. He's watching me with that expression I can't categorize, the one that has more in it than I know what to do with.
"You don't have to?—"
"I'll take you." Not an offer this time. A statement.
I look at him for a long moment. I think about the file with my grandfather's name on it, thick with four years of documentation I haven't read. I think about Nadia's card in my nightstand and the things she said she knows. I think about a locked drawer I still haven't opened.
I think about his thumb against my cheekbone, the gentleness of it, which is so much harder to manage than anything else he's done.
"Okay," I say.
I follow him out of the office, and he doesn't mention the file again, and neither do I, and we ride down in the elevator in silence, and when the cold hits us outside he puts his hand briefly at the small of my back to guide me toward the car.
I don't pull away.
I should. I don't.
I'm so tired.