The confession was so quiet I almost missed it. The sudden guilt moved through me with brutal efficiency. Because sheshouldn’t. Not completely. Not yet. And yet some selfish part of me was fiercely glad she did.
“Polina...”
“Don’t.” She looked away toward the city. “Just don’t ruin it.”
The words struck deeper than anything else she’d said that night. Not because they were dramatic. Because they weren’t. She was trusting me with something fragile. And hope was infinitely more fragile than trust.
Inside, the orchestra began another piece. Guests moved past the windows in warm pools of light.
The gala continued.
The world continued.
But for a moment neither of us moved.
Then she straightened. “Next Saturday,” she said. “I’ll make sure you’re on the guest list.”
The invitation solved a problem. The operation needed access. The house provided it. Everything about the arrangement made sense. That should have been reassuring.
It wasn’t.
She held my gaze for another moment. Then she turned toward the doors.
I followed her back into the warmth of the gala and told myself I still knew exactly where the line was.
The lie was becoming harder to believe.
Chapter 11
Polina
My father had said nothing on the way home.
That was worse than an interrogation. His silences had texture. I had learned to read them the way sailors read weather, by the particular quality of the air pressure before the storm. Tonight’s had been dense and watchful, the silence of a man cataloguing information rather than reacting to it. He was building something in his head. I didn’t know yet what it was.
My shoes were off before the bedroom door closed. I dropped onto the edge of the bed and immediately stood up again. Sitting felt passive and passive felt dangerous when my mind was moving this fast.
I paced.
The gala ran on a loop whether I wanted it to or not. The moment across the room when our eyes had met and the bottom had very nearly dropped out of my composure. The dance, his hand at my waist, the city noise of the room falling away, the low-voiced conversation that had been somehow both practical and the most intimate exchange I’d had with another person in years. The balcony, and the way he’d said Polina, my actual name, not the club name, not Miss Morozov, just my name, quietly, like it was something he’d been holding and had decided to put down carefully.
I pressed my fingers against my mouth and made myself stop pacing.
I didn’t know if he was coming.
That was the part I couldn’t settle. I hadn’t said yes. I hadn’t said no. I had said something between them, the diplomatic non-answer of a woman trained from birth to neither commit nor refuse outright, and he had looked at me with those dark eyes and said I’ll find a way and I had let him believe that finding a way was something I wanted.
Which I did. That was the problem. I wanted it with a directness that I found alarming.
I went to the window. The city below was doing its indifferent late-night business, cabs and distant voices and the particular quality of urban quiet that was never actually quiet. My reflection floated in the glass above it, composed, as always, the image and the interior having very little in common.
I had given him nothing. No invitation. No confirmation, no clear instruction. He had no way of knowing which room was mine, or which side of the house, or—
A sound from the balcony.
I turned. My heart knew who it was before the rest of me caught up.
The balcony door, the one with the mechanism that had never quite worked properly since last winter, the one Vlad had put on a maintenance list that had never been addressed, moved. Then opened. A figure stepped through with the unhurried ease of someone who had not found the process particularly difficult.
