Page 12 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“I know him.”

Poppy’s mouth opens, closes. “That’s not a cough.”

“His name’s Danil.” I pick the glue back up because my hands need distraction. “He works for my fiancé.”

“Your what?”

“Amelia, that’s enough feathers. The turkey’s dead; let it rest.”

“Your WHAT?!”

“Inside voice, Poppy. We’re in a school.” I roll to the sink and run my knuckles under the tap. The gold refuses to leave, because the gold is forever, we’ve established this as settled law in this room. “I’ll tell you at lunch.”

“Lunch was an hour ago.”

“Then I’ll tell you never, and you’ll die curious, and honestly that’s a fitting end for you.”

She doesn’t move out of the tiny chair. She sits there with the confiscated feather in her fist, watching me dry my hands on a paper towel with more attention than the task has ever required in the history of paper towels, and for once in her entire loud life she doesn’t fill the silence.

“He’s the janitor,” she says finally. “Your fiancé’s guy is mopping our hallway.”

“Apparently.”

“Do you want him to be mopping our hallway?”

Amelia’s still going at the turkey. Louis is showing the gap in his teeth to anyone who’ll hold still. Twenty-six of them, none of them looking at me, all of them fine, all of them exactly as safe as they were yesterday and yesterday and every day for two years before a man told me whose blood I’ve been walking around in.

“No,” I admit.

The bell goes off over both our heads, and the room detonates into coats and backpacks and one shriek of pure administrative panic from Ana, who can never find the left mitten and never once has thought to check the sleeve she put it in. Poppy gets out of the tiny chair a joint at a time, and she takes her sweet time about it. She points the confiscated feather at my chest on her way past.

“This isn’t over.”

“It’s four hours from over. It’s not even in the parking lot.”

“Vasilisa.” She stops in my doorway with the hall filling up behind her. “You said fiancé. In a sentence. Out loud. To me. I’m going to my room, and I’m going to teach a lesson about weather, and I’m going to think about nothing else for forty minutes, and tomorrow I’m coming back with a coffee, and I’m going to sit in that stupid little chair until you talk.”

She leaves, taking the feather with her.

I don’t call Lev to yell at him inside the school, because there are children, and because the thing climbing my throat runs too hot to bring within fifty feet of a six-year-old. I hold it in through the PT hour I stretched an extra thirty minutes past the buzzer for the sole purpose of not going home.

I drive. That’s the whole plan, and it’s a bad one, and I execute it for four hours anyway. Brooklyn to the bridge and back, the long way, the stupid way, past my own building twice without stopping, and the black sedan holds four car lengths off my bumper the entire time. He doesn’t flash me, doesn’t pull up at a light and roll the window down. At some point around eleven I take a left I have no reason to take, purely to see if he’ll take it, and he takes it. He doesn’t even have the decency to make it look like a coincidence. I have never in my life wanted so badly to be honked at. I know exactly who’s following me and why.

By the time the elevator lets me off at one in the morning I have the whole speech racked and my finger resting warm on the trigger.

The penthouse is dark. He isn’t in it. Light spills out of the back corridor to the service elevator, the one that runs down into the guts of the club. It carries a sound with it I’ve never heard in this building, a wet dragging with a beat under it. Every hair on my arms goes up.

I should go to my room. Every wired-in survival instinct I own is aimed straight at my room, flashing.

Instead, I go toward the light.

I know it’s idiotic while my hands are already driving me at it, and I’m right, but I do it regardless, because I spent two brutal years dragging myself up out of being the woman who sits in the dark and waits to be told what’s being done to her, and some doors you open for no richer reason than to prove to yourself the arms still work.

The service corridor is bare concrete and surgical light, and the smell reaches me a second before the sight does, copper laid over something sourer than copper. Two men I’ve never met are hauling a third between them by the arms. His shoes drag and lay down a long wet shine on the concrete behind him, and his face is a thing I make my eyes swerve around, because I already know I’d keep it for the rest of my life. He’s breathing. He’s the source of the sound.

Behind them comes Lev, shed of the coat, down to his shirt. He rolls the left cuff to the elbow, then the right, up over the knife tattooed into his forearm, and there’s blood across his knuckles that didn’t come out of him. He isn’t hurrying any part of it. Here he is, the man whose name I’m signing next to. Not the one who knelt by my chair in the dark with a wrench. The one that one stays in the next room and feeds through the bars.

He sees me.