Chapter Seven–Elena
The reception had lasted three hours and forty minutes.
I knew this because I had been counting.
Not obsessively, not with desperation, but in the quiet background.
Three hours and forty minutes of standing at the correct angle, smiling at the correct moment, accepting the weight of eyes I didn’t fully understand and conversations I was only partially equipped to decode.
Three hours and forty minutes of Mikhail’s hand at my lower back—light and consistent.
What I had seen in that room was still assembling itself as Mikhail led me out of it.
The way Gregor Vasin had looked at me like an element in an equation he was solving.
The woman with Morin who had never once looked our way, and what that careful avoidance meant about who she was serving.
Anya at my elbow for twenty minutes, warm and careful and conducting what was technically a social conversation but was also, I understood now, an orientation.
“The kitchen staff is loyal but the hospitality contractors rotate—be careful what you say near the event staff.”
“Alexei is easier than he looks and harder than he sounds.”
“Viktor is difficult but not unkind.”
The suite was on the third floor.
I had been in my own room the previous night. The separate room Mikhail had mentioned, the gesture of consideration I had received with more suspicion than gratitude because I had been too raw and too tired to receive anything else.
The suite he led me to now was different. It was crazily large and perfectly arranged in a way that told me Mikhail wasn’t uninvolved in it. It was his space, after all. Has been for God-knows-how long. The walls were a blue-grey color, complementing the black couches in the living area.
We entered the bedroom. It was magnificent.
The walls were still the same color but the furniture, from the couches to the bed frame and the wardrobe I could see from the doorless walk-in closet, was stark white.
Black silk sheets covered the bed that was definitely larger than the king-size I thought I knew.
His room. And now mine too, presumably.
My stomach flipped again.
He closed the door behind us. The sound of it was quiet and final, and in the silence that followed I could hear the reception’s background noise—the low hum of other people’s presence, the managed ambient sound of a full house—draining away.
It was just the two of us and the room and the dress I had been wearing for four hours and the weight of an evening I hadn’t finished processing.
He had moved toward the window, loosening his cufflinks with the automatic efficiency of a man removing the apparatus of a working day.
His back was to me, the dark suit jacket still on, the line of his shoulders composed even in this private space where composition wasn’t required for any audience.
I watched him for a moment and felt all the containment of the evening break open.
“I was chosen. That’s what you told me. Volkov chose me because of the specific shape of my situation. For my entire adult life I have been making decisions in the dark about things I didn’t have enough information to navigate, and I am tired of it, and I will not do it in this house.”
The room was quiet. Then he turned around to face me. Mikhail looked at me from across the space between us.
“You won’t,” he said, his voice certain.
It was hard to tell if he was being real or he was just saying it to shut me up.
“I need that to actually mean something.”
“It does.”
I pressed my hands together in front of me because they needed something to do and there was nothing available.
“I’m furious at you. I need you to understand that isn’t going to go away tonight. It isn’t going to go away because the evening is over or because you say the right things or because—”
“Because what?” he asked when I paused.
His voice had changed register. Lower. Something in it that was not the reception’s controlled distance.
The space between us was different from what it had been two minutes ago. He hadn’t moved. I hadn’t moved. But the charge of it had shifted in the specific way that charge shifted when an argument stopped being purely argument and started being something else, and I was aware of it. He was, too.
But I was still angry. The anger I felt was real and I was not going to pretend the evening had been anything other than what it was.
I was not going to pretend that being dressed and displayed had not cost something, or that the document I’d signed in the sitting room was not a fundamental rearrangement of my life without my full and free consent.
But also, there was the matter of what my body had been doing all evening.
That quiet, persistent, deeply inconvenient awareness that had run underneath the performance like a current I couldn’t switch off.
Every time his hand had found the small of my back.
Every time he had leaned close enough to speak quietly.
“Elena,” he said.
The way he said my name. That was the problem, fundamentally, and there was apparently nothing available to me in terms of a defense against that.
“Because what?” he pressed, his gaze unmoving.
I closed the distance. I did it consciously. I crossed the room and I stood in front of him and
I looked at him directly, and I said, “ You don’t get to demand anything from me. ’m still angry.”
“I know,” he said.
“This doesn’t—” I stopped, and started again. “This doesn’t mean everything is resolved.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
His hands came up to my face—both of them, slow, giving me every opportunity—and he held my face, his hands strong but his touch gentle.
“But what doesn’t?” he inquired, his voice devilishly low.
I blinked up at him, not expecting his question. He knew. The heat in his otherwise expressionless eyes was my surest proof.
“Hmmm?” he prompted. “The way your heart beats faster when I touch you?”
I opened my mouth to deny but then he kissed me.
Nothing like the corridor. Nothing like the hotel suite’s careful, slowed-down deliberateness.
This was the kiss of the argument’s aftermath—heated and direct, all the evening’s managed distance condensing into a single point of contact that made the managed distance feel absurd in retrospect.
I kissed him back, my fingers lacing through his hair as his hands found my waist and pressed my lower body to his.
He was not gentle in the way the hotel suite had been gentle. But he was careful. He kissed me like he had been starved of it for so long.
“Still angry?” he asked, when we finally broke apart for air. His voice was low and close, his mouth at the curve of my neck.
“Yes,” I said. The word came out less steady than I intended.
I felt him almost smile against my skin. Not mockery. Something that was amused and warm and unexpectedly human.
I had told myself—in the few minutes I’d had to tell myself anything before the evening had consumed all available cognitive resources—that this would feel like surrender.
That the asymmetry of our situation, the power he held that I didn’t, the circumstances that had produced this marriage and this room and this night, would make the intimacy between us feel like an extension of all of that.
Like one more thing happening to me while I managed my response to it.
But as he undid the zip at the back of my dress and led me to the bed with his eyes locked on mine, it didn’t feel like that.
He knelt between my legs as he said, “We could stop if you don’t want to.”
I half-rolled my eyes.
“You’re going to make me angrier if you don’t stop talking.”
He took off his shirt then, kissing me as he totally undressed me. The kiss escalated even quicker than before. There was no foreplay.
My back arched off the bed when he slid into me. He grabbed my breasts, squeezing and kneading as he started moving inside me. Mikhail didn’t start slow. He charged into me like a man claiming his long-awaited meal.
“Mikhail!... Yeah… oh!” I moaned as he pulled me lower by my shoulders, making him go even deeper.
The sound of our skin colliding and my moans which soon became breathless were the only sounds in the room as he screwed my brains off. And then I felt ecstasy begin to build inside me with every thrust.
I came with a loud cry that he eventually silenced with a wet kiss.
“Fuck! Elena,” he practically groaned as he reached his own peak.
At some point the ceiling was above me and his weight was beside me. The room was quiet in a way it hadn’t been before, and I was lying in the dark of it with my heart doing something unsteady and my body trying to remember the basic operations of breathing.
“You called my name,” he uttered.
“Well, I didn’t know your name the last time.”
“I know. That’s not it,” he said. “You never call my name.”
I tried to chuckle but it came out as a sigh.
“I like the way you do it.”
“Uh, do what?”
“Call my name.”
I stared at the ceiling.
I am married.
The word was still arriving in pieces, still not fully landing.
I was married to a man I had known for a combined total of—what, ten hours of actual shared presence?
Who had saved my life and left without a word and kissed me in a service corridor and told me the truth about who he was while simultaneously constructing a situation I had no clean way out of.
A man I might never be free of.
An even scarier truth was that a part of me wasn’t sure I wanted to be.