“Thank you,” I told her when I was done. “Is there anything I could help you with?”
God knows a little manual activity would do me a lot of good.
“Oh, no, no,” she answered, shaking her head like she did the last time I asked the same question.
“He’s not going to know. Nobody will.” I gestured to the two young ladies who were kneading a large amount of flour at the far end of the kitchen. “They won’t tell anyone.”
“I know, my dear,” she agreed. “But the guards enter anytime. Even the Pakhan can find out himself if he walks past.”
I sighed in resignation. I couldn’t put her or the other kitchen staff in trouble.
*************
The phone was in the lining of the toiletry bag, in the interior zip pocket behind the travel bottles of shampoo.
I turned it on and there was a message waiting for me.
“You’ve been quiet. We need to talk.”
Below it was a number to call. Different from the last one, which was always different from the one before, the rotation systematic, designed to stay ahead of the kind of monitoring that a man like Mikhail might run on communications touching his household.
My reflection was in the bathroom mirror.
The face that looked back was the face of a woman who had been making a specific kind of terrible mistake and had understood for the last twenty-four hours exactly what that mistake had cost.
I turned the tap higher and made the call.
“There she is,” he said when he picked up, tone cold.
“I’m here,” I said.
“You’ve been quiet,” he said. “You weren’t meant to stop there. You know that.”
“I understand.”
“I need you to understand more specifically than that, Elena.” The cold that started at the base of my spine and moved upward. “You are in the best possible position. Inside the house. Inside the marriage. Closer than any of our people have gotten in three years of trying.”
“I’ll be in touch,” I said.
“Don’t make us find other ways to remind you what the alternative looks like.”
I ended the call.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub for a long time with the phone in my hands and the tap still running.
The timeline of it assembled itself the way it always did when I was too exhausted to stop it—when the defenses I maintained against the full weight of what I had been doing were insufficient, when the thing I had been keeping at managed distance arrived at close range and I had to simply receive it.
Three days after the hotel suite. Three days after I had woken up in sheets that smelled like expensive cologne and found nothingon the pillow beside me and an envelope on the counter that I hadn’t touched and hadn’t been able to throw away.
The loan sharks had been waiting at my apartment building.
Not Petrov’s men—or not only them. Someone else was with them, someone I hadn’t seen before, who had communicated what was required with the specific efficiency of someone who had done this many times and found the direct approach the most time-effective.
“You’ve made a new friend. That doesn’t erase what you owe us. It creates an opportunity,” he’d said before explaining the proposal they came with.
I had said no, telling myself that continuing to pay the debt wouldn’t be that bad. Except that that wasn’t the only thing they held over me.
It was my safety. My life, in fact.
