13. Vasilisa
Vasilisa
“You should be packing.”
I say it out loud to myself, to my own dark bedroom, to the bolt I threw the second the elevator let us off, but I don’t move toward a single drawer.
I sit in the middle of the room, and I do the math a sane woman would do.
A man put a knife through another man’s hand over the veal course tonight and then finished the veal.
A sane woman packs a bag. A sane woman calls Poppy, tells her the truth she’s been outrunning, and gets driven somewhere with a lock the man doesn’t own a door into, except there isn’t one, he told me himself, there’s no dirt on this continent he doesn’t own a door into.
That’s not why I’m not packing. Let’s at least be honest inside my own skull.
I’m not packing because the adrenaline from that room is still in me with nowhere to go, my whole body a struck bell that won’t stop ringing, and every time I close my eyes I see the same thing, the knife going down, and then his hands, calm, picking the fork back up, and the two of them sitting side by side in my head refusing to cancel out.
Horror and the craving, riding the same horse, except tonight there’s no distance left to shove the other thing down a flight of stairs, because tonight he did it for me.
I throw the bolt back.
I roll down the hall before I’ve decided to, which is a lie I tell myself, I’ve decided, I decided in the car.
His door’s open. He’s at the window with the bridge burning behind him, still in the black shirt, and there’s blood on the cuff, gone brown now, another man’s, and he hasn’t changed it, and something about him standing there in a dead man’s dinner still wearing it wrecks whatever plan I rolled in here pretending to have.
“You should be asleep,” he says without turning.
“You put a knife through a man’s hand.”
“I did.”
“Over a joke.”
“It wasn’t a joke. It was a price.” Now he turns. “He put a number on you at my table in front of thirty people. A number gets answered, or it gets bid up. I answered it.”
“Why?” My voice isn’t steady. I’ve stopped trying to make it steady. “Tell me why, in a full sentence, in your own mouth, the way you make me do.”
He crosses the room. Four steps, the way he always crosses a room, like the floor was laid for him, and he stops close enough that I have to tip my head back to hold his eyes, and I refuse to be the one who looks away.
“No one laughs at my wife,” he says.
And that’s the last cable.
Because it’s the truth he didn’t give me before.
Not the winning hand, not the odds, not the long-term strategy of a gambler with a prize horse.
It’s smaller than that. It’s dirtier and simpler and more dangerous.
It’s a room full of animals, and the one animal that is his has teeth he put there, and he just sharpened them in public.
My name on his lips isn’t a political tool, it’s not an asset, it’s a thing, it’s a possession, and if you look at it sideways, he’ll break your fingers.
I set my feet down on the floor. And I get up.
It’s the ugliest, most graceless thing I’ve done in front of him.
I push up with my hands on the arms of the chair, I use my own arms, my own failing, stubborn arms, and I lock my knees and I stand, and it hurts, it always hurts, a dull ache at the base of the spine, a tremor in the right thigh that I will not let win, and I stand there on my own two feet, holding my own balance, not holding onto him, not holding onto a single thing, and I meet his shocked eyes.
“I am not an asset, Lev. I am not a name that you get to put your guard dog instincts on.” I take one step.
The floor is solid under my foot. The second step is harder, the left leg is stronger, the right is the traitor, but I take it, and I’m a foot away from him, close enough to see the gold flecks in the gray of his eyes.
“I am the one who decides what I am. And I am not the thing you get to knife people over. I am not your brand new car that you keyed another man for looking at.”
I am shaking with the effort of standing.
My whole body is a live wire of pain and effort and the sheer stubborn will to be upright in front of him.
His eyes are on my face, and then they drop; they drop to my legs, to the tremor in my thigh, to the way my weight is shifted, and he sees it all.
He sees the cost of this performance, and the look on his face is not what I expected.
It’s not pity. It’s not even shock. It’s something like awe.
And it’s the last thing I need.
I put a hand flat on his chest, right over the knife he keeps there, and I push.
He doesn’t move, of course he doesn’t move.
He’s a stone wall of a man, but I put all the weight of my standing, all the pain of it, all the fury, into that push, and I look him in the eye, and I say, “You don’t get to do my fighting for me. ”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t move. He just lets me push against him, a pointless, furious gesture, and then he does the one thing that could possibly undo me more than he already has. He puts his hands over mine.
He doesn’t pull them away. He doesn’t stop me.
He just covers my hands with his, huge and warm, the blood still on the cuff, and he holds them there, on his chest, over his heart.
And I can feel it. I can feel the steady, solid beat of it under my palm, a rhythm that hasn’t sped up, that hasn’t faltered, a metronome of absolute control in the middle of the chaos he’s created.
“I know,” he says. His voice is low, a rumble I feel more than I hear. “I know you fight your own fights. But that wasn’t a fight. That was an accounting. And I’m a very good accountant.”
The absurdity of it almost makes me laugh.
The sheer, unmitigated gall. He’s a very good accountant.
He stabbed a man through the hand and called it bookkeeping.
And I’m standing here on my own two feet, my hands on his chest, his hands over mine, and I can’t find a single word in my entire vocabulary that is big enough to hold the contradiction of him.
His face is inches from mine. The air in the room is gone, it’s all been sucked into the space between us, and I can see every line etched around his eyes, the faint scar on his jaw, the way the light catches the silver in the dark hair at his temples.
And I can feel the heat from his body, a solid, undeniable presence that is both a threat and a strange, terrifying comfort.
My legs are trembling so badly now I don’t know how long they’ll hold me. And he sees it. He sees everything.
He puts his arms around me and lifts me up, my legs wrapping around his waist automatically, a trained response to being moved when I can’t hold myself, but this is different.
This is not Natasha in a clinic. This is Lev Etush, the man who put a knife through a man’s hand for me, holding me against him like I’m something precious.
My arms go around his neck. My fingers in his hair. And I’m pressed against him, my body aligned with his, and the tremor in my legs is gone because they’re not holding me up anymore, he is, and the relief of it is so profound it’s like a drug.
He carries me to the bed. It’s not a romantic carry, it’s not a gentle one, it’s a purposeful, efficient movement, the way he does everything.
He lays me down on the dark sheets, and he follows me down, propping himself on an elbow beside me, not covering me, not taking anything more than the space he needs to look at me.
“Tonight,” he says, “was about power. It always is. They needed to see that my power is absolute. And they needed to see that you are the absolute center of it.”
“I’m not a center,” I whisper. “I’m a person.”
“You’re the person in the center,” he corrects me, and he reaches out and traces the line of my jaw with a thumb, a touch so light it’s barely there, but it sets my skin on fire.
“Do you know what they’re saying right now?
In every house along this coast? They’re saying Malenko laid a hand on the last Filatov and Lev Etush took it off him.
They’re not saying he insulted you. They’re saying he touched you.
And they’re understanding the difference. Do you?”
And I do. I understand it with a clarity that is terrifying. He didn’t just defend my honor. He established a perimeter. A no-fly zone. A buffer of blood and bone around me that no one will dare cross without a cost they can’t afford.
It’s the most terrifying thing anyone has ever done for me.
And it’s the most aroused I have ever been in my entire life.
I’m not supposed to want this. I’m not supposed to want the man who bathes in blood and calls it bookkeeping.
I’m not supposed to want the man who looked at my life, my grandfather’s name, my broken body, and saw a winning hand.
I’m supposed to want a teacher with calluses on his fingers from chalk dust, a man who smells like books and coffee and kindness, a man who doesn’t know what a real knife feels like in his hand.
But the man with the calluses from chalk dust can’t hold me like this.
He can’t look at me with this terrifying mix of possession and awe.
He can’t understand the part of me that found something beautiful in the violence tonight, the part of me that is sick to death of being underestimated, the part of me that is tired of being the one who has to be strong all the time.
The man with the knife can.
I close my eyes. Because if I keep looking at him, I’ll do something I can’t take back.
He lets me have the darkness for a long minute. Then he speaks, and his voice is right there, next to my ear, a low rumble that I feel in my bones.
“Look at me, Vasilisa.”
I open my eyes.
“You’re afraid,” he says. It’s not a question. “You’re afraid of wanting me. You’re afraid of what it means about you. That a part of you liked what I did tonight.”
I don’t answer. I don’t have to.