I keep walking anyway, because that's what you do when you've just felt the floor shift under you in a room full of armed men who'd notice if you stopped to process it. I nod at Yevgeny Sidorov's idiot cousin, accept a glass of something dark from a passing tray, say something to Akyl that makes him roll his eyes, and the whole time my brain is still back at that table, watching a redhead confess to faking reading an entire book series just to spend some time with her brother.
I've sat through three years of these dinners. I've heard every flavor of rehearsed charm a woman can dress herself in, every careful answer designed to make her sound exactly soft enough and exactly accomplished enough to be worth a Mostovoi's signature on a contract. I could recite the script in my sleep.
She didn't give me the script. She gave me the truth, almost by accident, like it slipped out before she remembered she wasn't supposed to hand it over for free.
I want more of it. Immediately. Embarrassingly.
I find her again twenty minutes later, near the doors that lead out to the terrace. She’s half hidden behind a curtain the way she was half hidden behind that column earlier, like hiding in plainsight is just something she does without noticing. The terrace itself is empty, cold air drifting in off the water.
"Going somewhere?" I ask.
She startles, hand flying to her chest. "You move like a cat."
"I move like a man who's spent his whole life sneaking up on people for a living." I lean against the doorframe, giving her room, because something about her tells me she'll bolt if I crowd her, and the last thing I want tonight is to be the reason she bolts. "You looked like you needed air."
"I needed about ten minutes where nobody could see my face." She wraps her arms around herself, and I notice, for the first time, that she's cold, that the sleeves on that vintage dress aren't doing much against the winter night. I shrug out of my jacket without really deciding to and hold it out.
She stares at it like it's a trick question.
"It's just a jacket," I say. "I promise there's nothing hidden in the lining."
That gets a small, surprised laugh out of her, and she takes it, pulling it around her shoulders. It swallows her whole, sleeves hanging past her wrists, and something low in my chest goes warm and stupid at the sight of her drowning in something that belongs to me.
"Thank you," she says.
"Don't thank me yet. I'm going to use this as an excuse to stand near you for the rest of the night so I can get it back eventually."
"Is that how this works?" she asks, raising one eyebrow so slightly it’s barely noticeable.
"I'm making it up as I go,” I confess. “So far it's working."
She actually smiles at that, real and unguarded, and for a second neither of us says anything, we just stand there with thecold air and the candlelight and several strangers' worth of noise muffled behind glass doors.
"Can I ask you something," I say, "and you can tell me to go to hell if it's none of my business."
"That's an ominous way to start a question."
"I'm an ominous man. Ask anyone." I study her face, the way it's still doing that thing it was doing across the table, every feeling sitting right there on the surface, completely unprotected. "What happened to you tonight? Before dinner. You disappeared down that hallway like the building was on fire."
She goes quiet for a second, long enough that I think she's going to deflect, go back to the easy banter we'd built like a fence between us and the rest of the evening. Then something in her shoulders drops, the same way it dropped earlier when she walked back into that room with her chin up.
"I didn't know," she says. "What this was. I thought I was coming to a charity dinner. My brother told me it was a charity dinner. I found out what it actually was when a woman handed me a folder with my photograph and…details in it at the front door."
The warmth in my chest curdles into something colder and considerably more dangerous.
"Your brother sent you here," I say slowly, "without telling you whatherewas."
"He's never been good at telling me things. Not for a while now." She pulls the jacket tighter around herself, not from the cold this time, I don't think. "I keep trying to find a version of tonight where that makes sense. Where there's some explanation that doesn't end with him knowing exactly what he was doing and deciding it was worth it anyway."
I have killed men for less.
"That's not a small thing to do to someone," I say, careful to keep my voice level, because the last thing she needs right now is my temper doing the talking. "Sending you in blind. Letting you find out from a stranger at a door."
"No," she agrees, her voice quiet. "It isn't."
"For what it's worth, and I realize this is coming from someone you met for the first time tonight, you didn't deserve that."
She looks up at me, and there's something in her face, surprise mixed with something rawer underneath it, like she expected me to laugh this off or use it to my advantage and instead I just handed her something close to anger on her behalf, no strings attached.
