"What does it say?" I ask, and then I realize what I have done and heat rushes into my face. "You don't have to tell me. It is not my business. You don't know me. I could be very untrustworthy."
He looks at the book box with its tidy label and the ink on the floor where Anna left a smudge and the bookmark sticking out of my fairy tale volume. He looks at my boots and the one salt stain I forgot to clean. He looks at the small smear of pizza sauce near my wrist that I had not noticed. The corner of his mouth turns the minute amount that counts as a smile in a man who doesn't offer them cheaply.
"It saysBy Honor and Pain," he says. "My choice. No one else's."
The elevator opens on the ground floor. He steps out, and I follow with my books, which are now heavier than they were because the air has changed weight. The corridor smells like wax and old wood and the smoke of candles that have been out for hours. Two of the house guards stand by the staircase pretending they are not listening. Dmitri moves with the unremarkable grace of someone who has had to build a body he can trust. His coat falls back, and there is the outline of a holster that would make any reasonable woman run. I don't. I angle the box on the console table to check the labels before I send them with the driver. I don't mean to glance again at his hands. I do.
"Thank you for returning Anna to me," I say, because I'm strange and I cover it with formality. "She is good company on nights like these."
"Your father will not like the pizza," he says almost gently. "He will pretend it is the most offensive thing you have done this week."
I make a small face. "It is not."
He doesn't ask for the list. It is for the best. I clear my throat. "It was nice to meet you."
"You too," he says, and he doesn't move until I turn back to the elevator and press the button with my elbow. When the doors close, I watch him for a second longer than is appropriate because I'm an idiot who has read more novels than is healthy.
Inside my suite again, I set the books back near the door and fold my hands against my mouth the way a small child does when she knows she has misbehaved. My heart is doing its own carol and my cheeks are warm and my brain is trying to write a poem about the angle of his wrists that I will never admit to anyone. He is older, he is ruthless, he is the definition of not safe. He is also not my problem. I belong to fairy tales and schoolwork and small acts of rebellion that smell like cinnamon and laundry soap. I don't belong to any of this. The part of me that is my grandmother's voice whispers that vows are holy things. The part of me that is my father's daughter catalogs the way Dmitri stood between me and the guards without thinking about it. I refuse to let either part rule the night.
I open the ledger to the next page and cross-check the wish lists for the Nelson family and for Mrs. S, who doesn't want her name in any book because she is hiding from a man who married her and forgot the meaning of the word. I text Reza a photo of the boxes and the little smile I make in the corner of my mouth when something is finished. He replies with a string of celebratory mugs. I look at the time and sigh. If I run down the back stair and avoid the hallway camera that has a dead spot near the Cullinan landscape, I can get the pantry box into the service corridor without any of the older men who think I'm a relic noticing. There is something satisfying about the choreography of mischief.
The snow deepens its quiet. Somewhere downstairs, a radio murmurs in Russian about a soccer match from last week and the clink of glass sounds like an argument being shaken. I put on a different sweater because the old one smells like pizza, and I'm not giving my father the pleasure of that joke. I slide my phone into my pocket, slip mygrandmother's tiny crucifix on a chain under my hoodie where it can rest against my skin, and carry the pantry box back to the elevator. The doors open and the car is empty. My reflection looks like a woman who knows better. I decide to forgive her.
The service corridor is narrow and practical. It smells like starch and black tea and the secrets of linen closets. I set the box by the door we use for deliveries and tape the little note on top that saysFor Reza. The ink smudges because the cold sneaks under the weather strip, and I dust it dry with my sleeve and wonder if anyone else in this house knows what it feels like to put your name on something that is not yours and be proud anyway.
On the way back, my phone buzzes. I look without thinking and see a name that makes the back of my neck ice. I don't open the message. I delete it. I'm annoyed to discover that a man can still upset me with a digital vibration two years after he took himself to New York and sealed himself behind a glass wall of his own ambition after promising me he would be different from the rest. I'm a scientist of my own heart. I refuse to let a subject contaminate the study surface. I return to my room and slam the bathroom cabinet a little too hard because this is the kind of emotional maturity I'm working with tonight.
When I open the door to the sitting room again, my father is standing beneath the arch like a statue that has learned disappointment as a first language.
He doesn't knock. He never does. He fills the doorway with winter, a broad man in a black coat cut to hide a body that still remembers youth even if the lungs have begun to forget. His hair has gone silver in a way that makes strangers trusthim. He smells faintly of myrrh and tobacco and the whisper of cold air from the chapel downstairs. He looks at me, at my boots, at the fairy tale on the coffee table, at the pizza box with a face like he has had to sit through every bad opera in Moscow.
"Valentina," he says, and the name is an entire history. He sees the charity boxes near the door and his mouth tightens as if cardboard can insult him. He sees the pizza, and his eyes move very slightly toward heaven as if to ask for strength.
"Hi, Papa," I say, because I'm still his girl even when I want to throttle every patriarch in a five-mile radius. "Do you want a slice? It is mushroom. It is basically salad."
He says nothing. He crosses the room with deliberate grace and picks up the pizza box like it might explode. He opens it, regards the humble survivors of my dinner like they are a chemical experiment gone wrong, and closes the lid. He sets it down like one sets down a small animal that has died.
"Our kitchens are staffed by people who can cook," he says in the voice that would make a lesser person fold their lungs into origami. "You choose to offend them."
"I choose to save them the trouble," I say. "I'm adapting to modern times. Convenience food is a sign of a historical era. Think of me as an anthropological study."
"This," he says, and gestures in a circle that includes my hoodie and the fairy tales and the boxes that hold other people's Christmas, "is not an era. It is a performance."
"It is also a pantry drive," I say. "Please don't confuse pizzawith beans. The one is for my stomach. The other is for people who need actual food."
"You slip away," he says, ignoring my distinction with the skill of a politician. "You evade protection. You invite eyes we don't want. There are men in this city with nothing to do but look for a weakness in my house, and you walk around offering them choreographed opportunities."
I sit on the arm of the couch because he hates it when I do and because I need a little height. "I walk to a church basement and sort donated coats by size," I say. "If this brings down the Kirov empire, perhaps the empire is not as stable as you think."
He lifts his gaze to the icon and then back to me. "You make jokes in order to avoid the seriousness of the world."
"I make jokes in order to survive the seriousness of this family," I say, and then I regret the steel in it because he and I have a rule about verbal knives. He doesn't flinch. He sets his hands behind his back in the stance that says he is either about to bless me or sentence me to a very polite prison.
"Your driver reports that you left his car on Tremont Street last week and vanished for ten minutes."
"He is a liar. It was eleven."
"Do you think you are clever?" he asks, and his eyes are not angry and not sad, which frightens me more than either. "Do you think you are the first Kirov to pretend the world will wait while she has a good time?"
