Page 24 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
I notice this the way I notice everything about her lately, which is to say immediately and without meaning to.
She gets in and pulls the door shut, says good morning, and opens her tablet. The day begins with her voice moving through the schedule. I listen and respond, look at her hands on the tablet screen, and think about last night.
Her hands on my desk. The way she looked at me afterward, composed and certain, telling me it could not happen again.
It cannot happen again.
I look out the window.
“Your ten o’clock is Harmon’s legal team,” she says. “They’ve accepted the thirty-day clause.”
“Good.”
“Your twelve thirty is clear. I can have lunch sent up if you’re staying in.”
“I’m staying in.”
She makes a note. The car moves through traffic. She is sitting eighteen inches away from me with her tablet and her composedface and her hair pinned up, and I think about what I am going to do when I get to the office.
I’ve been thinking about it since four this morning, when I woke up and lay in the dark and turned it over for the hundredth time. The laugh through the door. The birthmark. Every careful answer she has given me for three weeks has answered nothing.
Last night in the elevator, the way she stood next to me, giving me nothing, the way she always gives me nothing.
I have been generous with uncertainty. I am done being generous.
“That’s everything,” she says, closing her tablet.
“Thank you,” I say.
She looks out her window. I look out mine. The car moves, and neither of us says anything else.
Gregor has worked my security detail for six years, and he is good at his job because he is thorough, quiet, and does not ask questions he has not been invited to ask.
I call him from my private line at nine fifteen after the Harmon call and tell him I need the masquerade footage. Full coverage. All cameras. Interior and exterior.
He doesn’t ask why.
It’s on my laptop by ten.
I close my office door, sit down, open the files, and start from the beginning.
The estate cameras run on a grid: twelve interior, four exterior, with overlapping coverage and no blind spots, because I designed the system that way eight years ago and have updated it every year since.
The masquerade footage is timestamped and indexed by camera, and I start with the main entrance and work inward.
Three hundred guests arrive between seven and nine. Masks, gowns, suits, the choreography of expensive people at an expensive event. I fast forward through most of it, slowing when the camera catches something worth slowing for.
I find her at seven twenty-two.
She is in a dark blazer and flat shoes, a tablet under her arm, moving through the east corridor. My secretary. At my party. Doing the job I pay her to do.
I watch her work.
She moves through three different rooms in the space of forty minutes, talking to staff, checking setups, and making notes.
At eight fourteen, she has a conversation with Kostya’s assistant near the main staircase. At eight twenty-three, she goes up the main stairs.
I switch to the second-floor corridor camera.
