“Please.”
He lets go. His hand falls to the sheet. The sheet is still warm from both of us and I swing my legs over the side of the bed and I find my t-shirt on the floor and I pull it over my head and I stand and my legs hold, which surprises me, and I walk to the bedroom door and I don’t look back.
I walk through my apartment. Past the kitchen counter with the single coffee cup. Past the bookshelf with the cracked spines. Past the cardigan on the chair. I reach the front door and I open it and I step through it and I close it behind me.
I don’t slam it.
I close it with a click.
The click is the last sound between us.
ANTON
The door clicks shut.
I am sitting on her bed. The sheets smell like her shampoo and my cologne and the particular chemistry of two bodies that have just learned each other, and she is gone.
My hands are shaking.
I hold them up in front of me. I turn them over. I grip my own wrists and try to make them stop and they don’t stop. They haven’t done this since my father’s grave, standing there with with Andrei’s hand crushing mine, swearing I would never let anyone close enough to make me tremble.
I let her close enough.
And I destroyed her.
The shaking doesn’t stop. I sit on the bed of the woman I love, because I love her, I know that now, I have known it since the yellow tab and the coffee I brought myself and the file room where her hand was on my chest and her heart was faster than mine, and I sit and my hands shake and the door is closed and the click echoes in the apartment like a verdict, and for the first time in years, I can’t make them stop.
Chapter 9
ANTON
I drive to Keyes before dawn.
The streets of Monaco are empty at this hour. The harbour is grey. The yachts sit in their slips like sleeping animals and the city hasn’t woken and I haven’t slept and my hands have stopped shaking but only because I’ve been gripping the steering wheel the whole drive and the pressure has forced them still.
The firm’s lobby is dark. The glass doors are locked. I press the intercom and the night security guard, a man I’ve never spoken to and who’s never seen the version of me that is standing on this pavement, buzzes me in without a question because my name opens doors in this city and tonight I hate that it does.
Kaye’s office is on the second floor. I take the stairs. The corridor is unlit except for the emergency strips along the baseboards, green and clinical, and my shoes are loud on the marble and I don’t care who hears.
Her door is closed. I open it.
She’s there. At her desk. I don’t know why she’s here at six in the morning and I don’t care. She is sitting behind her laptop with a coffee cup and her reading glasses and her hair pulled back. Daisy’s aunt., the woman who braided her hair at Thanksgiving, the woman who sent her a first-day card, the woman who put her niece in front of me like a wrapped gift and told me the girl was willing.
She sees me. Her face changes.
Not fear. Not yet. Recognition. The recognition of a woman who has spent years working with men from my world and who can tell, by the set of my shoulders and the absence of my smile and the particular quality of silence I carry into her office, that the man standing in her doorway isn’t the charming twin. The charming twin is gone. What’s left is the other thing. The thing my brothers and I became in the years after our father was murdered. The thing that builds empires and dismantles people and doesn’t blink.
“Anton.” Her voice is professional. Her hands are not. They have moved from the keyboard to her lap. “It’s early. Can I help you with—”
“You told me she knew.”
The office goes still. Not silent, the building hums, the air conditioning drones, the harbour sends its distant wash through the windows, but still, the particular stillness of a room where someone has just understood that the conversation they’ve been dreading has arrived.
“You told me, in the corridor outside the conference room, that your niece was bright and eager and willing to make my experience comfortable. You told me she understood how things work at Keyes. You told me she was in on it.”
“Anton, I—”
“Did she know?”
