CHAPTER 16
Siena
I woke married in a bed that was not mine, in a room the size of my whole apartment. This time I remembered why immediately.
That was the first difference.
The second was the arm across my back. He slept the way he did everything.
Completely, and with no apparent effort.
At some point in the night he had put a hand between my shoulder blades and left it there.
The weight of it had gone through to the mattress.
I lay under it and did an inventory. This time the list came back strange.
Facts. I was in his bed. I had walked there on my own legs, having said out loud, twice, in a kitchen, that I was choosing it. Nobody had taken anything from me. Nothing outside this room had improved in any respect. A man had been buried yesterday. There were four and half weeks on a clock.
And I was, for the first time since this whole thing began, not afraid.
I turned that one over for a while. It failed to change.
He woke when I moved. Not gradually. His breathing changed and then his eyes were open and on me. For one second, before the rest of him arrived, they belonged to a man who had not yet remembered what he was.
"Hello," I said.
"Milaya."
"You snore."
"I do not snore."
"You snore in Russian. It's very dignified. I made notes."
His face softened and warmed in a way I would have believed impossible if I hadn’t seen it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize it was simple happiness. I had not previously had a baseline for it.
I got up before it could turn into anything else.
Regret had nothing to do with it. I got up because I had spent more than two weeks being handled with enormous care by a man who was supposed to be violent. I was not going to start my first morning as somebody's actual wife lying there, waiting to hear what he decided we were.
I had thought about this at four in the morning, awake under his arm.
Power did not distribute itself. It had never once, in six years of surgical hierarchy, been handed to me by a person who had it. I took it because that was what any sane person would do.
So at nine o'clock I walked into the long room on the third floor where his men were meeting without me.
The talking stopped.
Eight men around a table that was built for twelve. Ivan at the far end. Andrei with his back to the door. Three brigadiers whose names I knew because a dead man had taught me. And Kolya at the head, in his father's chair, with his face doing nothing at all.
"Gentlemen," I said.
Nobody breathed. Andrei looked at Kolya. That was the tell, and I had been waiting for it, and I did not look at Kolya at all. I pulled out the chair at his right hand. That is the sovietnik's chair. It had been empty since Yuri stopped being welcome in this house. I sat down in it.
"I'll need the last four months of the obshchak ledger," I said. "Not the summary. The line items, with dates."
Silence.
"There is a reason nobody has asked for that," Kolya said.
"There's a reason I'm asking." I put my legal pad on the table.
"Yuri signs for the fund. Every alibi he built cost money.
A private room in Brighton Beach, a christening gift, a doctor who comes upstate at midnight.
He is very careful about being somewhere else on the right night.
I would like to know whether he is equally careful about who pays for it. "
The room changed.
I had felt a room change like that exactly twice. Once on a kitchen floor with my hands inside Ivan, and once there.
"She is right," Ivan said. To the table, not to me. "He signs. He has always signed. Nobody reads it because he is the one who reads it."
"Get it," Kolya said.
And that was it. No discussion. No permission asked or granted. Eight men watching their pakhan agree with his wife in a room she had walked into uninvited.
I stayed for the rest of the meeting. I said four more things. Two of them were wrong and Andrei told me so. I liked that more than I expected. A man who told you that you were wrong in front of your husband had decided you were a real thing in the room.
When it broke up, Kolya stayed in his chair and let the others go.
"You could have asked me for the ledger last night," he said.
"I could have."
"Instead of in front of my brigadiers."
"Yes."
He looked at me for a while. Then his mouth moved in a way that on any other man would have been a grin. "You are aware that you took my uncle's chair."
"I'm aware."
"That will be all over this house by lunch."
"That's the idea." I gathered my pad. "You gave me the case in a library, Kolya. That's a private arrangement between a man and his wife and it can be withdrawn in the same room it was granted in. I'd rather have it in front of witnesses."
"You do not trust me to keep my word."
"I trust you completely." I stopped in the doorway. "I don't intend to need to. There's a difference, and you of all people should approve of it."
He did approve of it. I had never once taken ground from that man without him watching me do it, close to proud.
The ledger came up at four. It took me until nine to find nothing in it, which was its own kind of finding. I was still saying so out loud when he came into the library, shut the door, and did not turn the lamp on.
"You're standing in my light," I said.
"I know."
"I'm working."
"I know that too."
"Kolya."
"You sat in that chair," he said, "and told eight of the most dangerous men in this city what to do, and they did it."
He had not moved from the door. I understood, with a small hot shock, that he was waiting.
SDays ago he had put his hand on my jaw and pulled it back. In a hallway he had opened my shirt and then stopped himself. In a kitchen over his father's vodka he had said if you are choosing this, choose it now. And he had still made me be the one who said the word.
He was doing it again. He was standing in a doorway with his hands at his sides, in his own house, waiting to be told.
For sixteen days I had spent thinking I was the one being managed.
"Come here," I said.
He came.
"Sit down."
There was a low chair by the window that nobody uses. He sat in it and looked up at me. The pakhan of the Volkov Bratva put his hands flat on his own thighs and waited.
I took my time. I had watched him do it to me the night before and I understood the arithmetic of it now.
I got a knee onto the chair either side of him. I put one hand in his hair and closed it, the way he had done to me. I pulled his head back until I could get at his throat. He made a sound low in his chest and his hands came up off his thighs.
"No," I said. "Not yet."
They went back down.
That was the moment I understood what I had.
I took the shirt off him. I put my mouth on the vor stars at his collarbones. Then on the eleven domes of his father's prison, one at a time, all the way across his shoulder. By the fourth one his breathing had gone to pieces and he was saying things in Russian I did not need translated.
"English," I said.
"I said you are killing me."
"Mm." I got his belt open. "Say it in English again when it's true."
I had his cock in my hand. He was already hard. He shuddered head to foot when I closed my fingers. He was not a quiet man. That was the discovery of the night. The most controlled human being I had ever met was in his own library, making noise because of my hand.
"Siena."
"Ask me."
"Milaya."
"Ask me properly,"I teased.
He looked up at me. His eyes were black in that light and there was nothing left of the man who runs meetings in them. "Please."
I got out of my clothes, then put my knees back where they had been. I took him inside me slowly, all the way down, with his face right there the whole time. His hands went to my hips and closed hard enough to leave marks. I let them because I knew he needed to anchor himself.
I set the pace. He tried once to take it and I stopped moving entirely until he understood. And when he understood, he let his head fall back against the chair and gave it to me. What went through me then had nothing to do with sex.
I rode him in a dark library. My hands in his hair, his mouth on my breast, my name coming out of him in two languages. Somewhere in it he said the word again.
"Moya."
"Yours," I said. "Say the other one."
"I don’t know the other one."
"Yes you do."
He got a hand into my hair and brought my forehead down onto his. We stayed there, moving together, breathing the same six inches of air.
"Moya," he said. "Moya, moya. Bozhe, ya —"
He stopped. I came with him inside me and his arms around my back, holding me down onto him. He went right after, saying my name. That was the only word of it I understood and the only one that mattered.
Afterward, I stayed where I was. He kept his arms around me and neither of us bothered to move to a bed.
"You stopped," I said, into his neck.
"Da."
"You were saying something."
He nodded once.
"You don't have to tell me."
"I know that." His hand moved once, slowly, up the length of my spine. "I’m not going to."
And that was fine. That was fair. I was not going to tell him mine either.
Because I had worked it out around the third dome of his father's prison, with my mouth on his shoulder. I had been carrying it since.
I love him.
I put it in words in my own head, in the dark, in the exact flat voice I used for a diagnosis. I had never allowed that in my life.
You are in love with him.
Fine. Noted. Filed.
It changed nothing.
There were still just over four weeks on a clock.
And a man building an alibi somewhere in this city, with my name written on the far side of it.
There was still a paper in a drawer that I had made worthless in four minutes in a family room.
There was still a door in this man that I had been walking past for sixteen days.
Every so often I put my hand on the wood and heard that it was hollow.
I loved him. He was still keeping things from me. Both were true at once, and the second was going to matter more.
I put my face into his throat and stayed there while his heart came down. "Kolya."
"Mm."
"Whatever it is you stopped saying." I kept my voice easy. "You'll say it before the council sits."
He was quiet a moment too long.
"Yes," he said.
I let that be an answer. Again. It was the second time he had handed me one with nothing inside it. And I was still, God help me, choosing to build on it.