"This isn't a discussion, Alexei. Assemble the team. Plan the operation. We extract those women, and we do it cleanly. Understood?"
Another pause. Then: "Understood."
I end the call and stand in the darkness, the weight of the decision settling over me. It's not strategic. It's not rational.It's the opposite of everything I've built my life around—cold calculation, careful planning, never acting on emotion.
But Bianca asked.
And apparently that's enough now.
***
Mrs. Novak finds me an hour later, still staring at security reports I haven't read.
"Miss Bianca has requested to take dinner in the dining room tonight," she says from the doorway. "Rather than her room."
I look up. "Has she."
"Yes. She asked if you would be joining her."
The words hang in the air between us. Mrs. Novak's expression is carefully neutral, but I've known her for twenty years. I can see the curiosity she's trying to hide.
I should say no. Should maintain distance, keep things professional, remember that she's here because she has no other options, not because she wants to be. Eating dinner together in the candlelit dining room is not maintaining distance.
"Tell her I'll be there in twenty minutes," I say.
Mrs. Novak nods, and if she's surprised, she doesn't show it. "I'll have the table set for two."
She withdraws, and I'm left alone with the realization that I've just agreed to something I'm almost certainly going to regret.
***
The dining room is oppressive in its grandeur.
A long mahogany table that could seat twenty, lit by candelabras that cast dancing shadows on the dark walls. Oil paintings of Kashkin ancestors stare down with disapproving eyes. The ceiling is vaulted, lost in shadow, like a cathedral designed by someone with a taste for the macabre.
Bianca is already seated when I arrive, a glass of wine in her hand. She's changed from her work clothes into something simpler—a soft green sweater that brings out the gold flecks in her eyes, her hair loose around her shoulders. The candlelight catches the planes of her face, softening her edges.
She looks beautiful. She looks like she belongs in a different world entirely.
"This room is terrifying," she says by way of greeting.
"The shipping magnate who built this house had a flair for the dramatic." I take the seat across from her—close enough to talk, far enough to maintain the illusion of propriety. "He wanted his guests to feel small."
"It's working."
Mrs. Novak appears with the first course—soup, something with butternut squash—and disappears again with practiced invisibility. The silence that follows is awkward, weighted with everything we're not saying.
I take a sip of wine. So does she. Our eyes meet over the rims of our glasses.
"Tell me about this house," she says finally. "Its history. I've been living in it for days and I don't know anything about it."
"What do you want to know?"
"Anything." She sets down her glass. "I'm tired of silence and my own thoughts."
So I tell her.
I tell her about the shipping magnate—a man named Cornelius Blackwood, who made his fortune in the China trade and spent it building a monument to his own ego. I tell her about the scandals that followed him, the rumors of smuggling and worse, the mysterious circumstances of his death in the tower room that no one uses anymore.
