8. Nina
NINA
Thursday is when Irina leaves.
I know the cleaner’s name because I made it my business to know her name, the same way I made it my business to know that she takes the number six bus from the stop two blocks east of the estate gates at six fifteen every Thursday evening, and that her bag is large enough to fit a person’s essentials if that person packed light.
I know that the Thursday evening gate rotation is thinner than any other evening because two of the regular men swap out at six and the replacements don’t arrive until six twenty, and that Irina walks out through the staff entrance at six ten without fail because she has a life outside of this house and she’s not going to be late to it on account of anyone’s schedule but her own.
I’ve been watching Irina for four days.
At 6:08 PM, I come downstairs in my coat with my bag over my shoulder, and I tell Marta I’m going for a walk, which I’ve done twice before at this hour, so it’s not unusual. Marta nods and goes back to the kitchen.
I go out through the rear garden and around the side of the house, and I fall into step about thirty feet behind Irina, close enough to look like I’m heading the same direction, far enough that she doesn’t turn around.
The staff entrance opens. Irina goes through. I go through.
I’m on the street.
The cold hits me first, sharp and real, and for one second, I just stand there and breathe it in.
Someone’s window is open two floors up, music bleeding out, something with too much bass.
A cab runs a yellow half a block down, and the driver leans on his horn for a full two seconds at whoever made him do that.
An old man in a puffy coat is walking a dog that has decided the crack in the pavement near the lamppost is the most interesting thing that has ever existed.
Normal city. Normal Thursday.
I start walking east.
The stop is two blocks and a right turn. I have the route memorized. I also have forty-three dollars from Marta’s kitchen petty cash, lifted two Tuesdays ago.
I have my phone, but I won’t use it. I have what I packed, my coat, and eleven minutes before the replacement rotation arrives at the gate.
I give myself nine.
The first block is fine.
A woman with a stroller is coming the other way.
Two guys argue outside a bar. A delivery bike cuts too fast across the crosswalk, close enough that the rider and I make brief eye contact, and he doesn’t slow down.
I keep my pace even. Not slow, not brisk.
The pace of someone who has somewhere to be and isn’t late yet.
I turn the corner.
The bus stop is visible from here. A little blue shelter with one person already waiting—a teenager with headphones, face completely buried in her phone.
The number six runs every twelve minutes at this hour. If I can get there in the next four minutes, I might catch one already on its way.
I count my steps without meaning to.
Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.
A black car rolls up beside me and doesn’t pass.
My first thought is: of course. My second thought is that I’m still walking and I’m not stopping and they’re going to have to actually get out of the car and put hands on me before I quit.
The car doesn’t rush. Doesn’t screech or jolt or do anything that would make anyone on this block look twice.
The window comes down, and the man inside is someone I haven’t seen before.
Youngish. Unremarkable face, the kind that’s hard to describe afterward. He looks at me with the expression of someone running a very dull errand.
“It’s cold,” he says. “Car’s warm.”
I keep walking.
“There’s someone at the next corner,” he says. “And the one after that.”
I ignore him and keep walking.
There’s one more block to the stop. If I run—I’m not going to run—I might make the next corner before whoever’s waiting there can move. By the time I’ve worked through this, I’m seven steps in, and the car is still keeping pace, and my window is closing with every one of them.
I keep walking.
The man doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t have to. The car just rolls at my speed.
The bus stop is right there, fifteen feet, the teenager still on her phone, and I can see the lights of the number six two blocks north coming down the avenue.
If I can get on that bus before anyone physically stops me, I’m on a bus in a city of eight million people, and that means something.
I walk faster.
The car doesn’t follow me around the corner, and for four seconds, I think that means something.
Then I see the man at the stop standing just past the shelter with his hands in his pockets.
I know his face. East corridor, Tuesday mornings. I don’t know his name, but I know what his being here means.
The number six pulls up.
The doors open.
The teenager gets on.
The doors close, and the bus is gone, and so is any version of tonight where I actually make it.
The car from around the corner is at the curb behind me now. I didn’t hear it come. The window is still down, and the unremarkable man is still looking at me with the expression of someone completing the second half of a task he started earlier.
“Eleven minutes,” he says. Not unkindly. Almost like a fact he thought I’d want to know.
I get in.
The door closes, and the car is warm and smells like coffee from a cup in the holder up front, and nobody speaks. I sit with my bag in my lap, look out the window.
The anger comes about four minutes into the drive when I start thinking clearly.
The first attempt, the route closed before I reached it.
This time I got out. I got past the gate, onto the street, eleven minutes of actual freedom before the car appeared.
The system is not a wall. It is a net. It moves with me. It closes around me in real time, which means somebody is watching me in real time, not the cameras, not the gate rotation, somebody whose entire job is knowing where I am at any given moment and closing the gap before I can use it.
I sit with that the whole way home, and by the time we pull through the estate gates, I’ve stopped thinking about how to get out and started thinking about who’s watching and how close they are, and whether that is actually more useful information than an open gate would have been.
Nikolai is in the sitting room when I come inside. He’s on the phone, standing at the window with his back to the door, and he doesn’t turn around when I come in.
I take my coat off, drop my bag on the chair. I sit on the sofa and wait because I’m not going to be the one who starts this conversation.
He finishes the call, and turns around.
“Heels,” he says, looking at my shoes.
“I was optimistic.”
“You were gone eleven minutes.”
“I got further than last time.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he crosses the room, sits in the chair across from me, leans forward with his elbows on his knees, and says nothing.
I have learned enough about how he operates to know that this is not patience. This is pressure. He’s waiting for me to feel the weight of his silence and fill it, and I’m not going to fill it, so we sit there, and the room is quiet, and the clock on the mantelpiece does its work.
“Let’s talk about the dinner,” I say finally, and I mean last night, and he knows I mean last night because his eyes shift slightly.
“What about it?”
“You could have told me what it was. Who would be there. What you needed from me.”
“You didn’t need to be told.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“The point,” I say, “is that you keep making decisions about what I need and don’t need to know, and then you sit at a dinner table and watch me perform without a script like it’s some kind of test. Then you say something about me to Leonard Haas like I’m something you acquired and are pleased with.
I don’t know what any of that is supposed to mean. ”
He looks at me steadily. “What did you want it to mean?”
“I didn’t say I wanted it to mean anything. I said I don’t know what it means.”
“Yes you do.”
I open my mouth and close it.
He stands up. I stand up too.
We’ve been in this configuration before. I know how it ends. I’m still angry, properly angry, about the car and the street and the eleven minutes and the dinner, and none of that anger is going anywhere useful.
“You handled that table better than anyone I’ve brought to that dinner in ten years,” he says. “I’m not going to apologize for saying so.”
“I don’t want an apology.”
“Then what do you want?”
I look at him. He looks at me. The question sits between us, and neither of us says the real answer out loud.
The air in the sitting room feels thick and heavy. My coat is still buttoned tight around me. My heart is still racing from the car ride and the failed escape and the way he’s looking at me right now, like he can see every angry, messy thing inside my head.
I step toward him first.
Nikolai meets me in the middle. His hand slides into my hair, gripping it tight, and he kisses me.
There’s nothing soft about it. His mouth crashes against mine, demanding and rough.
I kiss him back, just as angry, biting his bottom lip. He growls low in his throat and walks me backward, out of the sitting room and into the hallway.
My back hits the wall with a dull thud. The impact knocks a small sound out of me. He doesn’t stop. He grabs both of my wrists, pins them high above my head with one strong hand, and holds them there against the wall. His body presses into mine, keeping me trapped.
“You infuriate me,” he mutters against my mouth.
“Fuck you,” I breathe.
He yanks my skirt up roughly around my hips with his free hand. The fabric bunches up, cool air hitting my thighs.
He hooks his fingers into my panties and pulls them roughly to the side. I’m already wet. He feels it and makes a low sound in his chest.
He frees his cock, lines himself up, and thrusts into me in one hard stroke.