Page 52 of Captured By the Pakhan

He does not knock, because he is ten. He comes through the door with his hair standing up and stops dead, and I'm on top of the covers fully dressed, and she is under them and asleep with one hand still curled at my ribs, and I watch him take the entire picture in with total gravity.

"Why were you both awake at three?" he says. "I heard you talking."

"We were talking."

"About what?"

"About things that happened a long time ago."

He accepts this. He comes and sits on the end of the bed with the perfect confidence of a boy who has never been told to leave a room in his life, and he pulls his knees up, and there is a pause of about four seconds.

Then he says:

"Is Raven going to be my new mother?"

Beside me, the breathing changes.

She is awake. She has been awake since the door, and she is lying with her eyes closed and her hand at my ribs, and she does not move a muscle.

And my son sits at the end of the bed with his knees up, waiting, entirely unhurried, with the whole of the morning in front of him.

Nobody says anything at all.

Chapter 14

Raven

Los Angeles, 6:50 PM

Icount nine exits before I put my bag down.

That's the first thing I do in the house on the hill, standing in a room with two walls made of glass and the Pacific going orange out beyond them, and I hate it on sight for entirely professional reasons.

Front door. Kitchen service door. The garage, internal. Two sets of sliders onto the terrace. The pool house, which has its own gate onto a service path. A staff stair down the north side of the hill that ends at a road. The garden door off the utility room. And the window in the corridor at the back that isn't a window; it's a full-height pane that swings, and somebody put it in for the view without once thinking about what it is.

Nine. In a house where the last one had one door in and one out and a fence built by a man who has been shot four times.

"You are counting," Ilya says behind me.

"Nine."

"Eleven. You have missed the wine cellar hatch and the roof access off the second landing."

"That's a hatch⁠—"

"It's an opening in a building. You said nine." He goes past me with a bag in each hand, and there is something almost cheerful about him, which is unnerving. "Andrei has already given me the whole list twice. I bought this house in 2018 because I liked the way the light came into it, and it was, I'm told, the worst decision of my professional life."

"It's a beautiful house."

"It's an indefensibly beautiful house."

"So why are we in it?"

He stops at the foot of the stairs and looks back.

"Because the fortress was a building four people knew about," he says. "This is a bad building that nobody knows about at all. I will take the second one every time."

The first week is a lie, and I know it's a lie while I'm inside it and I stay in it anyway.