Page 47 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
I look in the small mirror propped against the fruit bowl.
She has kept it soft. A low arrangement, a few strands loose at my temples, nothing severe. The ivory dress we found on Wednesday fits the way it fit in the dressing room, clean and simple, and when I tried it on, Mara stood in the doorway of the fitting room and said that’s the one and folded her arms like the matter was settled.
I didn’t argue.
She appears in the mirror behind me, her chin resting on top of my head, looking at our reflections together. Her eyes are doing something she is working to keep in check.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I’m not,” she says. She blinks. Straightens. Squeezes my shoulders once with both hands. “You look beautiful. Let’s go.”
Viktor holds the car door, and Mara gets in first. I follow, and the door closes with the solid quiet click of expensive machinery. The city begins moving past the windows.
Mara takes my hand in the back seat without a word and holds it, and I let her, and we ride the whole way like that, her thumb moving slowly back and forth across my knuckles, neither of us saying anything because everything that needs to be said hasalready been said, and the rest of it is waiting at the end of this drive.
The estate gates open when we turn onto the street, and the car pulls up the drive, and the house appears through the windshield, gray stone and tall windows, exactly as I’ve seen it a dozen times before.
I have overseen the setup of this house. I have coordinated its staff and confirmed its security rotations and stood in its rooms with a clipboard and a timeline. I know this building.
It looks nothing like I know it today.
Three men are standing in the main reception room when Mara and I are shown in, and the first thing I notice is that none of them looks like anyone I have ever been in a room with before.
Kostya I know. Standing in this room in a dark suit with his hands clasped in front of him, he looks like all of that and also like something else, something I cannot name but that I feel in the back of my neck.
The two beside him are worse.
They are introduced to me as Pavel and Gregor and they are the kind of men I used to see in the movies I watched growing up, the ones my father would shield my eyes from, the ones who stood in the background of scenes and never said anything but whose presence meant that whatever was about to happen was not going to be good for somebody.
Pavel is broad and dark-haired with a jaw like something carved rather than grown, and eyes that move over the room in a constant, slow sweep that never fully stops.
Gregor is leaner and older, gray at the temples, and he looks at me when I walk in with an expression of complete neutrality that is somehow more unsettling than anything else in the room.
They both nod when I am introduced.
I nod back, and I don’t let any of what I am feeling show on my face, and I remind myself that I have stood in rooms full of Roman Petrov’s associates for two years and kept myself composed, and I can do it now.
Then Roman walks in from the far door.
He is in a charcoal suit, white shirt, no tie, and he crosses the room toward me with the unhurried certainty he brings to every room he enters. He stops in front of me, and the room goes very quiet.
“You came,” he says.
“I said I would.”
The corner of his mouth moves, but it’s not quite a smile. He turns toward the officiant, a small, serious man in a gray suit who has been standing near the window with his hands folded, and the ceremony begins.
The words are the standard ones.
The officiant moves through them at a measured pace, the familiar cadence of a thing that has been said in this form for a very long time, and Roman responds where required with the same voice he uses in boardrooms, even and unhurried, and leaving no room for interpretation.
When the officiant pauses to look at Roman and asks if he has anything to add, I expect silence.
Roman looks at me.
“I vow to protect this child with my life,” he says.
He says it simply. No ceremony in the delivery, no softness, just the words stated as plainly as a fact about the weather.
