Page 2 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
I do not move. I will not move.
“I genuinely cannot imagine looking in the mirror before leaving the house and thinking yes, this is the one.” She tips her glass slightly toward me. “But I suppose confidence comes in all sizes.”
They both laugh, and then the other woman says, “You’d think the host would have standards for his guest list.”
That one lands. Not because she’s right. Because she means it to.
I’m still deciding whether to turn and look at her directly—just look, which is sometimes enough—when I hear a different voice entirely.
“I wasn’t aware the guest list was your concern.”
Everything in the immediate vicinity goes quiet.
Not silent. The ballroom is still roaring. But the small pocket of air around us seems to contract, and I turn, and Roman Petrov is standing there.
He’s in a black tuxedo and a dark mask that covers the upper half of his face and does absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that this is a man who has never once in his life been in a room and not been the most significant person in it.
Silver hair swept back. The type of posture that is not a performance, just the natural result of being a man who has never had to make himself smaller.
He is not looking at the woman in red. He is not looking at me either, not directly, but the angle of his body has shifted to place itself between us.
It is so slight.
The woman in red recovers fast. She smiles, and it doesn’t reach anything above her mouth. “Roman. I didn’t realize?—”
“Enjoy the rest of your evening.”
He says it pleasantly. It is not a pleasant sentence. She understands this, and so do her companions, and within thirty seconds, all three of them have redistributed themselves to another part of the room.
The space they leave behind is very quiet.
I’m aware that my heart is doing something medically inadvisable. I have spent two years learning to manage the proximity of this man, the specific gravity of standing close enough to him to note the detail. The gray at his temples. The faint lines at the corners of his eyes. The way he occupies space like he was made for it.
He turns and looks at me now. His eyes are dark behind the mask. He takes me in once, and I remind myself that he does not know who I am. Behind this mask, in this dress, with my hair loose and no clipboard in my hand, I am nobody he has ever met.
“Are you alright?”
His voice. I have heard his voice every working day for two years. Across a desk, through a phone, directing, deciding, concluding. But there’s no agenda in it right now. No efficiency. He’s just asking.
“Fine,” I say. “Thank you.”
He doesn’t move.
“You know her?” he asks.
“No.”
He nods once, like that confirms something. “She has opinions she wasn’t asked for. It’s a habit.”
I almost smile. “You know her?”
“She’s a guest.” The pause after it is almost imperceptible. “Nothing more.”
Up close, in the amber light, the silver in his hair catches. He is fifty-one years old, and there is not a single thing about him that suggests apology for it. He’s not performing vigor or agelessnessor any of the anxious masculinity that makes certain men his age exhausting to be around. He simply is what he is, and what he is takes up the room without trying.
I have been in love with this man—or something that functions embarrassingly like love, or the very detailed blueprint of it—for the better part of two years. I know exactly how irrational this is. I have cataloged the irrationality at length, usually at two in the morning when sleep has made my defenses unreliable.
He is a billionaire. He is my employer. He is twenty-eight years older than me. He runs an organization that I understand, in the vague and unexamined way that keeps me employed and functional, does not confine itself to the legitimate business interests listed on the Petrov Industries letterhead.
