Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
Nik
She makes tea in the morning the way she does everything: with complete attention and zero unnecessary movement.
I am sitting at her kitchen island watching this at seven-twenty AM, which is an activity I have apparently become entirely willing to engage in - watching Natasha Volkov in Harvard sweats move through her kitchen.
She sets a cup in front of me without asking what I want. She made a decision about what I drink at some point in the last twelve hours and has simply acted on it. The tea is exactly what I would have ordered.
Beethoven is on the counter to my left. Bowie is at the window. Billie is winding around Natasha's ankles with a focus she normally reserves exclusively for Natasha, and this, apparently, is the diplomatic opening.
"Bowie slept on the piano bench," Natasha says, her back to me, hands wrapped around her own cup.
"He migrated to my lap around four AM," I say. "I didn't want to disturb him."
She turns. Her hair is loose and her face is the unhurried, unmanaged version I have now seen three times and which I am beginning to understand is not a rarer version of Natasha Volkov but the original one - the version that exists before the armor goes on each morning.
"You played for two hours," she says.
"You were listening."
"For a while." She doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t press, because the fact of her standing in a hallway at three in the morning listening to Scriabin in the dark is something that belongs to her to decide what to do with.
Beethoven extends one paw and places it on my forearm with the tentative authority of a creature attempting a diplomatic overture. I hold very still. He presses slightly harder, apparently satisfied with my response, and retracts it.
"He likes you," Natasha says.
"Should I be concerned that this surprises you?"
"Beethoven has never voluntarily touched a person in three years," she says. "He barely tolerates me and I feed him daily."
"I'm flattered." I smile.
"Don't be. He touched a plumber's arm once and the man had to leave early. We never established a causal link."
The corner of her mouth moves. I watch it - the adjacent version of her smile that arrives when something has caught her genuinely off guard and she has not yet decided whether to give it full expression.
I have been cataloging these degrees carefully.
The way you catalog something you understand is rare and want to be able to identify accurately.
"What do you want to do today?" she says, turning back to the counter.
The question is so ordinary that it takes me a beat to answer. I don’t remember the last time I was asked what I wanted to do without it being in a professional setting.My days do not typically begin with someone else in the kitchen making decisions about my tea preferences.
"I don't have a plan," I say.
She looks at me over her shoulder. "You've mentioned."
"I could make one."
"Or," she says, "you could not. Just for today."
I consider this. "I'm not sure I know how to not do anything."
"I'm also not sure I know how," she says. "We could be bad at it together."
Something settles in my chest at this - the small, ordinary, entirely unremarkable prospect of being bad at something together on a Wednesday morning in Chicago.
I cannot explain why this particular combination of words arranges itself in my chest with more weight than four-point-two billion dollars ever has.
My phone rings.
I know before I look at the screen. Viktor has a calling pattern - early mornings, when he has calculated that the hour maximizes disruption and minimizes the likelihood that you are surrounded by people who might observe the interaction.
Some residual conditioning from thirty-six years of being Viktor Astrovsky's son makes me answer. The deep-grooved reflex of picking up when the father calls, because not picking up simply defers the cost to a later invoice.
"I've seen the photographs," Viktor says, without greeting.
Not the contemptuous cold of the Malibu call.
Something more controlled than that - the register he uses when he has assembled a complete picture and is deciding how to deploy it rather than simply reacting to it.
"The building has been identified. The address.
" A pause. "I know about the pregnancy."
The kitchen is very quiet.
"You've been thorough," I say.
"I am always thorough." He does not make it a boast—a statement of operating principle.
"I want to be clear about the position, Nikolai.
The Volkov woman works for Sterling-Kane.
You have spent over a decade building toward that company.
What you are doing in her apartment this morning is not a private matter.
It has implications for everything you have constructed. "
"Her name is Natasha." My voice is low but as hard as steel.
"Her name," Viktor says, "is Volkov, and that name has a history with this family that does not disappear because you have decided it is inconvenient.
" A pause, precisely placed. "She will find out the full scope of what you were building.
If not from you, then from me. I have no attachment to which version she receives first. I am simply informing you of the landscape. "
"Do not even think of contacting her," I growl into my phone.
"Then manage your own situation before it requires my management."
He ends the call.
I set the phone on the island.
My left hand is shaking with the sustained vibration that arrives when rage has been compressed to its highest density and is pressing against every available wall.
I have felt this in various forms since I was ten years old.
Viktor's voice taking on that register means he is making something permanently clear.
"Nik."
Natasha is in the kitchen doorway. Her face is running the rapid assessment she applies to everything - reading my posture, my hand, the quality of my stillness, arriving at a conclusion that is correct.
"Sit down," she says.
"I'm fine."
"You're shaking," she says, with the directness that is not unkindness but precision. "Sit down."
I sit.
She sits across from me and wraps both hands around her tea cup and looks at me with the attention she brings to things she has decided to see clearly regardless of what seeing clearly costs.
"Tell me," she says.
I tell her everything.
Not the version I have been parceling out in manageable installments across weeks of careful disclosure.
The full blueprint of what Astrovsky Technologies had been building toward Sterling-Kane.
The acquisition preparation. Three years of competitive intelligence, the litigation research targeting Crawford's legacy agreements, the distribution pressure points I had identified and was prepared to activate.
The scope of it, clean and complete, no longer softened by strategic framing.
The silence afterward has weight.
"If I had never gotten pregnant," she says, her voice level and precise, "would you have gone through with it?"
I do not look away from her. "Yes."
The word sits between us on the kitchen island like a stone.
"And now?" she asks.
"Now I’ve met someone who makes the revenge feel small and the future feel possible, and those are not things I was expecting to feel but I am not going to pretend they haven't rearranged everything."
Natasha goes still. She doesn’t say anything for a long time, and to keep myself from panicking, I open my mouth and words begin to flow.
"Viktor called. Someone photographed me entering your building.
He knows about the pregnancy." I watch her face register this without flinching.
"He's threatening to contact you directly with the full scope of the campaign if I don't manage the situation myself.
I'm telling you because he told me you'd find out one way or another and he's correct, and I would rather you hear it from me than receive it as a weapon from my father. "
"Why does it matter how I find out if the information is the same?”
"Because it isn't the same," I say. "Viktor delivering it is a strike. Me delivering it is the truth. They produce the same facts and they are not the same thing."
She looks at me for a long, evaluating moment. The kitchen is quiet around us. Chicago doing its unremarkable Wednesday morning thing beyond the windows.
"There's something else," I tell her.
She waits.
"My mother. Before the Volkovs left Russia.
Before your father fled to Brooklyn. "My gaze drops down to the cup in my hands for a moment.
. "Irina knew what Viktor was doing to your family.
The estate seizure, the asset stripping.
She knew and she did not agree with it, and she attempted to intervene on your family's behalf. "
"Not in any large way," I continue. "She had no real leverage against Viktor and she knew it. But she went to a contact in Moscow, someone with access, and she tried to create a delay in the process. Time for your family to remove assets. To prepare."
"What happened?" Natasha asks, her lips parted on a silent gasp.
"Viktor found out," I respond. . "He made sure the contact understood the consequences of assisting her.
The intervention came to nothing." I set the cup down.
"He told her that her softness was going to destroy the family.
That sentiment was a liability he could not afford in a wife.
" My voice is even because I have been carrying this for a long time and I have learned the discipline of speaking about it without letting it become something I cannot close back up.
"My mother's decline began around that time. Not because of one conversation. Because it was the moment she understood, comprehensively, that the life she was living had no room for the version of herself that she actually was."
Natasha's eyes are bright with tears. They don’t fall down her face, but they gather and shimmer in her eyes, and the sight of them punctures my heart.
I hate that I’ve seen her cry before seeing her laugh.
I hate it so much. "My father told me that story," I say quietly.
"I still remember how detached he sounded, how satisfied his voice had been, as if he were explaining a successful containment operation.
He told me because I had just started the label and he wanted me to understand what happened when Astrovskys invested in things that were beautiful and soft and ultimately indefensible.
" A pause. "He thought he was warning me.
He was actually showing me the most damning thing he has ever shown anyone about himself. "
"Your mother tried to save my family," Natasha says, in a voice that is not quite steady.
"Yes."
"And your father stopped her."
"Yes."
"And she spent the rest of her life in a house with no music in it."
I cannot answer this immediately. I look at the table and I breathe once, carefully, and I look back up. "Yes."
One tear tracks down Natasha's cheek. She does not touch it. She holds her posture and her chin and she lets it move down her face without managing it, which for this woman is the equivalent of full grief from anyone else.
"I'm not going to be my father," I say firmly. It sounds like a promise but it’s not. It’s pure conviction.
"Viktor spent his life taking beautiful things and calling it strength.
He took your family's home. He took my mother's music.
He took the label when Crawford gave him the opportunity - not directly, but he would have - and I was building toward something that would have used the same mechanism.
" I hold her gaze. "I am done with that architecture. "
She is quiet for a long moment. Outside, a car passes. Beethoven adjusts on the counter. Natasha stands up. She walks to the piano in the main room and I follow her, standing near the bookshelf while she settles on the bench, and she begins to play without preamble.
The Chopin nocturne. The E-flat major. The one she told me her mother hummed.
She plays for a while without speaking, and I listen the way I listened at four AM in the dark, except the lights are on now and I can see her face - open and unguarded and completely in it.
She speaks without stopping, her eyes on the keys.
"My father was a good man," she says. "Before your father took everything. Before the estate and the flight to Brooklyn and the taxi shifts and the silence." Her fingers move through the Chopin phrase with the muscle-memory fluency of something learned so deep it has become structural.
"He became cold to survive. The coldness became the only version of him that could keep functioning, and he taught me that version was the correct one." A pause. "He called it endurance. I called it discipline. It is the same room with different wallpaper."
She looks at me then, across the lit room, her hands still moving through the nocturne.
"I don't want to teach our child that," she says.
"I don't want to hand them a prison and tell them it's a philosophy.
I spent thirty-five years believing the coldness was strength and it is only now, sitting here in my kitchen at seven AM with three cats and a man whose family history is tangled completely through mine, that I can see what it actually was. "
The nocturne continues.
"What was it?" I ask.
She holds my gaze steadily. "Fear," she says. "Dressed in very expensive clothes."
I cross the room and I sit beside her on the piano bench and I do not touch her and I do not speak, because she is still playing and some things deserve the space they are taking up.
Bowie drops from the windowsill and pads over and inserts himself between our feet on the floor - a small, warm, entirely sovereign presence.
The nocturne reaches its close, the final phrase settling into resolution with the Chopin quality of grief that is not defeated but accepted.
Not erased but integrated. The way loss becomes part of the load-bearing structure of a person who has learned to carry it without pretending it isn't there. I love hearing her play. I mean, I’ve always loved the piano but I particularly love hearing her play.
Natasha lifts her hands from the keys.
The apartment holds the silence.
"Alright," she says, to the room, to me, to the three cats and the Chopin still sitting in the warm lit air. Not a surrender. A beginning.
I reach over and take her hand and she lets me keep it.
For the first time in a long time, I have no worries.