“And?”
She looked at the wine.
“This is going to sound strange.”
“Tell me anyway.”
She looked up.
“You,” she said quietly. “Lately. Which doesn’t–I know it doesn’t make logical sense. Given the circumstances of how I got here.” Her jaw tightened slightly, the familiar compression of someone saying a true thing that costs something. “But the way you–you face toward things. You don’t look away from what’s real. That makes me feel like the ground is solid even when I know it isn’t.”
The room was quiet.
I had run a Bratva operation for fifteen years on the principle that warmth was a resource to be managed carefully and attachment was a coordinate that told enemies where to aim. But now I was sitting at a small table with a bowl of Mariya’s borscht and a woman who had just told me I was the ground she stood on, and the principle was not holding up to the current conditions.
“Come here,” I said.
She came.
*************
The balcony off the small dining room overlooked the eastern grounds, the desert beyond the wall visible as a dark mass against the night sky, the storm’s clean air still present.
I had not planned this. The dinner had been planned, the intention had been clear to me from the library chair at dawn. What happened after, with the cool night air coming in through the open door and the dinner behind us and Elena’s hand in mine on the balcony rail–this had not been planned.
She turned toward me. I turned toward her. The desert dark was around us and the manor’s light was behind us and she looked at me with the expression that was not any of the managed ones–not the careful assessment or the controlled anger or the revising-estimate. The one underneath all of those.
I was not a man given to extended deliberation about things that were already decided.
I kissed her. She kissed me back with the same quality. Present. Chosen. Her hand at my jaw in the specific way she had, without thinking, touched my face more than once.
I lifted her and her legs wrapped around my waist swiftly. My fingers shifted her underwear to the side and I entered her, thepleasure moving all over my body even as she threw her head back, her hand covering her mouth to conceal her sound.
There were no words, just sighs and gasps. And moans that I stopped her from concealing.
I held her there as we she came and I followed.
************
Later, in the room, she said, “I want to see Sofia.”
I had been expecting it. Not tonight specifically, but the request–the shape of it, the need it represented. She had been in the manor for nearly two weeks, the world contracted to its walls and grounds. Sofia was the human thread connecting her to her prior life–the friend, the witness, the person who knew her in the before that I had rearranged.
“Tell me about her,” I said.
She turned her head toward me. A slight surprise–she had braced for the logistics, the conditions, the security considerations. Not the question.
“She’s been my best friend for three years,” she said. “She’s a cocktail waitress at your casino. She’s the main reason I wanted to transfer, aside from the pay. She’s sharp and protective and she says the true thing rather than the comfortable one. She knew something was wrong when I came back from—” She stopped.
From the hotel suite. From the night she hadn’t talked about.
“She sounds like someone who pays attention,” I said.
“She pays attention to me,” Elena said. “Which is different. She’s the only person who actually knows what my face looks like when I’m lying.”
“She’ll be able to tell you’re not fine.”
“Yes.” Elena looked at the ceiling. “I would like to be able to tell her I’m safe.”
