Tonight, it feels like both.
8
The Dinner
Monika
The dress is blue.
It's the only nice thing I own—the only thing I brought from the farm that isn't stained or torn or worn thin from years of wear. My mother bought it for me two summers before she died, at a department store in the nearest town, the kind of place where the salesgirls wore name tags and the fitting rooms smelled like cigarette smoke. She said it brought out my eyes. She said every girl needs one dress that makes her feel like someone else.
I haven't worn it since her funeral.
The fabric is crepe, cheap but soft, the color of the sky just before the sun goes all the way down. It's too small now—I was fifteen when she bought it, still growing, still shaped like a girl instead of a woman. The sleeves end at my elbows instead of mywrists. The hem falls above my knees instead of below them. The zipper pulls tight across my ribs, and when I breathe, I can feel the fabric strain.
I look at myself in the mirror. The reflection is wrong. The girl in the blue dress has dark circles under her eyes and a mouth that doesn't know how to smile anymore. She looks like someone who has seen things she shouldn't have seen. Someone who has made choices she can't take back.
But she's also the only version of me I have left. So I smooth my hair, pinch my cheeks to bring back some color, and walk out the door.
The car is waiting downstairs.
Black. Tinted windows. The kind of car that people don't notice because they're trying not to notice. The driver is Viktor—I recognize him from the warehouse, though we've never spoken. He's old, older than my father, with a face that looks like it's been carved from something harder than wood.
"Miss Monika," he says, opening the door for me.
"It's just Monika."
He doesn't respond. Just closes the door behind me and gets in the front seat, and we pull away from the curb without another word.
The city slides past the windows. I watch it the way I watch everything now—waiting for the thing that doesn't belong, the shadow in the corner, the man with the knife. The warehouse changed something in me. Or maybe it just uncovered something that was already there. A wariness. A knowledge. The understanding that the world is not divided into good and evil but into things that hurt and things that bleed.
I don't know which I am anymore.
The mansion is in the hills, north of the city, where the roads curve and the trees grow thick and the houses become compounds. We drive through a gate—iron, ornate, the kind ofgate that sayskeep outin a language more expensive than words—and up a long driveway lined with evergreens. The headlights cut through the dark, illuminating trunks and branches and the occasional glimpse of something that might be a garden or might be a graveyard.
And then we stop, and I see it.
The mansion is obscene.
That's the only word for it. Obscene in the way that wealth is always obscene when you've grown up with nothing. It's three stories, maybe four, made of stone that glows faintly in the moonlight. There are turrets, balconies, windows that stretch from floor to ceiling like eyes watching the dark. A fountain sits in the center of the circular drive—dry now, empty, its basin filled with dead leaves and the memory of water.
I step out of the car and feel the cold on my bare legs. The dress is too thin for November. The heels I borrowed from a coworker are too high. I am a farm girl playing dress-up, and everyone here will know it the moment they see me.
But I walk to the door anyway. Because I have nothing left to lose except my pride, and my pride is already in pieces somewhere between the warehouse and the diner and the night I pulled a bullet from a stranger's side.
The door opens before I knock.
A man in a suit—not Aleksander, someone younger, someone with the same flat eyes as the guards at the warehouse—nods at me and steps aside. I walk into a foyer that could fit my entire apartment inside it.
Marble floors. A chandelier that looks like it was stolen from a palace. A staircase that curves up toward a ceiling painted with clouds and angels and something that might be a god watching from above. The air smells like flowers—real flowers, not the kind from a grocery store—and money, and the particular stillness of a house that has no children in it.
I stand in the middle of the foyer and try to remember how to breathe.
"Monika."
His voice comes from the top of the stairs. I look up, and there he is—Aleksander Mire, standing on the landing with one hand on the railing and the other in his pocket. He's wearing a suit, of course. Dark charcoal. A white shirt. No tie tonight, the top button undone, and I see a sliver of his chest, the curve of his collarbone, and I look away before I can look longer.
"You came," he says.
