Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
Nik
Iarrive in Chicago without a plan, which is, for me, approximately the equivalent of arriving without my own skeleton.
I have run twelve years of corporate acquisitions on the foundational principle that you do not enter a room until you know every exit, every variable, every possible response to every possible development.
I have sat across negotiating tables from people whose entire professional apparatus was pointed at dismantling my position and I have been comfortable because I had already mapped the terrain before I walked in.
I have no terrain here. I have a coffee shop three blocks from the Sterling-Kane building, chosen because it is small and unglamorous and has no possible interpretation as a power move.
I have a corner table. I have an espresso I am not tasting.
I have, on my phone, a message I sent through professional channels forty minutes ago that said, simply: I'm in Chicago.
The café on Wabash with the green awning. If you want to talk.
I do not know if she is coming.
I know she read it within four minutes of sending, because the read receipt is there. Four minutes means she was at her desk and not in a meeting. She has not replied, which in the vocabulary of Natasha Volkov means she is deciding something rather than declining it.
I watch the door.
She comes through it at eleven forty-three with her coat buttoned to the top and her auburn hair in its severe professional bun and her face carrying the composure like she has already decided how this interaction is going to be managed. Then she sees me.
For approximately one half of one second something else crosses her face - something quick and unmanaged and entirely real - before the composure closes over it with the practiced efficiency of a system that has been running this protocol for a very long time.
She sits down across from me without greeting.
"You came to Chicago," she says.
"I did."
She looks at me steadily. "What do you want, Nikolai?”
Not a question. An audit. She is running her version of the risk assessment I ran on her from across an auction room three weeks ago, and I let her run it because I have earned the scrutiny.
"To tell you the truth, in a room that doesn't belong to either of us professionally."
She looks around the café — the scuffed wooden chairs, the handwritten specials board, the general air of a place that has been serving coffee to the same neighborhood for thirty years and sees no reason to reinvent itself. Something in her expression acknowledges the choice.
"Then tell it," she says.
I tell her about Rassvet Records.
Not the trade press version. Not the litigation timeline she has already assembled from her research.
The actual version. I tell her about my mother in the kitchen on Sunday mornings, the radio turned up, moving through the small space with an ease she never had any other time, teaching me to waltz.
I tell her about the hatbox on the shelf.
The Tuesday mornings at the rink window.
"She kept her ballet shoes," I say. "Wrapped in tissue paper.
She never wore them after she married Viktor.
But sometimes when I was small and the house was loud with his opinions about what constituted weakness, she would take me into her dressing room and open the box and let me hold one of them.
" I pause. "The leather was butter-soft.
She would say, in Russian, that some things are built to carry music, and some people are built the same way, and the worst thing the world can do to either is ask them to be silent. "
Natasha is very still across the table.
"Rassvet," Natasha says. "The label."
"What I built with my inheritance," I say.
"Because she taught me that building something beautiful was a form of repair.
Because Crawford Sterling was the man who wrote the check that funded Crawford's philosophy the year before he hired you, and the label was the one thing I had that might have mattered. " I set my espresso down.
"Crawford saw a young competitor with resources and instincts. He poached my artists, buried me in intellectual property litigation I could barely answer, and blackballed anyone who stayed. Eighteen months in, the label was ash."
"I was twenty-seven," she says quietly. "Just recruited as a junior analyst."
"I know."
"I ran his numbers," she says. "I didn't know what the numbers were funding."
"I know that too."
She looks at me with the quality of attention she brings to things she is deciding how to file. The silence between us has weight. Not the silence of an impasse but the silence of two people sitting with something that is true and difficult and real.
"So this is revenge," she says. "Sterling-Kane."
"It was." I hold her gaze. "Before the auction. Before you."
Her eyes go very clear. "Do not," she says, with a quietness that is considerably more forceful than volume, "use me as your redemption arc.
I am not available for that. I am not the reason you abandon a thirteen-year grievance and I will not be positioned as the softening agent in someone else's origin story. "
"I'm not positioning you as anything," I say. "I'm telling you the sequence of events as they actually occurred."
"The sequence of events as they actually occurred is that you were building a play against this company when we met. Everything after that is complicated by that fact."
"Yes," I say. "It is."
She studies me for a long moment. "The violin was manipulative."
"The violin was honest."
"Those are not mutually exclusive."
"In this case," I say, "they are. I sent it because you wanted it the way people want things they have given up expecting to receive. Nothing else. No strategy. No architecture."
She looks at me with the evaluating focus and I let her look, because there is nothing here she is going to find that I have not already shown her.
"Leave," she says finally. "I need to think."
"I'll be at the Italian place on the corner at eight," I say, standing. "If you come, we can continue this. If you don't, I'll fly back to London."
I leave her with her coffee and whatever she needs to do with the information I have just handed her.
The restaurant is small and lit with the unstudied warmth of places that have been feeding people for decades without trying to be anything other than what they are. Checked tablecloths. Wine poured without ceremony.
She comes at eight-oh-four.
She slides into the chair across from me and picks up the menu and I watch her read it with the focused efficiency she brings to everything, and when the waiter comes she orders in confident Italian that I did not expect and she does not explain.
"So,” I begin. “Four years at the Royal Conservatoire."
"It was in Florence one summer," she says. "And I have a good ear. I pick up what’s useful."
We argue through the entirety of dinner.
Not hostilely. The way two people argue who are both very intelligent and very invested - using the argument to test the other person's consistency, reveal their own, and narrow the distance between their respective positions without appearing to do so.
Crawford. Viktor. Whether the sins of our respective fathers are debts we inherited or weights we are choosing to carry.
"They do not define you," she says.
"They certainly shaped the terrain," I say. "Nuanced for a man who showed up in Chicago without a plan."
"I had some of a plan."
"The café with the green awning."
"That was the plan," I admit. "It ran out after that. Now, I’m just improvising."
The corner of her mouth moves. Not quite the smile, but adjacent to it, arriving when something has genuinely caught her off guard and she is not yet ready to give it its full expression.
"Crawford once told me sentiment was a liability," she says, after the second glass of wine.
Her forearms are on the table and her voice has dropped to the register it finds when she is speaking something true rather than something managed.
"He said it every week in some form, in reviews, in meetings, in passing conversation, the way you repeat a thing until it becomes weather.
I was twenty-seven and ambitious and I believed him. "
"You were good at your job," I say.
"I was lethal," she corrects smoothly. "Which brings us back to you. I am currently eating pasta with a man who has enough leverage to pull the rug out from under my entire life's work. It’s either a masterclass in executive confidence, or I have catastrophically bad judgment."
"Could be both," I tease.
"Don't flatter yourself."
Her hands move when she talks about Crawford's philosophy — not gestures, just small movements, the tell of a person whose editorial function is running slightly below capacity. I watch her hands because they are the part of her that most consistently bypasses management.
The space between us is doing something.
It has been doing it since she walked through the café door and I have been declining to name it.
But it is there - warm and charged, pulling our respective centers of gravity toward the same point.
When I refill her wine glass and my fingers brush hers on the stem, neither of us moves away.
Walking back to her building, the November air cold and the street quiet, I stop her at the corner half a block from the entrance.
She turns and her face in the ambient light of the city is open in the way it gets when her guard has simply been running too long and is tired.
"I'm going to kiss you," I say, "unless you tell me not to."
She does not tell me not to.
I cup her face in both hands and I kiss her slowly, on a Chicago street with people moving past on both sides - not a hotel room in the dark, not a gala terrace, but here, actual and visible and entirely intentional.
She makes a small sound against my mouth and her hands grip the front of my coat and I feel her lean into it, all of her leaning in, the wanting in it completely unperformed.
The elevator in her building is mirrored on three sides. The same configuration as the hotel three weeks ago. I watch her reflection watching mine as the doors close and I step toward her and back her against the wall.
My hands go to her hair first, pulling the pins loose until the auburn waves spill over my fingers. She tips her head back and I bring my mouth to the side of her neck - below the jaw, where her pulse runs fast - and I feel her whole body shudder against mine.
My hands trace down over her coat, finding her waist, then her hips, gripping through the fabric and pulling her close against me. She feels what she does to me, the hard press of my cock against her hip, and her breath goes sharp.
"Nikolai," she says, and it comes out unsteady.
My hands slide under her coat and find the warm skin at her waist and she gasps when my palms spread flat against her lower back.
I walk her further into the wall, my thigh pressing between hers, and her head drops back and her lips part.
Through the silk of her blouse I feel her nipples, peaked and tight, pressing against me, and I groan against her throat.
My hands skim upward and cup her breasts, my thumbs tracing the hard points, and she arches into my hands with a sound that travels directly down my spine.
"God," she breathes. Her hands grip my shoulders, nails pressing in.
I rock into her once, deliberately, and she whimpers and her hips answer it, pressing back against the wall for leverage.
The elevator opens on her floor.
We separate. Both breathing hard. Both undone.
The space between us alive with everything that has not yet been resolved.
Her hair is loose around her shoulders and her mouth is swollen and her eyes are dark and wide, looking at me with an expression that is want and restraint and something more complicated than either.
"I can't do this," she says, "until I know what's real."
"Everything about what I feel for you is real," I say without thinking.
She holds my gaze for a long moment with the evaluating focus that I have come to understand is not skepticism but self-protection.
She steps out of the elevator.
"Goodnight, Nikolai," she says, and the door closes between us.