“It was a moment of feeling.”
“You don’t have moments of feeling.”
“Apparently, I do now. It was a fourteenth-century Japanese vase.”
Silence.
“In my defense, I was having an emotional breakthrough.”
He looked at me for a long moment with the expression of a man recalibrating something. “Never do that again,” he said finally. “The additional intelligence on Davidof’s network that came through the arrest was not something we’d anticipated. That alone justifies the timeline adjustment.” He paused. “Don’t make a habit of it.”
“I won’t.”
He was quiet for a moment. Outside the club windows the city moved through its Thursday afternoon with the comfortable indifference of a place that had no awareness of how much had changed in the last three weeks. Nikos turned his glass once more.
“She’s worth it?” he asked.
Not the professional question. Not the operational assessment. Just the question, asked with a simplicity that was, for Nikos, something close to sincerity.
I didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
He nodded. Once, slowly, the nod of a man filing something under a category he hadn’t previously kept. Then he picked up his coffee and we moved on to the next item, because that was what we did, and the conversation that had just happened entered the record without ceremony and stayed there.
Erik’s penthouse on a Friday evening had always felt like coming home.
It wasn’t the space, though the space was extraordinary, the underwater corridor, the carved ravens, the fireplace that made everything amber and warm. It wasn’t even the people, though the people were the best part of everything. It was the combination of both, the distinct alchemy of this group in this place, which had the quality of being exactly what it was supposed to be. A found family in a found home, doing the thing that families did, which was nothing in particular, all at once, loudly.
Tonight there were eleven people in Erik’s living room and exactly none of them were being quiet about it.
Raia was in the kitchen doing something with Rose that involved periodic bursts of laughter. Noah had found the billiards table and was engaged in a competition with Colin that was approximately forty percent skill and sixty percent psychological warfare. Shelby had commandeered a corner of the sofa and was explaining something to Zara with enormous enthusiasm, her hands doing most of the work of the sentence. Lincoln stood near the bar with a drink and the expression of a man contentedly watching people he loved make noise. Declan and Marissa were in conversation near the windows—closer than the usual distance between them, not quite touching, occupying the specific proximity that said everything to anyone paying attention.
And Dottie.
Dottie had arrived twenty minutes after everyone else, swept into the room in a red dress that should have been too much for a casual Friday and was somehow perfect, and had immediately located Polina with the accuracy of a woman who had been waiting for this reunion and was extremely pleased about it.
The sound of their greeting had caused at least three people to look over.
I was watching from the edge of the room with a glass of water and the unfamiliar sensation of a man standing in his own life and recognizing it for the first time.
Polina was… herself. That was the only word for it. Not performing, not managing, not wearing any of the versions of herself she had deployed for different audiences across the weeks I’d known her. She was standing in the middle of Erik’s living room meeting my people and she was simply, entirely herself, asking questions, listening with the focused attention that was one of the things I had catalogued earliest and never stopped noticing, laughing at something Shelby said with the real laugh, the unguarded one that I had only started hearing recently and that did the same thing every time to the inside of my chest.
She fit.
That was the thing I kept coming back to because it continued to surprise me. I had watched my friends find their people one by one and I had watched those people enter the group and I had observed, with the detached appreciation of someone on the outside of the thing, how each new person had eventually found their place in the configuration. What I had not been prepared for was how immediately, how completely, how entirely withouteffort Polina had done it. She had walked into this room as a stranger and was not a stranger anymore, and it had taken approximately fifteen minutes.
“You look like someone who has just understood something,” Erik said, appearing at my shoulder with the quiet approach of a man who had been doing this to me for twenty years.
“I’m watching the room,” I said.
He followed my gaze to where Polina was now in conversation with Raia, the two of them having drifted toward each other with the easy gravitational pull of women who recognized something in each other, standing slightly apart from the main noise with the focused body language of a real conversation already happening.
“Raia will like her,” Erik said.
“I know.”
“She already does. She told me on the way over.” He took a sip of his drink. “She said, and I quote, that anyone who looked at the Viking murals the way Polina looked at the Viking murals the first night at Midgard was someone worth knowing.”
I looked at him. “You knew about that night.”
