She’s breathing hard beneath me, her arms still around my shoulders, my weight half on her, half on my forearms. The room is quiet except for the sound of us trying to recover.
I lift my head just enough to look at her.
Her eyes are open now. Soft. A little stunned.
I kiss her once, slower this time, and she answers me with the kind of sweetness that makes me want to drag the whole morning back into bed and keep the world outside until it gives up.
By the time we make it to the kitchen, the light outside has turned from gray to pale silver.
It’s still early. Too early for the city to be fully awake, but not early enough to pretend the world can be kept out much longer. Katerina has showered. So have I. She’s wearing the same clothes she arrived in, though they sit differently on her now, softened by sleep and sex and the fact that she’s been in my bed. I shouldn’t notice that. I do anyway.
Mikhail has had breakfast brought in without comment. Coffee, eggs, dark bread, fruit, smoked salmon, and some pastry I know Katerina will pretend not to want before eating half of it while distracted.
She sits across from me at the small table by the window, wraps both hands around her coffee, and stares into it for a second before drinking.
“You don’t sleep much, do you?” she asks.
“No.”
“That wasn’t really a question.”
“I know.”
She gives me a look over the rim of the cup.
There’s still softness in her face from the morning, but it’s fading now. The mother is back. The daughter too. The woman who has to go home and put her mask on properly before anyone notices how far she let herself slip.
She glances toward the clock on the oven. “I need to get back soon.”
“Why?”
She blinks. “Because I don’t live here.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Her mouth tightens. “Because if I’m gone too long, my father starts asking questions.”
For a minute we just eat. She picks at toast. I drink coffee. It should feel ordinary, but nothing with her does.
Finally she says, “I keep thinking about Moscow.”
I look at her.
“My father spent years acting like the Morozov alliance was the smartest thing he ever did,” she says. “Like it made us stronger. Safer. More respectable, somehow.”
I almost smile at that last part. “Respectable?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
She tears a piece of bread and doesn’t eat it. “I was too young to understand most of it at first. I just knew your family mattered. Then Lev came into the picture and suddenly it was all about timing and dinners and whether I said the right thing at the right table.”
“You were part of the deal.”
“Yes.” She says it plainly. “I know that now.”
I lean back in the chair. “Sergei wanted the tie. My father did too.”
