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She spent her whole life swearing she has nothing to do with the Bratva, but yet here she is.

You can refuse the life, milaya, but you can’t unlearn the way they raised you to see a room.

Her family built that into her bones along with the bulletproof windows, and she has no idea she’s wearing it like a second skin.

She pauses at the camera tucked into the molding above the conservatory door and looks directly into it for a long, level moment.

I lean back in my chair and laugh, delighted, because she’s found one out of forty and she’s letting me know she found it.

There you are.

She drifts out to the gardens around nine, and god the light is good to her. She’s tall and lean, the morning sun finds the auburn buried in all that dark hair and sets it glowing.

Two years I’ve had photographs, but photographs are nothing.

They don’t capture the way she tips her face up to feel the sun then catches herself doing it, scowling, as if reminding herself she can’t let herself enjoy anything.

She’s looking for the way out and it’s obvious by the way she’s already surveying the fence.

It should annoy me, but it enchants me instead.

This is the woman I chose—not some soft thing who’d fold into captivity and call it fate, but a creature with a spine of steel who walked in here to save a child she barely knows and is now beginning the long work of attempting to get herself back out.

She wears her confidence outwardly and underneath it, and, because I have memorized every flicker of her, I can see the fear she’d die before showing me.

It’s in the set of her shoulders and the way her eyes never stop moving.

She’s afraid, which is smart because she should be. And she’s magnificent anyway.

I let her have her day.

I have business that genuinely requires me, and there’s a particular pleasure in restraint, in knowing I could go to her at any moment and choosing instead to wait.

I’ve become an artist of waiting.

She’ll learn that about me soon enough.

Later, I find her in the library.

She’s folded into the wing chair by the cold fireplace with a book she isn’t reading, and when I step through the door she goes still.

She reminds me of a prey animal, as if she’s deciding whether to run.

Her hair is down, and I have to take a moment to absorb the fact that Katerina Sokolov is sitting in my library close enough to touch.

But I don’t touch her.

I’m not an animal.

I’m simply a man who has wanted one thing for two years and has finally, finally been allowed into the same room as it.

“You haven’t eaten,” I finally say. “Not really. You ate a piece of fruit and only half a sandwich.”

Her chin comes up and her eyes narrow. “You’re watching what I eat?”

“I’m watching everything.” I decide to be honest as lies would insult us both. “Have dinner with me, Katerina. You can keep starving yourself to make a point, or you can let me feed you something extraordinary and ask me all the questions I know you want to ask.” I shrug, placing my hands in my pockets. “It’s your choice. It’s always your choice.”

It isn’t, of course, but she’s hungry. For food and for information. The chance to interrogate me is bait she can’t quite refuse.