Page 11
Earlier that evening…
“Don’t sit there,” Riley told Maxim, taking hold of his untouched wineglass and moving it two places to the left.
Maxim lifted one dark eyebrow. “This is my chair.”
“You always turn supper into a meeting when you sit at the head of the table.”
“I do not.”
Every person at the table looked at him, and Maxim stared back at us, apparently waiting for one of his brothers to back him up, but no one did.
Riley smiled sweetly and patted the chair she had chosen for him beside her. “Sit here.”
For one moment, my eldest brother looked exactly like the man who had built a criminal empire. Then Riley crooked one finger at him, and he stood without another word.
Nikolai made the mistake of laughing.
Maxim gave him a look that should have killed him where he sat, but Nikolai only grinned and reached for a third piece of bread.
I remained near the French doors overlooking the west lawn, checking the reflection in the glass while the last of the platters came out of the kitchen. The eastern patrol had changed six minutes earlier, and the front gate was secure. Two men covered the drive, another watched the service entrance, and the camera over the garden wall had stopped dropping frames after I replaced the connection on Thursday.
“Sergei.”
I looked toward Riley. She stood with one hand on her hip, a serving spoon in the other, and stared at me from across the room.
“What?”
“Sit down.”
“I was about to.”
“You have been about to for ten minutes.”
“The guard rotation changed.”
“And somehow the rest of us survived.”
“Barely,” Nikolai added around a mouthful of bread, but I ignored him.
Riley pointed the serving spoon at the empty chair beside Ivan. “You’re making the roast nervous.”
“The roast is dead.”
“You’ll be too if you let dinner get cold.”
Maxim’s mouth curled up with the whisper of a smile. Shaking my head, I crossed the room and took my assigned place. Riley looked satisfied, which was probably why Maxim let her control the seating. There were ten chairs around the table now. One remained empty beside me.
I preferred it that way.
Dinner began with the usual passing of plates, reaching across one another, with several contradictory conversations taking place at the same time. Amy was halfway through explaining that the painting above the fireplace was not hung crooked when Nikolai leaned back in his chair and squinted at it.
“The horizon slopes,” he said. “That means it’s crooked.”
“The horizon is supposed to slope,” Amy replied patiently. “The artist was challenging the viewer’s sense of stability.”
“It looks like someone spilled red paint on a staircase.”
Amy set down her fork. “It is an exploration of industrial isolation and the artificial geometry of urban life.”
