He still doesn’t know.
I straighten my skirt. Find my jacket on the back of the chair where it landed. Put it on.
Roman is leaning against the edge of his desk, watching me with his shirt untucked and his arms folded and an expression Icannot read, which is not unusual for him and is somehow worse right now than it has ever been before.
“This can’t happen again,” I say.
He says nothing.
“I mean it.” I pick up my bag. “This was a mistake, and it cannot happen again.”
He looks at me for a long moment. His eyes are very dark.
“Goodnight, Elena,” he says.
It is not an agreement, nor a disagreement.
9
ROMAN
My shower runscold for the last thirty seconds, the way it has for the last thirty seconds every morning for twenty years.
It is not a complicated philosophy. You start the day by doing one hard thing before the day has asked anything of you yet, and everything after that is easier by comparison.
I towel off and dress in the quiet of the bedroom, the city still gray outside the floor-length windows, the penthouse doing what it always does at this hour, which is nothing.
My phone is on the nightstand.
It lights up while I’m buttoning my shirt.
I pick it up and look at the screen. Mila Volkov’s name sits above a string of images that load one after another before I have decided whether I want them, followed by a single message:
This is what you’re missing out on.
She is not subtle. She has never been subtle, which Grigori probably considers an asset and which I consider a flag of a different color entirely. The photos are the kind that make a manput down whatever he is holding and pick up his phone with both hands instead.
She has sent two photos. They’re provocative but not fully nude. In the first one, she stands in front of a bathroom mirror wearing a tiny black lace bra and a matching thong that barely covers anything. The bra is pushed down just enough to show the curve of her small, firm breasts and hard nipples.
Her slim, toned body is angled to highlight her long legs and narrow waist, dark hair loose over one shoulder.
The second photo is closer. She has pulled the thong to the side with two fingers, exposing her smooth, shaved pussy. Her slim stomach is tight, and she’s biting her lower lip while looking straight at the camera.
I look at them for a moment.
Then I put the phone face down on the nightstand and go back to buttoning my shirt.
This is the thing nobody in that council room seems to understand when they talk about the Volkov alliance with certainty.
Mila Volkov sending photographs at six forty in the morning is not a woman. It is a transaction. It is Grigori’s opening position dressed in expensive lingerie, and every response I give to it is a negotiation, whether I intend it to be or not. Call her back, and I am signaling appetite. Ignore her, and I am signaling resistance.
There is no version of this where I am just a man looking at his phone.
I pick the phone back up, turn it over, delete the message without responding, and put it in my jacket pocket.
Six weeks until the council session.
Elena is at the curb at seven fifty, which is four minutes earlier than I told Viktor to be there, which means she has been standing outside her building in the November cold for four minutes rather than risk being thirty seconds late.
