“Da,” I said.
I meant: for now.
“I’m giving you a one-off pass.” His fingers bit into my arm without quite becoming a grip that would bruise. A message, precisely calibrated.“You are associated with the Dragunovs now. You will act accordingly.”
“Da,” I said, and put every shade of sullenness I had into the single syllable.
One of his men had the car door open before we reached it. Vadim folded himself inside and moved without looking at me, making space the way you make space for luggage. I gathered the dress in armfuls and manoeuvred myself in after him, the fabric compressing around me in the confined space until I was wedged against the door with approximately half the skirt on my lap and the rest doing whatever it wanted.
He had his phone out before the door closed. Tapping. Reading. Entirely elsewhere.
I looked out of the window and let the city move past.
It didn’t take long. Chernograd thinned at the edges—the stone facades giving way to wider roads, higher walls, the quiet of land that had been purchased and cleared and made purposeful. I had heard about his home the way everyone in Chernograd had heard about it. An old mansion, bought and extended and reinforced until it had become something that occupied its own category between residence and fortress.
The gates appeared first. Iron, tall as the walls they were set into, and the walls were considerable. They opened inward as we approached, smoothly and without hesitation, and the car continued through.
Then I saw the house.
I had expected imposing. I had not expected this.
The entrance was a great white dome—not the grey stone of the city or the gold of the cathedral but white, pale and clean against the winter sky, tall enough to encompass several floors, supported by pillars that rose from a wide circular forecourt. The rest of the house extended on either side of it, long and symmetrical and elegantly proportioned, the windows tall and regular, the stonework immaculate. Snow had settled along every horizontal surface and across the grounds beyond, and the effect of it—the white of the building against the white of the snow against the flat white winter sky—was of something that had no edges. Something that went on.
I had been saving against a deposit on a flat.
A second car pulled in behind us. I recognised the driver—the man who had taken me from my parents’house this morning. Beside him, Radovan, who had carried my dress in the cathedral like a choirboy and who was now looking resolutely forward.
“They are yourbyki,” Vadim said.
I turned. He had lowered his phone and was watching me with the expression he seemed to reserve for things he was assessing rather than speaking to.
“Radovan and Spartak,” he continued.“Where you go, they go.”
I looked back at the house. At the dome. At the pillars.
Where you go, they go. Guards dressed as protection. A gilded cage dressed as a manor house.
Both cars stopped at the foot of the entrance steps. One of his men opened my door and offered a hand I didn’t need but took anyway, because the dress made independent exits impractical. Vadim was already out, already moving, phone back at his ear, speaking rapidly to someone in the clipped shorthand of a man for whom this moment had already been processed and filed.
“Show her to her room, Radovan,” he said without turning, and was gone through the doors before I had finished gathering my skirt.
I stood on the steps in my wedding dress in the cold and watched him disappear.
Radovan appeared at a respectful distance, patient and expressionless.
I exhaled slowly. A reprieve. A room to myself, a door I could presumably close, a few hours before whatever came next arrived to collect me.
I looked up at the dome above the entrance. At the pillars. At the white that went on in every direction with no visible boundary.
I wondered how long the reprieve would last.
??????
The house was not a house. It was a statement.
Everything had its place and everything knew it. The walls were pristine white, the floors dark mahogany polished to such a depth that the white of the walls lived in them too, reflected back in long clean lines that made the corridors feel endless. No clutter. No softness. Nothing that hadn’t been chosen deliberately and positioned with precision.
I paused at the threshold of the open-plan living room.
