Fox handed Harper a key and squeezed her shoulder. Something passed between them in the quick way of people who’d known each other long enough to need very few words.
“Authorities tomorrow,” Fox said quietly. “After everyone’s slept. Statements before flights. I’ve made arrangements.”
Harper’s head dipped as if she understood the words. But she was somewhere very far away from them.
His room wason the sixth floor, and it was the size of a reasonable apartment. Expensive soundproofing swallowedwind and traffic and left nothing behind at all. He paused just inside the door after it closed, mapping the room on instinct. Exits. Blind angles. Distance to cover.
Threat level: none.
The bed was vast and white, and turned down at one corner. A single foil-wrapped chocolate on the pillow. Pav looked at it for longer than it deserved. Then he sat on the edge of the bed with his forearms on his knees and stared at nothing long enough for the room to lose depth around the edges.
He stood up again before stillness turned into thought. He took his watch off in the bathroom and set it on the marble shelf beside the sink, where it sat looking very much like what it was: a Soviet-era field watch with a scratched crystal and a worn strap.
Pav turned the shower on. He stood under it with the water as hot as it would go and watched steam fill the room until his skin turned red.
He scrubbed off the compound more than once until the water ran clear and stayed there longer than necessary because he couldn’t remember the last time there had been no reason not to. The shower at his cabin was a pipe run from a rainwater tank. Cold eight months of the year and the other four months merely unpleasant. This was different. This was water pressure and marble tiles and a shelf full of small glass bottles of things that smelled expensive.
He used them anyway.
Out. Towel. He wiped steam from the mirror.
The man in the mirror looked like someone he used to be. Scars he knew by their histories, but the split at the corner of his mouth was new. Bruising along his ribs. His jaw had been locked for so long that it ached now even though the danger had passed.
The dressing on his chest needed changing. His shoulder needed ice. His feet needed proper cleaning before infection found another way into him. He took two painkillers instead andcalled it triage. Then picked up his watch and fastened it around his wrist.
Fox had arranged clothes. Dark trousers, a navy shirt, both of them the right size. Pav dressed. This man in borrowed clothes wasn’t the one who’d lived alone in the taiga. He didn’t know yet who he was instead.
A knock came from the door. When he opened it, his brain stalled immediately.
Harper.
She wore close-fitting charcoal pants and a cashmere sweater in a gray precisely calibrated to her eyes. Her hair was loose, falling past her shoulders in soft chestnut waves. She gave him a tentative smile. “Hi.”
He took a breath. “Hi, you.”
But beneath all of it, she looked carefully assembled. As if exhaustion had been buttoned neatly beneath the cashmere. “Can I come in?”
“What? Yes. Of course.”
The room changed when she stepped into it. That was the only way to describe it.
Shewas the variable.
She moved to the large picture window. Ekaterinburg spread below them, gold and shimmering and indifferent. She gazed out at it, her arms loosely crossed.
Pav waited six feet away and committed the image to memory. She wore the luxury easily. As if she’d always belonged in rooms like this.
Pav understood survival. Endurance. Violence. This felt dangerously close to grace.
She turned to face him and smiled. “I took the liberty of ordering room service. I hope that’s okay?”
He stared at her for a second too long. “You ordered room service?”
She took hold of his hands. “I thought it would be nice to eat together. Just you and me.”
He nodded. “I’d like that. Very much.”
Room service arrivedon a silver trolley that looked absurd after the last week. Linen napkins. Covered dishes. A bottle of wine sweating gently in a bucket of ice. The food smelled like something people ate by choice rather than necessity, which felt surreal.
