CAGED IN CRIMSON

CAGED IN CRIMSON chapter 6-8

Chapter Six

Nikolai

On the evening of day eight, I slid a key under her door with a note: The house is open to

you after nine each evening. The gardens during daylight. There are rooms I would ask you

not to enter — I'll tell you which if you come to find me.

I signed it with my initial and went to the study and waited.

She appeared at eleven-fifteen.

I heard her in the corridor before she knocked — soft-footed, careful. A single knock at

the study door, decisive rather than tentative.

'Come in.'

She opened the door and stood in the frame and looked at the study. Books stacked three

deep on every surface. Files on the desk that I'd closed before she arrived. The lamp on the

reading table, the one I preferred in the evenings because the overhead was too hard. She was

barefoot, in the loose dark clothes she wore when she worked late, her hair down.

She came in fully and looked at the room the way she looked at everything —

completely, cataloguing, trying to understand the logic of it.

'One of your libraries,' she said.

'One of them.'

'How many do you have?'

'In this house, two. Elsewhere — four more.' I watched her look at the books. 'Sit down,

Mara.'

— 33 — She chose the couch by the window. Not the chair beside my desk, which was the closer

option. She was maintaining a deliberate distance, and the deliberateness of it told me

something.

'The rooms I shouldn't enter,' she said.

'The safe room in the east corridor. The server room in the basement. The room at the

end of the north wing where I keep things I'm not ready to — where I keep things I haven't

decided what to do with yet.'

She tilted her head slightly. 'That last description was not logistical.'

'No.' I met her eyes. 'It wasn't.'

'Everything else is accessible.'

'Yes.'

She was quiet for a moment, looking at the bookshelves. Then: 'Tell me something true.

Something you wouldn't normally tell me. Something that costs you something.'

The request was unexpected. I turned it over.

'No one has ever been in this house except staff,' I said. 'I've had this property for eleven

years. I've never brought anyone here who wasn't employed by me.'

She looked at me. 'No one?'

'No one.'

'Not a — not anyone.'

'Not anyone.' I held her gaze. 'This house is where I don't perform. I've kept it separate.'

'And yet here I am,' she said softly.

'And yet here you are.'

'Why?' she asked. Not challenging. Genuinely asking.

— 34 — I thought about it. About the honest answer rather than the available answers. 'Because I

wanted you somewhere real,' I said finally. 'Somewhere that was actually mine rather than

somewhere managed. I couldn't—' I stopped. 'A safe house would have been more practical.

Somewhere sterile and functional and completely separate from anything that mattered to me.'

'But you brought me here instead.'

'Yes.'

'Because you wanted me somewhere real,' she said. She was looking at me with that

complete, going-all-the-way-down attention. 'Nikolai. What does that mean?'

'I don't know yet,' I said. The honesty of it surprised me as I said it. 'That's a true thing.'

She was quiet for a long time. Outside, rain had started — the soft kind, steady, the kind

that made the old house feel more itself.

'Your turn,' I said. 'Tell me something true.'

She thought about it. I watched her decide on honesty the way she always decided on

honesty — a particular quality of settling, of giving up the version that was easier to say.

'I'm not as afraid of you as I should be,' she said. 'I've been thinking about why, and the

most honest answer I can find is that you haven't lied to me. Not once. About anything I've

been able to check.' She met my eyes. 'I don't know what to do with that. But it's true.'

We sat in the study trading true things until two in the morning. The rain came down

outside and the old house held us both, and I thought about the concept of a life that had taken

a shape I hadn't planned for, and how it felt to be inside it.

It felt like something I hadn't had a word for.

It felt like being in the right place at the right time, which was not an experience I had

had often. It was also frightening, in the specific way of anything that matters: the fear that it

won't stay, the fear that the having of it means the eventual losing of it, the fear that is the

direct product of caring.

— 35 — She went back to her rooms at two-thirty. I sat in the study for a while after she left, in

the silence she'd left behind, and I thought about the word for it.

I didn't find it.

That was all right. Some things didn't need names to be real.

~ ✦ ~

Chapter Seven

Mara

My mother warned me about this.

Not in those words, not with any reference to captivity or organised crime or men who

brought me coffee in the morning and traded true things with me late at night. But in the way

she talked about my father — in the way she talked about him even after he was gone, even

after the car accident in a city neither of them was supposed to be in, even after the years of his

complicated, divided life had been explained to her in ways she hadn't wanted to be explained

— she was warning me.

She said: the ones that get you are the honest ones. The ones who don't pretend. My

father never pretended to be simple. He was a difficult man who told her the truth about his

difficulty, and she loved him for it, and the loving complicated everything else about her life,

and she would not have chosen differently.

I thought about that a lot, those first two weeks.

I thought about it when he came with coffee in the morning and sat in the chair by the

window and read while I worked — his presence oddly companionable, not intrusive, like

someone who understood how to share space without consuming it. I thought about it when he

— 36 — talked about his grandfather, the man who'd walked out of Russia with Pushkin and illegal

savings and the language intact. I thought about it when he took me to see the library on the

first floor — the large one, not his study — and stood at the threshold while I went in and

looked at two thousand books in the afternoon light and felt something in my chest that

embarrassingly resembled joy.

Day eleven. I was in the library. He'd told me it was mine to use whenever I wanted,

which was the kind of gift that required no ceremony to land hard.

I was sitting in the window seat with my grandmother's copy of Eugene Onegin — the

one with her annotations, the marginal notes in her small precise hand — when he came in.

I heard him stop in the doorway. I didn't look up immediately. I was reading a passage I

had read twenty times but that my grandmother had underlined twice and written beside it:

this is what it means to see someone. I kept my eyes on it until I'd finished the thought.

When I looked up, he was watching me with that expression that I had begun, against

my better judgment, to find the most compelling thing in any room.

'Onegin,' he said.

'My grandmother's copy. She had opinions about it.' I held up the book so he could see

the margins. 'She thought Pushkin was writing about language as much as love. That Onegin

rejects Tatiana not because he doesn't feel what she feels but because he doesn't have the

language for it. He's a man who has lost access to his own interior.'

He was quiet for a moment. He came into the room and sat on the window seat at the far

end — several feet of distance between us, deliberate — and looked at the cover of the book.

'Your grandmother read it in the original,' he said.

'She read everything in the original. She was suspicious of translation.'

'And yet her granddaughter became a translator.'

'She thought that was very funny.' I smiled without meaning to. 'She said: you're

betraying the original every time, but at least you're honest about it.'

— 37 — Something changed in his expression. Gone before I could fully read it.

'Mara.' He said my name the way he always said it — with the Russian underneath, the

worn stone of it. 'I want to ask you something.'

'Ask.'

'Are you all right? Truthfully.'

I thought about it. The honest answer. 'I'm managing,' I said. 'It's strange — stranger than

I expected, being somewhere I didn't choose. But I'm—' I looked for the word. 'The work

helps. Having work to do. And—' I stopped.

'And?' he said quietly.

'The library helps,' I said. 'The garden. The conversations. Things I didn't expect.'

'Things you didn't expect,' he repeated. Not a question. He was looking at me with that

intensity I had stopped trying to look away from, because looking away hadn't made it less

present, only less legible.

'I didn't expect you,' I said. 'Whatever you are.'

'What am I?' he asked.

It was such a genuine question. No performance in it, no rhetorical confidence. He

actually wanted to know what I thought he was.

'I don't know yet,' I said. 'Honestly.'

'Honestly is the only way I want it,' he said.

We looked at each other across the window seat and the afternoon light came through

the old glass and the room was very quiet and I thought: this is the moment my mother warned

me about. The moment when the honest ones get you.

I looked back at my book. But I didn't read any more of it.

~ ✦ ~Chapter Eight

Nikolai

Day fifteen. I kissed her.

I had been not kissing her for a week, which is a different and more active thing than

simply not doing something. It required attention. It required noticing, constantly, the specific

quality of the distance between us and choosing to maintain it. It required not crossing the

room when she laughed at something — the rare, real laugh that she didn't seem to know she

was doing — and not reaching out when she was working at the desk and pushed her hair back

with an abstracted hand and left it tucked behind her ear in a way that was so unself-conscious

it did something complicated to my chest.

On day fifteen I stopped managing it.

She was in the large library, asleep in the window seat with a book open across her chest

and Dostoevsky distributed across her feet in the midafternoon light. She looked younger

asleep, the way she had that first night in her apartment — the tension gone from her face, the

constant working of her mind temporarily suspended, leaving something underneath that was

very different from her professional surface. Something that reminded me that she was

thirty-one years old and had been taken from her life and was managing it with a grace that

cost her things she wasn't telling me.

I stood in the doorway and did not think about what I was about to do, because thinking

about it would have led back to not doing it, and I had spent a week not doing it and I

understood now that the not-doing had an end point.

She woke. Eyes opening directly to me — that complete, immediate waking that I had

seen twice before and that still struck me every time, the quality of someone whose

unconscious knew where I was even in sleep.

— 39 — 'You're staring,' she said. Not alarmed. Just observing.

'Yes.'

'You look like you've made a decision.'

'Yes.'

She watched me come across the room. I was aware of every step — the threshold

quality of it, the understanding that this was a line I could not uncross. She was watching me

with the honest stillness that meant she knew exactly what was happening and was choosing

not to stop it.

I stopped in front of the window seat and reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind

her ear. Just that. The edge of my thumb against the line of her cheekbone. She shivered — a

visible, full-body shiver — and the current of it went through the point of contact and into my

hand and up my arm and I understood why I had been managing the distance so carefully for a

week. Because this was what was on the other side of it.

'Tell me no,' I said. 'If you want me to stop.'

The silence lasted long enough that it became its own kind of answer. Outside, the

autumn garden was grey and still and the old house was quiet around us.

'I don't want you to stop,' she said.

I leaned down and kissed her.

She tasted of the tea she'd been drinking and something beneath it that was purely her —

warm and specific and real, the particular reality of a person who had never once pretended to

be something simpler than she was. She made a sound against my mouth that was half surprise

and half something much older than surprise, and her hands came up and gripped the front of

my shirt and held on.

Not pushing away. Holding.

I pulled back. An inch. Two inches. The space between us charged in a way that made

the distance feel physical.

— 40 — 'This is a terrible idea,' she said into the space between us. Her voice was different —

rougher, unguarded.

'Objectively.'

'You're keeping me here against my will.'

'I know what this is,' I said quietly. 'I know what I am. I'm not asking you to pretend

otherwise.'

'I'm not pretending.' She was looking at me with her full, direct attention. 'I'm being very

clear-eyed about it, actually. I understand exactly what this is and what you are and what

every reasonable version of my judgment is telling me right now.'

'And?'

'And I still want you to do that again,' she said. 'That's not confusion. That's not

something I've talked myself into. It's what I actually want, and I'm choosing to be honest

about it the same way you've been honest about everything else.'

I looked at her. She looked at me. And I thought about honesty — about the version of it

that was easy, which was telling the truth about difficult things, and about the version of it that

was harder, which was admitting that you wanted something you had no clean justification for

wanting.

She was being honest. The least I could do was receive it honestly.

I kissed her again. Not carefully this time.

~ ✦ ~