“Listen to me. If you get on that plane—“
“Goodbye, Jared.”
I ended the call.
Set the phone back in the drawer under the book.
And then I put my face in my hands and cried in a way I hadn’t cried since I was ten years old. Not for myself, not for the room I was locked in or the man in Russia waiting to be handed a woman he’d expressed an interest in, but for my mother. For a girl who had married a dangerous man and tried to love her way through it and had died on a mountain road that wasn’t slick from rain.
For a woman who had never gotten to choose.
For the inheritance she had left me, which was her face and her voice and the particular fierce stubborn belief that daughters were worth more than their fathers decided, and which I was sitting on the floor of a locked room holding on to with both hands because it was the only thing I had left.
I cried until there was nothing left to cry and then I sat in the quiet and looked at the ceiling and thought about what came next.
Chapter 16
Jared
Declan’s apartment was the kind of place that looked like a man had furnished it in a single decisive afternoon and then never reconsidered a choice. Dark wood, clean lines, no clutter, the aesthetic of someone who found disorder professionally offensive. I had been here enough times over the years that I knew which chair had the best sightline to the door, which scotch was the good one, and where the silence lived when Declan was thinking something he hadn’t decided to say yet.
He was thinking something now. Had been since I’d arrived at six with no explanation beyond I needed somewhere to be and he’d opened the door, looked at me for one assessing second,and stepped aside without a word. That was one of the things I had always valued about Declan, his ability to let a thing arrive in its own time without forcing it.
I sat with a glass I hadn’t touched and looked at nothing in particular and ran the problem through its iterations for the fourteenth time since Polina had sent five words on a burner phone and changed the shape of everything.
He’s gone for two nights.
That had been Tuesday. Today was Thursday and Ivan was back from New York and the house had the quality I’d been dreading. The closed-down watchful quality of a situation contracting around a person. I had felt it in the change in Nikos’s voice on this morning’s call. Something had moved in Morozov’s network. Something was accelerating.
I had not been back to the house.
That was a choice I had made and remade hourly since Tuesday night, the ongoing negotiation between the operative who understood that another visit increased exposure and the man who had left a burner phone on a nightstand and told her not to use her regular one and had been checking his phone with the specific dread of someone waiting for news he didn’t want to receive.
Declan set a fresh glass beside my untouched one without comment and settled back into the opposite chair with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be and no interest in pretending otherwise.
My phone rang.
I looked at the screen. The burner number. Her burner, the one I’d given her, the one she only used for me.
Something dropped in my chest.
I stood and moved to the balcony without explaining and pressed the glass door closed behind me. The night air was coldand the city was doing its indifferent evening business below and I answered before the third ring.
“Polina.”
“I need you to know something.” Her voice was completely steady. That was the first thing that told me something was wrong. The specific steadiness of it, the register she used when she was holding something that required both hands and couldn’t afford to shake. “I can’t see you anymore.”
The city kept moving below me. I stood very still.
“He’s sending me back to Russia,” she said. “There’s a man. Roman Davidof. My father has chosen him for me.”
Davidof. The name landed with the specific weight of a dossier I had read eighteen months ago during the preliminary Morozov research. The rumors attached to it were extensive and consistent and all of them were true.
“I’m coming,” I said. “Right now. Don’t—“
“No.” The word sounded like something she had prepared. Quiet and absolute and already decided. “No, Jared. Listen to me.”
It was hard but I stayed quiet.
