I knew what it meant.
I looked up. Nikos was watching me with the focused attention of a man who had just watched something interesting happen to someone’s face. Whatever he saw there made him sit back slightly, a small, almost imperceptible movement.
“She texted,” he said. Not a question.
“She did.”
A beat. He picked up his glass. “Good. That’s good. The operation moves forward.”
“Yes.”
The word came out clean. Certain. Exactly what it needed to sound like.
Nikos turned his glass in his hand and looked at it rather than at me, which was, I had learned over the years, what he did when he was thinking something he’d decided not to say out loud. I had a reasonable idea of what it was. I had the same thought myself, running underneath the certainty like a fault line, quiet, invisible, and deeply inconvenient.
If she ever found out, it would destroy something that had no business existing in the first place.
I typed:Valhalla. 9 PM. I’ll leave your name at the door.
Sent it before the cleaner version of myself could object.
“Keep the other options active,” I said, tucking the phone into my jacket. “All of them.”
Nikos studied me for a moment with eyes that had catalogued the vulnerabilities of smarter people than me for twenty years. Then he nodded. Not agreement. More like a decision to leave the subject alone… for now.
“Of course,” he said.
Outside, the city moved through its Thursday evening without us. I watched it through the window for a moment, cabs, restaurants, people with ordinary lives doing ordinary things, and felt the particular stillness of a man standing at the edge of a decision he’s already made, waiting for the rest of himself to catch up.
The folder sat closed on the table between us.
I left it there when I went.
Chapter 7
Polina
Getting out of the house had required three days of patience, one convincing performance of docile compliance, and the strategic sacrifice of my favorite Hermès scarf.
The scarf had gone to Molly, draped over her shoulders with a warmth I didn’t entirely have to manufacture, because the woman was genuinely kind and entirely too loyal to my father for her own good. But Molly had a fondness for beautiful things and an even greater weakness for feeling seen, and twenty minutes of sincere conversation about her sister’s upcoming wedding had bought me exactly what I needed. She would be occupied in the kitchen until ten. Vlad had a standing Thursdaycall with his wife in Kyiv that ran long without fail. Dimitri, sweet, uncomplicated Dimitri, had developed a very predictable habit of disappearing to the small sitting room off the east corridor at precisely eight fifteen to watch football on his phone with his earbuds in.
I had noted all of this the way my father had always taught me to note everything—as information, as leverage, as the architecture of a situation waiting to be used.
He would be furious if he knew I’d turned his own lessons on him.
Good.
I’d changed in the small bathroom off the staff entrance, not the UV dress, too conspicuous for the journey, though it was folded carefully in the bag over my shoulder, and slipped out through the garden while the city did what cities do at eight on a Thursday evening, which was to provide cover for anyone motivated enough to use it.
The quiet jazz and cheap pine air freshener inside the Uber offered a calm solace after the intensity of my time with Master Loki.
Three days of breakfast under my father’s careful eyes. Three days of marble hallways and the particular silence of a house where every door was technically open and none of them actually were. Three days of art books and my own thoughts and the restless, itching awareness of a life being lived in the wrong direction, too small, too managed, too precisely arranged to be anything as organic and unpredictable as an actual existence.
I had not been thinking about him.
That was almost entirely true.
I had been thinking about the scene. The rope, specifically. The particular quality of surrender that shibari required. Not passivity, nothing so simple as that, but a sustained active yielding that demanded as much presence as any performanceI’d ever given. The way my mind had gone genuinely, blessedly quiet for the first time in longer than I could measure. The feeling, afterward, of having been somewhere real.
