“You are my daughter,” he said. “This is not a negotiation.”
“You’re right that I’m your daughter. You’re wrong that this isn’t a negotiation. Everything is a negotiation. You taught me that.”
His jaw tightened. “You will do as I say.”
“I won’t.” I held his gaze. “I know what you are. I know what you do. I know what happened to my mother.” My voice was completely steady and I was not surprised by it this time. I had earned this steadiness, had paid for it on the floor of a locked room, and it was mine. “You don’t have anything left to threaten me with that frightens me more than what I already know.”
He stood up.
That was new. In twenty-four years of confrontations across breakfast tables and study desks and the formal parlors of houses I had never been allowed to call home, he had never stood up. He had always conducted his authority from a seated position, the deliberate stillness of a man who understood thatthe most powerful person in a room was the one who didn’t need to move.
He was moving now.
“You will go to Moscow,” he said.
He was already moving around the table. I stood because sitting felt like a concession I was not prepared to make.
We faced each other across its length with the unmistakable sense of a situation no longer proceeding according to plan.
Like two people who had finally run out of the language they had been using as distance.
“You will meet Davidof. You will conduct yourself as my daughter, and you will do your duty to this family. I have arranged it, and it will happen.”
“There is a man,” I said. “His name is Jared Kane.”
Silence.
I had said it out loud. To Dottie, in a restaurant, with guards at the door. I had said it there first, but this was different. This was saying it here, in this room, to this man, with full knowledge of what I was doing. I was putting Jared’s name between myself and my father like something I was choosing to stand behind. Like a declaration.
The silence stretched.
My father’s expression went through something I had never seen on his face. Not the cold. Not the hot-before-cold. Something more complicated. A rapid series of calculations running behind his eyes, assessments being made and discarded, a man processing information he had not expected and was now fitting into a picture.
“Jared Kane,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then something settled in his face that was worse than the anger would have been. Not coldexactly… knowing. The expression of a man who has just been handed an advantage he had not anticipated.
“Jared Kane is not who you think he is,” he said quietly.
I kept my face still. “I know exactly who he is.”
“Do you.” He said it without inflection, which was the most frightening way to say anything. “He is not a man who found you by accident, Polina. He is a man who was looking for you. There is a difference.” A pause, precisely weighted. “Ask him what he was doing at the Barnes Foundation. Ask him why he really wanted to get close to you.”
Something moved in my chest. Cold. Fast.
I did not let it reach my face.
“You’re trying to turn me against the one person—“
“I’m trying to tell you the truth.” His voice had the quality it only had when he was not performing. The flat, declarative tone of a man stating a fact he found neither pleasant nor unpleasant, simply accurate. “A truth you deserve to have. Whether you choose to believe it is your business.” He straightened. “It changes nothing about Moscow. It changes nothing about Davidof. It simply means that the man you are sacrificing your future for may not have been entirely honest with you about the nature of his interest.”
I said nothing.
My hands were completely still at my sides.
“The only way I’m going to Moscow is over my dead body.”
