Page 87 of Reckless Heir
Aleksei watches me do it.
Something in his face does something I don't have a category for. It lasts approximately one second. It might be relief. It might be something larger and more complicated than relief, the kind of thing that doesn't have a clean word for it.
"You should probably know," I say, "that this doesn't mean I forgive you."
"I know."
"I'm furious."
"I know."
"And I still think you're arrogant and calculating and precisely the kind of man every woman should run from."
"Yes." Something shifts in his face. "But you didn't run."
"I'm still evaluating my options."
"Sofia."
"What?"
He says nothing. Just looks at me with that thing — the vast, contained, frightening thing — for a long moment. He's holding something at the edge of language and not releasing it. Not yet. Thenot yethe keeps returning to, that I've decided means something other thanno.
"Thank you," he says finally.
Two words. Quiet. Unadorned. Without the precision he wraps around everything else — just the two words, sitting there.
I turn and walk back out to the gala before I do something irreversible, like forgive him immediately.
That night I lie awake in the Tower and look at the ceiling and think about the envelope in the bin and what it means that I put it there.
I'm not ready to call it forgiveness.
Forgiveness implies the account is settled, and the account is not settled. He spent eighteen months arranging my captivity with the specific care of someone who wanted one particular person and engineered the world to produce them. That is not a small thing. That doesn't become small because he flinched when he said it, or because his restraint has been dissolving by degrees, giving way to something unguarded and real.
But I also know what Dimitri wanted when he handed me that envelope. I know the shape of the game he's playing — Mara told me, Niko told me, I've watched it for three months. He wanted me afraid of Aleksei. He wanted the envelope to be a wedge. And the specific satisfaction in his expression when I took it was the satisfaction of someone who has positioned a piece correctly on a board.
I didn't take the envelope for Aleksei.
I put it in the bin for me.
Because I am the variable in this equation who keeps choosing to stay, and I need to know that the choice is mine. Not Aleksei's, not Dimitri's, not the contract's. Mine. The envelope in the bin is mine. The red dress is mine.
Not yet,he said, in the study, months ago. I've been saying it back to him all along, in different languages — the dress, the Russian workbook, the addendum I wrote in the contract before I even arrived.
I understand,I said tonight.And I'm still here.
I think he understood.
I close my eyes.
The ceiling is the same ceiling it always is — white plaster, the hairline crack in the northeast corner. I've been watching it since October. Some things don't change.
Some things do.
26
SOFIA
