“I need to think,” she says.
“Take the time you need.”
She crosses the office. Her hand finds the door. She pauses with her back to me.
“Zane.” Her voice has dropped to the register she uses when she means what she’s about to say completely. “Don’t do anything with this yet.”
I look at her back. The line of her shoulders. The hair down past them.
“Okay,” I say.
She leaves.
I sit at my desk for a long time after she closes the door.
The city finishes deciding about the morning outside the window. The light comes through, and the room shifts from gray to something cleaner. I don’t move. I sit with the information theway she sat with it. I know she sat with it; I can see it in the way she walked in here.
I think about the succession clause. The council. The internal inheritance structure that the contract was built to satisfy, the one Alexei has been pressing on for months. I think about Gregor, the leaked information, and the Marchetti faction running inquiries into Celine’s background. I think about the shape of what is moving toward her and the speed at which it is moving.
An heir changes every calculation on the board.
It changes the weight she carries inside this organization. Half the council that has been watching her with polite skepticism will recalibrate the moment they know.
She will stop being a woman that Zane Volkov chose without precedent in the organization and become the mother of the next succession line. The protection that comes with that is not ceremonial.
It is structural. It’s the difference between being a variable someone can threaten and being a constant no one can touch without touching everything.
I told her I wouldn’t do anything with this yet.
I think about what not doing anything costs her while the Marchetti faction is already moving. While Gregor is already talking to people he should not be talking to. While the information he passed is already being assembled into something by people who understand exactly how to use it.
I pick up the phone.
Roman answers before the second ring.
“Get me Alexei, Viktor, Dominic, Fedorov,” I say. “Today. My office. Two o’clock.”
A pause. “All four.”
“All four.”
Roman doesn’t ask why. That’s what Roman is for.
They arrive within an hour of each other.
Alexei first, Viktor and Dominic together, Fedorov last. I have not told them the reason for the meeting.
I let them sit. I close the door.
“Celine is pregnant,” I say.
The room holds it.
Alexei is the first to move. He straightens in his chair. Something settles in his face, a calculation running and arriving somewhere that satisfies him. Viktor looks at Dominic. Dominic is already looking at me.
“The succession line,” Dominic says.
“Yes.”
