Page 77 of Reckless Heir
He leaves the book.
That evening I look up the phrase he used.
?? ?????, ??? ? ??????????.You are smarter than I deserve.
I read it three times. I think about the fact that he said it in Russian — the private language, the one he switches to when the content is not for me. Except it was for me. He said it in Russian because he knew I understood, and he said it in Russian because saying it in English would have been a different kind of admission.
He said it in Russian because it was the closest thing he has to a private voice, and he gave it to me anyway.
Then I look up:?? ?????? ????? ??????, ??? ????????.You always knew more than you said.
Both of them are true.
I close the book.
I look at the window. The Hamptons is Friday. Three days. He said I had until the Hamptons.
Not yet,he said in the study, months ago. About the things he wasn't ready to say.
I think he's getting closer to yet.
So am I.
I open the book again and read until midnight. The grammar workbook closed, the app set aside. His grandmother's book in my hands, her handwriting on the inside cover, the weight of language that belongs to a person rather than to a curriculum.
?? ?????, ??? ? ??????????.
I will not argue with that.
But I'll take the book.
23
SOFIA
The choker arrives at ten AM in a velvet box with no card.
It doesn't need one. I recognise the Romanov crest on the clasp before I open it, and when I do, the thing inside makes me understand immediately that this is not jewellery. It's a message. Diamonds, brilliant-cut, close-set, sitting against the throat at precisely the weight that makes you aware of your own neck at all times. Beautiful. Exact. The kind of thing that looks, from a distance, like a gift.
I put it on.
There is, as I discover, no clasp on the outside. It locks from the back with a small mechanism I cannot reach, and the note at the bottom of the box — which I find after thirty seconds of experimental hand-contortion — reads:Wear it. Or don't come at all.
I wear it.
I stand in front of the mirror in the Tower bedroom and look at myself. The white gown he approved, floor-length, tasteful, the kind of thing that saysI am appropriatewithout saying anything else. The diamond choker at my throat that says everything the white gown is trying not to. I look like a womanat a Venetian gala. I look like a woman who belongs to someone, which is the accurate statement.
I look like myself, underneath both of those things, which is the thing I keep having to remind myself of.
The choker is warm from my skin already. I can feel it when I swallow.
Property,the processing room said.
Make yourself too expensive to break,Mara said.
One of those is what this is, and one is what I'm choosing it to mean. I decide that distinction is mine to make. I reach up and touch the clasp once — feel the mechanism I can't reach — and then I pick up my bag and go downstairs.
The Hamptons estate belongs to someone I'll never be formally introduced to. I've learned to stop expecting formal introductions at Obsidian events — names are leverage here, and leverage is not given freely. What I have is a receiving line that Aleksei walks me through with his hand at the small of my back, introducing me asSofiawith no modifier, which by now everyone understands as a modifier in itself.
