3. Nina
NINA
We drive for forty minutes, and he doesn’t say a single word to me.
I don’t say a single word to him either, which is a different thing entirely, because my silence is the silence of a woman with too many thoughts moving too fast to let any of them out, and his silence is the silence of a man who has already said everything he intends to say today and sees no reason to add to it.
He sits on his side of the back seat looking out his window, and I sit on my side looking out mine, and the city moves past us, and then the city thins out, and then there are gates.
Two men at the first gate. Two more at the second.
I count them without turning my head, using the window as a mirror, an old habit from years of arriving in places where arriving wrong could cost you.
The gates are not decorative. The men are not decorative.
The cameras mounted at intervals along the perimeter wall are not decorative.
I’ve been to the homes of wealthy men before.
I’ve interviewed three of them, written about two of those, and been asked very politely never to return by one.
They have security the way wealthy men have security: a gesture toward safety, a man at a door, a camera at a gate.
What Nikolai Vasin has is not a gesture.
I count eight visible points before we reach the front entrance, and I stop counting because the car has stopped and a man is opening my door, and I need to look like I was not just cataloging the defensive layout of my new husband’s estate.
Inside is worse.
Not worse in a way I can point to. The house is extraordinary, with high ceilings, dark wood, and the kind of quiet that only exists when a building has been constructed to hold it.
I’m shown to a room on the second floor by a woman who introduces herself as Marta and speaks to me in the warm and efficient way of someone who has been briefed on exactly how to handle me, which means I’ve already been handled before I arrived, which means someone gave instructions before we left the reception, which means he planned for tonight before tonight happened.
The room is beautiful. I don’t care.
I check the window first. It opens. The drop is fifteen feet to a stone terrace and another twelve to the garden below.
I check the door. No lock on the inside.
I check the adjoining bathroom, one entrance, no window.
Then I sit on the edge of the bed in my wedding dress, look around the room, and think about how I’ve been in scarier places than this and have believed them less.
He knocks at ten.
I know it’s him before I open the door, which is its own annoying piece of information. He’s still in his suit jacket, which means he hasn’t taken it off since coming home, or he put it back on before coming up here, and I can’t decide which is more infuriating.
“I want my passport,” I say.
He looks at me. His eyes move over my face in a way that is not rude and not soft and takes longer than it needs to.
“I want my passport,” I say again. “I had it in my bag at the church. Where is my bag?”
“Marta will bring it to you in the morning.”
“I want it now.”
“Goodnight, Nina.”
He says my name like it’s already his, like he has been saying it for years and is only now doing it out loud, and something about that unlocks something in me that the entire day has been building toward, and I pull my hand back and swing it at his face.
He catches my wrist before it lands. Not roughly, not with any particular effort, just catches it the way you catch something you saw coming, and holds it in the air between us.
I yank back. He doesn’t let go.
So I use my left hand, going for his ribs, a short punch with my body weight behind it because I have thrown punches before, and I know where they land, and he’s close enough that I don’t need distance.
He twists, takes it on his side instead of where I aimed, and in the same movement turns me, one arm locking both of mine against my body, pulling me back into his chest, and I can’t move.
I try anyway. I kick backward, I throw my weight forward, and none of it does anything except make him tighten his grip, which makes it worse and angrier.
“Let go of me.”
He says nothing.
“Let go of me right now or I swear to God I will scream this house down.”
His mouth is close to my ear. His arm is a wall across my chest, and I can feel how completely still he is while I’m still fighting, still pulling, and then I stop because I’m not accomplishing anything, and I’m not going to keep performing for an audience of one.
We stand there.
His face drops, slowly, to the curve of my neck, and he breathes in, and I feel it move through him before I hear it, a low sound that is not quite a word.
“God.” His voice is different from how it was at the door. Quieter. “You smell incredible.”
I stop breathing for a second, which I hate, and then I start again, and I say, “Get off me,” and my voice is steady, which I am proud of.
He releases me and turns me at the same time and walks me backward three steps until the backs of my knees find the bed, and I sit down hard on the mattress, less pushed than redirected, and he stands over me and looks down, and there’s nothing in his face that looks like anger.
“I’ve read everything you’ve ever published,” he says. “Every piece, every name you’ve burned, every story you ran into four countries of opposition to get into print.” He tilts his head slightly. “You’re too good for tantrums.”
Then he straightens up, and he’s at the door before I’ve found an answer, and he pulls it shut behind him, and the room is quiet.
I sit on the edge of the bed, and my face is hot, and my wrist feels like it belongs to someone else, and I’m furious, absolutely furious, and underneath the fury is something I refuse to look at directly, something that started when his face was at my neck and has not fully stopped.
I wait ten minutes. Then I go into the bathroom, run the shower, sit on the floor with my back against the tub, and call my editor.
He picks up on the second ring.
“Something came up,” I tell him.
“Nina, the piece is due Friday.”
“I know when it’s due. I need a few more days.”
“How many days?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He’s quiet in the way he gets quiet when he’s deciding how much to push. He has known me for six years, and he has learned, slowly, that pushing past a certain point gets him nothing.
“Fine,” he says. “Monday. I need something by Monday.”
“You’ll have something by Monday.”
I hang up and sit there for a few more minutes, the shower running, steam building, the cold tile underneath me doing nothing to help the way I feel.
I turn the shower off and go back to the room and lie on the bed in the dark, and I go through everything I know about Nikolai Vasin.
The business profiles. The financial filings.
The net worth estimates vary by fifty million, depending on which publication you read.
I line all of it up against what I have seen today.
The men at the gate. Rico, who moved through a room full of chaos like a man who has stood in rooms full of chaos for decades.
The negotiation, the way Nikolai sat at that table, like the whole thing was a mild administrative inconvenience.
The estate, the cameras, the layout of this house that makes no sense for a man whose only business is private equity.
None of what I know covers what I have seen.
I think about Sofiya and then I think about Nikolai’s voice when he listed my work back at me, and I think about the cameras on the perimeter wall, and I think about the way none of it adds up, and I lie in the dark for a long time before sleep finds me.
When it does, I am already, without meaning to be, paying attention.