Mikhail looks like he swallowed something bad. “You what?”
“That doesn’t matter,” I say.
He taps Katerina’s name on the page. “You reacted the second you saw her at the council event. Then you left a lunch to go sit at her table. Who is she?”
I look at the file for a second before answering.
“She’s the girl from Moscow.”
That gets his full attention. “You mean the one from the flight?”
“Yes.”
His face changes just slightly. Not surprise exactly. More like a new piece dropping into place. “When did you figure out who she was?”
“Later.”
“After Moscow went bad?”
“Yes.”
He nods slowly. “That explains a few things.”
“Not enough of them.”
Mikhail lets that pass. “So by the time you found out,” he says, “what? It was already too late?”
“Oleg had already blown half the city apart,” I say. “Lev was dead. My father had gone to ground. I had bigger problems than chasing a woman who’d already disappeared.”
Mikhail studies me for a second. “Didn’t stop being a problem.”
“No,” I say. “It didn’t.”
He looks back down at the file. “Belov’s interest in her doesn’t look personal,” he says. “It looks arranged.”
“I know.”
“Which means Sergei wants something.”
“Yes.”
“And Belov may know what.”
That’s the part that matters.
By the third day after the lunch by the pier, I have become unbearable even to myself.
Katerina is everywhere.
In the apartment, where she has never actually been. In the car. In the scent of shampoo that isn’t hers but still manages to annoy me by trying. In every quiet moment my mind gets for itself and immediately wastes on the memory of her mouth, hertemper, her body opening under my hands like it remembers me too well.
I get into the shower because I need ten minutes of not thinking.
That lasts maybe twenty seconds.
Water runs hot over my shoulders, steam thick against the glass, and I close my eyes just long enough to picture her walking in. Not dressed for seduction. Worse. Barefoot. Curious. Angry already because she knows exactly what she does to me and resents it.
In my head she opens the shower door without asking.
