12. I broke the wrong thing. （Tamara）
I brOKE THE WRONG THING. (TAMARA)
Ihate every chair in the penthouse. Perfect lines. Perfect materials. Perfect placement. Everything curated with the kind of ruthless precision that says “nobody relaxes here.”
I’m standing in the kitchen, staring at a bowl of fruit, when the elevator opens.
Mikhail walks in wearing a camel coat over a black turtleneck and sunglasses despite the fact it’s nearly dark outside.
“You look like someone trapped in a very expensive Scandinavian prison,” he announces.
I glance at him. “You look like you owe three casinos money.”
“I do.” He drops his gloves onto the counter. “But only emotionally.”
Despite myself, a laugh escapes.
Mikhail points at me. “There she is. Human emotion. Aleks said you’ve been haunting the study like a Victorian ghost.”
“I lost a client.”
“Ouch.”
“She said she wanted to ‘reassess project timing.’”
“Translation?”
“She thinks marrying into the bratva is problematic.”
Mikhail considers this. “That’s fair.”
I glare at him.
“What?” He shrugs out of his coat. “You did marry into the bratva.”
“Against my will.”
“That argument would probably only make things worse.”
I exhale sharply and reach for the wine bottle sitting open on the counter. Mikhail watches me pour two glasses.
“It’s not five o’clock yet,” he says.
I slide one toward him. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
He lifts it in acknowledgment. “To catastrophic decision-making.”
“I think that toast applies to my entire life now.”
“Good. Adaptability is important.”
We drift through the apartment slowly as we talk, wine glasses in hand. Or maybe I drift and Mikhail follows because he realizes I’m unraveling more than I want anyone noticing.
The penthouse feels different in the dusk. Colder somehow. I start noticing things I missed before.
Books everywhere. Old New Yorker magazines. Furniture beautiful, but arranged with too much symmetry to feel lived in.
No candles burned halfway down. No abandoned sweaters. No flowers dying slowly in vases. No softness anywhere.
No one has been allowed to live here properly in a very long time. The realization changes what I’m looking at.
“This place feels embalmed,” I murmur.
Mikhail glances at me over his glass.
“That’s because Aleks hasn’t really changed it since Elena.”
The apartment seems to hear her name. He goes quiet afterward. The easy manner he’d been carrying since he walked in disappears all at once.
I turn toward him slowly. “Elena?”
Mikhail swears under his breath.
“Who was she?”
He hesitates just long enough to confirm she mattered. “It was a long time ago,” he says finally.
Now when I look around, I don’t just see restraint. I see preservation. Like the entire penthouse held its breath at the exact moment someone disappeared from it.
“That’s depressing,” I mutter quietly.
“You’re not wrong.”
We move farther into the living room. Rain slides down the floor-to-ceiling windows, Manhattan glowing silver and gold beyond the glass. The city feels impossibly far away from up here.
The large painting above the fireplace catches me. Kandinsky. Or at least I think it is. I step closer automatically.
“Original?” I ask.
“Unfortunately.”
“You say that like it’s a problem.”
“You have no idea.”
The painting pulls me closer anyway. Bold color fields. Violent geometry. Color that shouldn’t coexist, arranged until it does.
The painting doesn’t soften the room.
It interrupts it.
“Interesting choice for this space,” I murmur.
Mikhail leans against the bar behind me. “Elena bought it for him before she died.”
I turn slightly. “What happened to her?”
Mikhail’s mouth tightens, and for one second I think he won’t answer.
“Cancer,” he says.
I don’t know enough about Elena for that to hurt. It hurts anyway.
Because I suddenly realize someone once knew Aleksander well enough to choose something this personal for him. Someone once loved him closely enough to understand the architecture of his mind.
That’s not something you can fake with money. You have to pay attention. I put that thought down carefully. It has edges.
I move closer to the painting, studying it. “You know,” I say absently, “this placement is quite terrible.”
Mikhail nearly chokes on his wine.
“I’m sorry?”
“The lighting.” I gesture upward. “It flattens the texture completely at night.”
“You’re critiquing an eight-figure Kandinsky.”
“I’m critiquing the wall placement.”
“I’ve seen people react to a lot of things in this apartment. Never the lighting angles.”
I barely hear him.
Because now I’m focused on the mounting hardware behind the frame. The spacing is uneven. That bothers me irrationally.
I set my wineglass down on the console table and step closer. The frame is slightly off-level. Barely noticeable. But once I see it, I can’t unsee it.
Worse, the lower bracket is sitting wrong. Not loose exactly, but stressed.
“Don’t,” Mikhail says.
“It’s not seated properly.”
“Tamara.”
“I’m not moving it. I’m checking it.”
I reach carefully for the lower corner of the frame. It shifts under my hands—and then one of the mounting brackets releases entirely, faster than I expect, and the whole painting comes away from the wall.
I catch it.
Barely.
But catching it means turning with it, and as I bring it down, the lower edge of the canvas catches on the marble surround. A soft, delicate sound follows, and a split opens through the lower corner. The paint around it crackles faintly.
I end up standing in the middle of the room with the painting in my hands and no way to undo the sound it made.
The rip is not large. Still instantly awful.
Nobody moves, which makes the tear seem louder. Mikhail sets his wineglass down on the nearest surface.
When I look at him, the amusement is completely gone.
“I’m going to hang it back up,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “It’ll be fine.”
It is not fine.
One bracket is broken. The painting won’t settle back onto the wall. It lists, slips, catches, then tilts again.
I’m still holding the lower edge when the elevator dings softly behind us.
Footsteps.
I turn just as Aleksander walks into the apartment.
He stops.
He sees everything in the order I wish he wouldn’t.
Me.
The crooked frame.
The torn canvas.
And for the first time since I met him, Aleksander Sokolov has no face left to put over what he feels.