BLOOD AND ASHES

Nikolai

She tried to get into his study on the fourth day.

Not to find anything specific, she was not a spy, had no coordinates to transmit to no one, had no plan except the ongoing project of know the territory.

She wanted to understand the house. She wanted to understand him, because understanding him seemed like the most important survival intelligence she could gather, because everything in this compound moved around him the way planets moved around a gravitational body, and she had decided that the only way forward was through.

The study was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor that two different guards had been positioned at on the two occasions she had walked past it, which told her something. Both times she had not slowed her pace or looked at the door, just continued walking, cataloguing.

On the fourth day, the corridor was empty.

She didn’t think. She walked to the door and tried the handle.

Locked.

Obviously locked. She stood there for a moment feeling foolish, and then she became aware of a quality of air behind her that was different from before, a displacement, a presence and she turned around.

He was standing ten feet away.

He had made no sound. She had no idea how long he had been there.

“The corridor is not usually empty,” he said.

“I noticed.”

“I had the guards moved.” He looked at the study door behind her, then back at her. “I wanted to see what you’d do.”

She felt the heat rise in her face, which she despised. She had too fair a complexion for indignation it always showed. “That’s a very manipulative way to gather information,” she said.

“Yes.” Again, no apology. Just acknowledgment.

“Come inside.”

She blinked. “What?”

“The study. You want to see it.” He moved past her to the door, produced a key, unlocked it.

“Come.”

She should not go. The reasonable, careful version of herself said: don’t go somewhere enclosed with a man who has guns and power and no discernible reason to be kind to you.

She went.

_________________________________

The study was not what she expected.

She had expected the stage set version dark wood, globe drinks cabinet, perhaps a taxidermied something on the wall. She had expected the performance of power.

The room was full of books.

Floor to ceiling, in several languages, she spotted Russian, English, Italian, French, what looked like Mandarin. Not organised by colour or size, like someone who treated books as furniture, but by a system she couldn’t immediately decode, some combination of subject and language and era.

On the desk, papers, a laptop, a half-full coffee cup. A framed photograph turned face-down.

She looked at the photograph.

“Don’t,” he said.

She looked away.

He sat at the desk. He did not gesture toward a chair, but there was one leather, worn and she took it, because standing in someone’s study while they sat felt like a position she didn’t want to hold.

They looked at each other.

“You are not what I expected,” he said.

“I get the impression,” she said carefully, “that I was misrepresented.”

“Your father described you as manageable.”

The word hit her like a slap. She absorbed it. Filed it. “He would,” she said.

“He was wrong.”

She tilted her head. “Is that a problem?”

He looked at her for a long moment, the focused, accurate look that she was beginning to recognise, the one that felt like being read.

“No,” he said.

“Then what is this? Why am I sitting in your study?”

“You have questions. So do I.” He leaned back in his chair. “Ask yours.”

She stared at him. Of everything she had prepared herself for in this place, this was not on the list. An invitation. An actual invitation to speak.

“Why did you take me from Petrov’s house?” she said. The most important question first. Always the most important question first.

“Petrov owed me a debt. You were part of his assets.”

“I’m a person.”

“Yes.” Quiet. “That is becoming increasingly clear.”

She absorbed this. “Are you going to sell me to someone else?”

“No.”

“Are you going to —” She stopped. Made herself say it, because not naming it gave it more power than she could afford to give it. “Are you going to use me. The way Petrov intended to.”

He held her gaze. “No.”

“How do I know that?”

“You don’t. Yet.” He picked up the coffee cup.

“What else?”

She thought about what else. There were so many what elses that they stacked up behind each other like traffic, each one pushing the one in front of it.

“The sketchbook,” she said. “Who put it there?”

He said nothing.

“You did,” she said. “Or you told someone to.”

Still nothing.

“You saw the drawings on the wall. In Petrov’s house. You stopped and looked at them and then you told your man to bring me with you.”

He looked at his coffee.

“Why?” she said.

A very long pause. The kind that told you the answer was something he was deciding whether to give you.

“My sister,” he said, “used to draw on her walls.”

She went very still.

He was looking at the coffee cup now, not at her. The framed photograph face down on the desk.

The room full of books in five languages. The man who walked his compound at three in the morning and stopped outside her door and moved on.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Carefully.

“Don’t be.” He stood. The moment closed like a fist.

“My question: when you were at Petrov’s, you learned the house. The layout. The staff. The patterns.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I paid attention.”

He looked at her for a moment.

“Yes,” he said, for the third time, not in answer to her, exactly, but as though he were confirming something to himself. Something he was cataloguing.

He walked to the door and held it open.

She stood, because the invitation was clearly over, and she walked to the door, and as she passed him she was close enough to notice and she did not want to notice, filed it immediately into the department of irrelevant and dangerous that he smelled like coffee and something cold, like winter air that clung to a coat.

“Anya,” he said.

She stopped. He had not used her name before.

“Go to hell,” she said.

She walked out.

She made it four steps down the corridor before she heard him, and she was almost certain, she was nearly positive that the sound she heard was something close to a laugh.