Papa looks at me. “Yes. That’s why I’m saying it plainly.”
I step toward him. “You don’t get to decide this.”
That almost amuses him. “I don’t?”
For one horrible second, I can hear my own pulse.
Papa knows nothing definite. I know that immediately. He’s testing. Prodding. Reading.
Still, it’s enough to make the room unbearable.
I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Stay out of my life.”
Papa’s mouth hardens. “Then stop behaving as if your life has nothing to do with this family.”
There is no point staying after that. Not one.
I turn and walk out before anyone can stop me, before Vika can start asking questions with that bright, sharp voice of hers, before Irina can sneer, before Papa can calmly rearrange my future into something he thinks looks cleaner than the mess I made of it.
Behind me, I hear Vika say, “This is insane.”
And Papa answer, “No. This is better.”
I keep walking. Up the stairs. Past the portraits. Past the nursery door. Past the part of me that wants to sit on the floor and shake.
By the time I reach my bedroom, I’m breathing hard. Not from the stairs. From the simple, terrible fact that my father has looked at Roman Sokolov and seen possibility.
And Roman, if he wanted to, could destroy every one of us.
21
ROMAN
I wakebefore dawn with Lev’s face in my head.
Not the real one. Not exactly. Dreams never get faces right. They pull pieces from memory and rot them a little. In the dream he’s standing in the dark at the end of a long corridor, wearing the same coat I saw him in outside that hotel years ago, only now there’s blood down the front of it and he keeps saying something I can’t quite hear.
When I get close enough to understand him, he smiles.
Then I wake up.
My room is dark, cold, and silent except for my own breathing.
For a few seconds I lie there staring at the ceiling, annoyed more than shaken. I don’t waste time asking what dreams mean. Usually, they mean your brain is tired and your body remembers something it would rather not.
Still, Lev’s mouth in the dark stays with me longer than I like.
By seven, I’m dressed and in the office with coffee that tastes burnt because Elena isn’t here yet to replace whoever thoughtthis pot was acceptable. Mikhail is already waiting with two folders open on the table, one on the terminal hit and one on the guest list from the council night.
He knows better than to comment on the hour.
He also knows better than to ask whether I slept.
“Yegor’s still moving,” he says. “We missed him in Queens by forty minutes.”
“That means somebody warned him.”
“Yes.”
