I pulled a clean face on between one breath and the next. I stepped back onto the gravel so my next step would crunch, and I called out at a polite distance, light and a little sleepy.
"Pyotr? Morning."
He turned the rest of the way. His face did the thing a face does when a man is rearranging it fast. Then he found his polite smile and put it on.
"Miss Chloe. You are up early."
"Couldn't sleep." I walked toward him, easy, hands in my coat pockets so he would not see them shake. "I actually came out hoping to find you. I owed you a thank-you for yesterday. My ankle, at the garden. You were very kind. Daniil was not."
A breath of relief moved through his shoulders. He had not known that was coming.
"It was nothing, miss."
"It was not nothing." I tipped my head, smiling the smile I used at brunches in another life. Underneath it I was counting his pockets. Right side, phone. Coat half open. "He gets like thatwith anyone who stands too close to me. I keep telling him it is rude. He does not listen."
Pyotr's mouth softened. "He is protective."
"He is a menace." I let my laugh come small and warm. I was close to him now, close enough to smell the cold on his coat. I tilted my face up at him, a degree more interested than a wife should be, just enough. "Anyway. I wanted to say it properly. Before the house wakes up and I get shy about it."
He almost laughed. His guard came down by inches.
I rose up on the balls of my feet, one hand light on the front of his coat for balance, and pressed a quick friendly kiss to his cheek the way a sister might. He smelled like the cold and like aftershave worn down to almost nothing. My other hand was already moving. The angle of my shoulder hid it from his eye line. Two fingers into the right pocket, the slim weight of the phone against my knuckles, lift, and out, and into my own coat pocket in one motion as I came back down off my toes. The whole thing took less time than the kiss did.
I smiled at him like I had done nothing at all.
"Thank you, Pyotr. Really."
"Anytime, miss."
I turned and walked back the way I had come. I kept my pace easy. I did not look over my shoulder. The phone was a small hard rectangle against my hip through the lining of my pocket, my heart was beating in the back of my throat, and somewhere under my ribs a small bright thing had turned on that felt a lot like fear and a lot like resolve at the same time.
I had thought I was the soft one in this house. I had let everyone, including me, believe it. I was going to walk this phone straight up the stairs and put it in Daniil's hand.
19
DANIIL
The mirror in my room knew my face before I did. Pale at the temple where the small scar sat, the one that did not fade no matter how many seasons piled on top of it. My hair was still damp at the ends. I set the cuff straight at one wrist, then the other, working each link through the slit of the white shirt with the slow, exact motion my hands always remembered, even when my head did not.
The watch went on last. Heavy. Cold against the bone. I tightened the clasp and let the weight settle. A meeting waited downstairs. My brothers and I had pulled enough thread from the warehouse intel two nights ago to start unraveling something serious, and Alek did not call us together twice in one week for nothing.
I rolled my shoulders and squared the lapel. The man in the glass looked like he had been doing this a long time. He had. The small scar on the left index knuckle caught the light when I flexed my hand. I had stopped wondering where that one came from. There were bigger questions to chase.
The door behind me opened without a knock.
I knew the rhythm of her step before I caught her in the glass. Quick today. Light, but not light-hearted. Chloe came around my shoulder with her hair tied back and her sleeves shoved past her elbows, her mouth set in a line I had only seen on her twice before, once over Rhea's fever and once over a busted lock.
"Can I sit in on the meeting?" she said. "We have to hurry."
She did not give me the long version. She did not even give me her usual half breath of nerves before asking a hard thing. I caught her eyes in the mirror, and the green-brown in them was steady.
"Okay."
It came out faster than I meant. Sharper, too. She nodded once, the way someone nods when they have bet on an answer and won, and her hand closed around mine before I had turned all the way from the glass.
"Come on."
She did not pull hard. She did not need to. I followed.
