"She gets a year." He looks up. "A gap year. She's been asking for one — she wants to travel, she had plans. She doesn't know about any of this and she isn't going to know until—" His voice frays at the edge, just slightly, in the way of men who love something they've already sold. "Give her that. One year."
A year.
A year of surveillance packets arriving on my desk — Florence, Santorini, wherever she wanders, believing herself free. A year of photographs I have no tactical reason to keep. A year of reports filed under her name while she exists in the negative space between what she knows and what's already been decided.
"Agreed," I say.
Dante closes his eyes. Opens them.
My father reaches across the table.
They shake hands.
What happens next happens quickly.
Dante does not stand to leave. He sits for three seconds after the handshake — three seconds of stillness that I read correctly and don't act on, because the calculus is already complete, because I've had six months to run the variables of this meeting and I know what the Conti heir is here to close. Not just a deal.
He raises the gun from his jacket.
The shot is clean. My father doesn't speak.
Aleksander Romanov dies the way he lived: without excess, in a room he built from forty years of patience and survived adversaries. He dies in seconds. The chair rolls back slightly. The room is very quiet.
Dante sets the gun on the table. His hands are steady.
"The deal stands," he says. "Sofia comes to St. Gabriel. The board seat transfers. Emilia comes home tonight." A pause. "The account of what happened here is what you choose it to be."
He stands. He picks up the gun. He straightens his jacket.
He walks out.
I don't move.
I sit to my father's right, look at the Moscow skyline through the glass, and run the calculus Dante knew I would run. That retaliating now means a Commission intervention I'm not positioned to win, three months into a Regent cycle where our standing depends on demonstrated control. That Nikolai will handle Emilia's release, because Nikolai is already receiving the instruction I'll send in eleven minutes. That the deal is binding regardless of who signed it. That my father spent forty years being the most dangerous man in every room he entered, and Dante Conti walked in from the only angle that didn't have a sight line.
I note the friction in my chest.
It's larger than usual. More specific. I identify its components: something that is not grief, exactly, because what I had with Aleksander Romanov was not the kind of relationship in which grief is the appropriate category. Something that is not anger, though anger is nearby. Something that is recognition — the sensation of watching a calculation complete itself and knowing I could have run the variables to a different outcome and chose not to, because the outcome I wanted required this room, this meeting, this particular end.
I note it. I don't act on it.
What is relevant to the next seventy-two hours: Nikolai will be called. My uncle is next in the succession line until I complete the Regent cycle and take the seat formally — that transition requires the Obsidian convocation, the board vote, the institutional weight of St. Gabriel behind my name. My father understood this, which is why he allowed me to stay in the university structure rather than pulling me into full operational command. Nikolai holds the network until I'm ready to hold it permanently. The Kazakov truce will need reconfirming. The board seats will need managing. I'll send Nikolai the framework tonight.
What I am, right now, is still the heir. What I will become is a longer calculation.
The friction can wait.
I stay in the conference room.
The view from the forty-seventh floor is Moscow at midday — gray winter sky, the city compressed and orderly, everything operating within its system. I've looked at this view for years. I know it the way I know the Conti file, the face of every man I've ever negotiated with.
I think about the photograph.
The courtyard. Late afternoon light. A woman laughing at something I'll never know the source of, her arm outstretched, her whole face opened up by it.
I think:one more year.
Then she'll come to me.
