Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
Natasha
Sleep never comes.
It’s not unusual. Four hours is my standard operating parameter and I have made peace with it. But tonight I’m not awake because of my fifteen-minute schedule blocks or because the Q3 projections have an anomaly I keep turning over.
I’m awake because I am sitting cross-legged on the guest suite bed at two in the morning with my laptop open and my cold coffee going untouched and Nikolai Astrovsky's entire documented existence scrolling past my eyes.
The tech empire is well-covered. Four-point-two billion.
Astrovsky Technologies, founded in London at twenty-five, scaled with ruthless efficiency across twelve years of strategic acquisitions and patented infrastructure.
Feature profiles in three business publications.
A reputation for operational precision that the financial press describes, uniformly, as formidable.
I skim this the way I skim anything that confirms what I already suspected and go looking for the older material.
I find Irina Astrovskaya in a dance archive from 1987.
Mariinsky Theatre. Corps de ballet, then soloist, then a review that calls her elevation otherworldly and her interpretation of Giselle the finest in a generation.
Twenty-three years old in the photograph, mid-leap, completely suspended.
Her face carries the expression of a person who has located the center of themselves and is broadcasting it outward at full frequency.
She married Viktor Astrovsky in 1988. The archived reviews stop the same year.
I close that tab and open another.
The music label surfaces in a trade press archive from thirteen years ago.
Rassvet Records, London. Independent. Founded with a commitment to authentic emerging artists and a catalog philosophy that prioritized longevity over commercial formatting.
Two follow-up mentions: a promising first signing, a showcase at a Soho venue that the reviewer calls electric.
Then the litigation notices. Three separate intellectual property filings in eight months, all originating from Sterling Records' legal team.
A distribution dispute. A roster poaching incident that reads, in the careful language of trade journalism, like a systematic dismantling rather than a competitive skirmish.
Eighteen months after founding, a brief industry note: Rassvet Records has ceased operations.
I take this in.
Crawford Sterling destroyed Nikolai Astrovsky's music label the same year Crawford was tightening his grip on what would eventually become Sterling-Kane.
I was twenty-seven then, newly recruited as a junior analyst, completely focused on proving that sentiment was a liability and discipline was the only reliable currency.
I did not know the casualties being produced by the machine I was entering.
I keep coming back to the ACL tear. Left knee, documented in a brief archived profile of junior competitive figure skaters from his London rink. Career-ending at sixteen. The exact injury. The exact knee. The exact dream cut off at the point where the body was still learning what it could become.
I think about my own left knee. About the seven years I spent between the Bolshoi scholarship program and my first day at Sterling-Kane, building a different language because the one I was fluent in had been taken. I think about what it cost to do that. How much got left behind in the conversion.
Two people who found numbers because the alternative was feeling everything - and feeling everything, when you have been trained since childhood to treat emotion as structural weakness, is not a survivable proposition.
I close the laptop at four-thirty.
Sleep still doesn’t come.
In the morning, Rosa's coffee arrives at the breakfast table before anyone else does.
I hold the mug and register, distantly, that the smell is wrong.
Not wrong as in poor quality. Wrong as in my stomach has filed a formal complaint about it - a rolling nausea, the kind that suggests my body has decided this morning that Cuban coffee is not the neutral start to the day it has always been.
I set the mug down and reach for water instead.
Stress, I think. The gala. . Twenty-four hours of adrenaline metabolizing out of my system.
Victoria arrives in a robe with her hair loose and her hands wrapped around her own mug. She looks at my untouched coffee, then at my face. She pulls out the chair beside me and sits down and does not say anything yet, which I appreciate. I’m not sure I have the strength for any interrogation.
Alex, Executive Office for Sterling-Kane Records and Victoria’s husband, follows two minutes later, pours himself coffee, reads the room accurately. He takes the chair across from us. That’s when I realise I don’t have a choice.
"Tell us," Victoria says.
“Tell you what?” I ask innocently.
She rolls her eyes. “You know what I mean. What happened last night?”
I tell them the documented facts in the order I assembled them: the Volkov estate and Viktor Astrovsky's role in the post-Soviet land seizure, the music label and Crawford's systematic dismantling of it, the industry litigation trail, the timeline.
I give them the architecture of a man who has been carrying a two-decade accumulation of legitimate grievance toward this company's founding legacy. But I don’t tell them everything.
"He has every reason to want to hurt us," I say, when I have laid out the structure of it. "Whether he's acting on it, I don't know yet. I don't know what his attendance last night means in terms of active strategy. But we need to be aware."
Victoria is quiet for a long moment. Alex sets his coffee down and organizes his thoughts.
"Crawford destroyed his label," Alex says slowly. "That couldn’t have been easy for him.."
"No," I say. "It isn't."
"Does he know you know?"
"He knows my name," I say. "He knows what my name means to his family's history. And since there’s no way on earth I can forget what his family did to mine, I’m sure he cannot pretend not to recognize me."
Melody appears in the kitchen doorway with coffee and a cardigan and the quality of attention she carries into every room that makes you feel both seen and slightly nervous about what she is about to say. She pours herself a cup and leans against the counter.
“You both didn’t look like enemies to me last night,” she comments.
She holds my gaze as she says it and I try to keep my features neutral, not to give away how my heart skips a beat at the memory of how close Nikolai and I had been last night.
Then I look at my water glass.
Nobody fills the silence for me.
"It was almost as if he knew my body better than I do," I say, finally. “Like he could instinctively read me.” It is the least revealing accurate thing I can offer, which is saying a lot because I already feel naked.
Melody nods once, as if this confirms something she had already filed correctly. She does not press.
Jax comes in from the terrace with the deliberate, unhurried movement of a man who has spent years learning how to occupy a room without filling it with noise. He catches enough of the ambient energy to understand the general territory, pours coffee, and settles at the end of the table.
"Jax." Victoria sets her mug down. "If Crawford really did dismantle this man's label.
The way we're hearing.." Victoria knows what she is implying. The fact that Jax can likely relate to this, seeing as Crawford, Victoria’s late father, tried to take over Jax Kane’s Record company a few years ago, before he finally died from a heart attack.
Jax is quiet for a beat. He turns the coffee mug in his hands - that slow rotation that means he is not constructing an answer but locating one that is already formed.
"That kind of wound does not heal," he says.
"You can paper over it. You can build an empire on top of it and call it moving on.
" His voice is even and certain. "But Crawford-sized damage festers.
It sits in the foundation of everything you build afterward and undermines the load-bearing walls until one day you are standing inside something you built to be safe and you realize it was always just a container for the original grievance.
" He sets the mug down. "When someone has been carrying something that long, they will burn the world trying to cauterize it. I almost did."
The weight of his words moves around the table unspoken. Alex and Victoria exchange the brief, wordless communication of people who know the history Jax is referencing and do not require him to name it.
"The question," Alex says carefully, "is whether he came to that gala as a man with a plan, or a man who accepted an invitation."
"Those are not mutually exclusive," I say.
"No," he agrees. "They are not."
Melody is watching me from the counter with the particular patience of someone who has already identified the question nobody is asking yet and is deciding whether to ask it herself.
"The other question," she says, "is what you are going to do about the rest of it."
The rest of it. His hands at my waist. The waltz. The three weeks of bad sleep and wrong lunches and six-second elevator stares that I have been attributing to professional anxiety and which were never that.
"I'm going to get on a plane," I say. "And I'm going to do my job."
Nobody argues with this. Nobody agrees with it either.
I fly back to Chicago at four in the afternoon.
The flight is smooth. I spend it running the numbers I should have been running yesterday - Q4 projections, the quarterly audit, the items that accumulated while I was managing forty-seven gala tabs and not sleeping.
My stomach lodges another complaint somewhere over Nevada when the flight attendant moves past with the beverage cart and the smell of hot coffee travels down the aisle.
Stress, I think again. I have been thinking this for three weeks. At some point the hypothesis requires review.
My apartment is as I left it. Precisely ordered, the coming week's schedule already mapped on the whiteboard beside my desk.
Beethoven is on the fire escape railing and regards my return with the mild disdain of a cat who has made separate arrangements.
I fill the three bowls by the back door, change out of the travel clothes, stand at the kitchen window for sixty seconds doing nothing - as close to unwinding as my nervous system permits.
The delivery notice is on the front mat. I almost miss it in the dark. A courier receipt for a package left with my building's front desk, long rectangular case, dimensions consistent with approximately nothing I ordered.
No sender information on the receipt.
I retrieve it from the lobby. I carry it upstairs. I set it on the kitchen counter and look at it for a moment.
I open it.
The Stradivarius lies in its velvet-lined case, the spruce top catching my kitchen light with the same quiet authority it had under the auction spotlight in Chicago.
The bow rests alongside it. Every piece of hardware gleams with the care of an instrument that has been tended across three hundred years.
A single card rests in the lid. Small, cream-colored, handwritten in ink.
For the girl who bid like she was fighting for her life, because she he was.
I read it once.
I set the card on the counter.
I pick it back up. I read it again.
The third time, I sit down on the kitchen floor, which is not a thing I do.
I do not sit on floors. Volkovs do not sit on floors.
Volkovs stand with correct posture and do not let things in through the cracks in their composure.
But my legs have simply made a unilateral decision about this and here I am, back against the lower cabinet, the card in my hands.
I read it a fourth time.
Beethoven comes in from the fire escape and sits directly in front of me and stares with the unsentimental solidarity of a creature who has no interest in explanations.
My eyes are dry. I do not cry. My father said we don't cry, we endure, and in this one area my body has always been a faithful disciple. But something in my chest is doing something loud and unscheduled and I do not have a tab for it in the binder.
He bought the violin because I wanted it.
He shipped it without a return address, without conditions, without a transaction implied.
Nikolai Astrovsky, whose father took everything from mine, sent me the thing I bid for like I was fighting for my life. And told me I was right to fight that way.
I sit with the card for longer than is efficient.
I think about Irina Astrovskaya in the 1987 archive photograph, mid-leap, her face open at full frequency.
I think about what it cost her to pack away the thing she was built for.
I think about a boy standing at a rink at four in the morning learning everything his body could do, and his mother at the window watching and never saying so, because she wanted to see the real thing.
I think about what it means to be sent something you wanted with your whole self by the person whose family your family is supposed to be the wound of.
I think about it for a long time.
Beethoven does not judge me for it.