“He is still running them,” I say.
“The communication was indirect. Routed through two intermediaries. But the origin traces back to Volkov Capital the same way the Renko payments did.” Kostya closes his folder. “He’s not slowing down, Roman. He’s accelerating.”
I stand up.
Grigori Volkov sat in that council room and watched me decline his alliance and present my marriage as a closed matter, and he drove directly from that room into the next phase of whatever he has been building. He is not a man who absorbs a loss and recalibrates. He is a man who decides that the loss means the timeline needs to move faster.
“Increase Elena’s detail,” I say. “Quietly. She doesn’t need to know why yet.”
Kostya nods once. “How many?”
“Four on rotation. Two visible, two not.” I move toward the door. “And Kostya. I want the full Renko file ready to present at the next council session. Everything. I want Grigori to walk into that room not knowing what is waiting for him.”
“It will be ready,” he says.
She’s at the window when I come back out.
She has taken her coat off and draped it over the arm of the sofa, and she’s standing at the floor-length glass in her ivory dress with her arms loose at her sides and the city spread out sixty-two floors below her, and she’s very still in the way she is still when she’s thinking through something she hasn’t finished thinking through yet.
I stand in the doorway of the study, and I look at her.
She doesn’t know about Grigori. She doesn’t know about Marchetti or Renko or the four men on rotation in the lobby downstairs or the fact that marrying me has made her a variable in a calculation that dangerous men are currently running.
She knows this world professionally, has known it from the outside for two years, the schedule and the correspondence and the names on the documents, but the weight of the inside of it is something I have kept from her because tonight is tonight and there will be time for the rest of it.
Not tonight.
She turns her head slightly when she hears me cross the room, and she looks at me over her shoulder. She says nothing, and neither do I. I come to stand beside her at the window, and we both look out at the city together.
The lights go all the way to the horizon.
After a while, she says quietly, “It’s a good view.”
“Yes,” I say.
She looks back at the window.
I look at her reflection in the glass, the ivory dress, the loose strand of hair, and the plain gold ring on her left hand catching the light from the city below, and I think about a child who is going to grow up in this penthouse.
I put the thought where it belongs, and I let the room be quiet.
Tonight is tonight.
Everything else starts tomorrow.
21
ELENA
The ceilingin the guest suite is higher than the one in my bedroom in Queens.
I have spent a significant portion of my first night as Roman Petrov’s wife lying on my back looking at it. Not anxious exactly, just awake, the way you are awake in a space that doesn’t know you yet, where every small sound is unfamiliar and the quality of the dark is different, and your body can’t quite settle into rest because some part of it is still taking inventory.
The sheets are expensive. I noticed this at some point around two in the morning when I had run out of ceiling to look at and turned onto my side. The kind of expensive that doesn’t announce itself, just sits there, quietly superior to every other sheet you have ever slept on.
The pillow is the same. The mattress is the same. Everything in this room is the best version of itself, and none of it is mine, and I lay down in the middle of it and listened to the city sixty-two floors down and reminded myself that I chose this.
I did choose this.
