The room tilts. Not the floor. Me. I swallow, and it catches. There is a taste in my mouth like old copper and mint tea gone cold. Heat flashes across my skin, then recedes as if the building inhaled me and changed its mind. I feel the thin drumbeat under my palm. I hear my grandmother's voice. I hearThe Book of Vowsas if it were thundering in my ear.I come to you with no secrets between us.It is ink in our book. It is a line I was raised to honor. Now, it is a cliff.
If he knew. If he has known. If his men read my body off a server while I was still deciding whether joy was safe to touch. If he said nothing and watched me practice vows with clean diction and an unsteady soul. If he decided protection includes reading me like a ledger and assumed I would thank him later.
Or this is a play. Sergei loves thread pulled through a family seam. He feeds ten truths and one poison and tells you to choose fast. The Baltic courier's vowels, the latex glove, the neat handoff, and the white wolf in the corner like a maker's mark all smell of Sergei's new church—only leverage and no vows. No saints, only shareholders, akryshabuilt from glass towers and foreign wires that never bend a knee. He wants the council to call our altar rust.
What if he wants Dmitri's devotion to vows to read as a weakness he can price and buy? Did Dmitri set a tail to keep me breathing or to keep me owned? Did the house steward open a door for God or for a fund with a foreign spine? Did Aleksandr carry Sergei's message because he is a fool orbecause he is a partner? If the wolf is real, why show me the trail now? If the trail is false, what part of me does Sergei want to move first, my fear or my faith?
The access log could be dressed to look like home. Or it could be home. I know enough to doubt everything and not enough to calm anything.
I close the lid. The bell rings. Someone leaves with a sugared pastry. The smell lifts and turns my stomach. I stand too fast, and the room goes gray at the edges. The glass spills water on the table. A hand moves near me. The barista. She slides the water closer so the ice touches my knuckles and eases a second chair in with her knee as if inviting the room to sit down for me. "Breathe," she says softly, fishing a clean napkin from her apron, laying it beside my hand, the way to lay a small mercy. I nod, swallow, and let the cold find my mouth.
"Thank you." I hold the tote close like a child with a bad secret and cut back into the street.
My legs know the city when my mind doesn't. I pass a store that sells wedding crowns in the window as Christmas ornaments. I laugh once, sharp and wrong. I pass a pawn shop where a ring sits under glass with a tag that saysEstate. I pass a parish where a woman kneels with her forehead on wood, and for a second I envy her the clarity of a posture that knows what it means. The crucifix at my throat is hot against my skin.
The estate rises with its familiar brick and its gargoyles dusted with powder, as if the city put flour on old mouths to keep them from speaking. I push through the gate. I don't smooth my face at the door. I want him to see the truth. Themarble catches my steps and sends them back up the stairs like an announcement.
He is there. The foyer frames him like a portrait, suit black as the space between stars, coat open, holster hidden but present, cross under his shirt a cold geometry I know by touch. Men place themselves at the edges the way his presence teaches them to.
His eyes find me. They go to my hands, to my throat, to my face, cataloging harm, logging air. My eyes touch the black knit at his throat, a narrow lick of ink climbs toward his collarbone, the first stroke of the bleeding cross I have traced with my mouth.
His eyes travel to the tote. His gaze holds no elation and no shock, only winter kept still by discipline, a reading that measures distance and decides who belongs inside it. Bell dust flecks my sleeve, cold rides my hair, and he reads trouble without the map.When he shifts, a cuff lifts, and a thin bar of ink flashes at the wrist, a fragment of words not yet earned, then disappears.
"Where were you?" he says. Not raised. Not gentle.
Something in me snaps like thread cut too close to the knot. Nausea hovers like a threat and a promise. I don't choose diplomacy. I choose the only truth he left me room for.
"Don't do that," I say, and the marble drinks my voice and sends it back stronger. "Don't stand there like a judge in your own church and ask me for alibis."
His mouth tightens. "Where?" he repeats.
I lift the tote and slam it against my hip because I will not slap him with it like a child. I unzip, pull the drive, hold it upbetween two fingers as if it were a small bomb I'm tired of carrying. The guards slip into shadows with a flick of his finger.
"How long?" I ask. Each word lands clean. "How long have your men been following me? How long have you known I'm pregnant?"
23
DMITRI
She holds the drive up like a relic and asks how long I have watched her and how long I have known about the child. The foyer takes the words and lays them between us like the ocean.
I don't let my face move. "Give it to me," I say.
She doesn't blink. "Answer me."
"Give it to me," I repeat and open my palm.
A beat, then the plastic touches my skin. Cold. Light. Filthy with intent. I nod to the two men by the arch. "The study," I say. I take her to the study off the library, the sound-sealed sit-down with a thick door and carpet that swallows footsteps. The radiator's white-noise tap runs steady. To the guards I say, "No one enters this room until I call."
They vanish. Marble and lamp glass hold a long stillness. I could offer an explanation first. I don't. I set the drive to the console table and let the grain keep the mark.
"Where did you get it?" I ask.
"Do you care?" she says. The red scarf at her throat is a wound and a banner at once. "Weeks of photos. A transcript of men reporting my steps as if I'm a street to be plowed. My clinic results. Pulled from a system with our house on the access log. Your house."
I keep my tone level. "Our house."
"And your surveillance," she says.
