“I did most of the work.”
My face burns and I nearly drop the spoon.
Roman’s eyes warm with wicked amusement, and I hate how beautiful he looks with it. Not handsome in the clean, practiced way Lev is handsome. Roman’s face is stronger than that. Harder. A little rough around the edges, with silver at his temples and lines beside his mouth that make me think he has spent years not smiling when he should have.
I take a sip of water and pretend it helps.
I curl my feet beneath the blanket and lean back against the pillows. The bed is absurdly comfortable. Everything about this suite feels unreal, as if we have been placed inside a rich person’s dream of travel. Soft linen. Warm lamps. Silver cutlery. A window full of clouds. Roman is beside me, close enough that his knee almost touches mine.
Almost.
The space between us seems to know what happened in the washroom and refuses to behave.
Every time I move, I become aware of him. The sleeve of his shirt near my arm. The heat of his thigh beneath the blanket. His hand resting inches from mine. The fact that, if I turned my head, my mouth would be dangerously close to his shoulder.
“Do you still have family in Moscow?”
He pauses just long enough for me to notice. “Something like that.”
It’s not an answer. It’s not even close.
But I let it pass because I have my own secrets sitting between us, dressed up as omissions and careful wording.
“What about you?” he asks. “If this trip was meant for him and his family, why still go?”
I think about lying. Something light and easy. Tourism. Revenge. Stubbornness. All of those are true, but none of them are the center of it.
So, I give him another careful piece.
“Because I wanted to see it,” I say. “Before it belonged to the engagement. Before it became dinners and introductions and smiling at people who were deciding whether I was suitable, it was just a place I wanted to go.”
I choose my next words carefully.
“My life has always looked freer than it was,” I say. “I had beautiful clothes, a beautiful house, cars, parties, staff, everything a person is supposed to be grateful for. But there was always someone deciding where I could go, who I could meet, what was appropriate, what was safe, what was expected.”
He remains quiet.
“And I wanted to see snow,” I say.
Roman is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “You will.”
The certainty in his voice makes me turn my head on the pillow. “You sound very sure.”
“I am.”
“Do you control the weather too?”
“No.” His mouth curves slightly. “Only most other things.”
I should laugh, but the way he says it does not feel entirely like a joke.
Outside the window, the clouds glow faintly under the moon, soft and endless, like the world has been covered in white velvet. I press my cheek deeper into the pillow and look at them, trying to imagine Moscow beneath us. The cold. The streets. The churches with golden domes. The city I was supposed to enter on Lev’s arm.
“I don’t even know where I’ll go when we land,” I admit.
Roman looks at me.
The lamp beside the bed leaves shadows along the hard lines of his face. Without his jacket, with his collar open and his sleeves rolled back, he looks less like a stranger from first class and more like a man who has stepped out of some darker, older world.
