Page 41 of The Last Dance

Vadim shifted his attention back to me, and this time it was softer. “She will have access only with my authorization,” he said. “She is not to enter this house unless invited.” His eyes held mine, waiting for a response.

It hit me all at once: the thing I’d spent the last twenty minutes working up the courage to say had already been acted on, filed, and cross-indexed.

Vadim had moved Sasha out not because I suggested it, but because he’d anticipated the need and pre-empted the entire argument. He was three moves ahead, as always, and I was left clutching my little script like a child in a school play who just realized the show was cancelled.

Yuri stepped away from the wall, and with a nod to Vadim, exited. Lin followed, closing the notebook with the neat click of a well-oiled hinge. The room went quiet, just me and Vadim.

I realized I was still standing, so I sat. The chair was too big for the space, as if it had been brought in as a joke and then made permanent by inertia.

Vadim said nothing for a while, just watched me. The silence was not awkward; it was strategic. I waited. “You think I am cruel,” he said, eventually. “For putting her out.”

“No,” I said. “I think you’re…better than that.”

His eyes narrowed, as if I’d said something both true and threatening. “You’re still thinking about what she said.”

I almost denied it, but that would have been pathetic. “She’s not wrong,” I said, after a beat. “About some things.”

He tilted his head. “About you being replaceable?”

That stung, but I gave him a wry smile. “Aren’t we all?”

“No,” he said. “Not all.”

I waited for more, but it didn’t come. Instead, he reached across the desk, not to touch but to close the small gap in the conversation. His hand rested on the edge of the desktop, fingers spread, as if bracing for impact.

“Do you want to leave?” he asked. This question was real.

“No,” I said, and meant it.

He nodded, as if he’d suspected that all along.

We let the quiet eat the next minute.

I wanted to tell him about the part of me that was scared, the part that worried about being a footnote, a collectible, a thing displayed and then packed away in the attic when a better model arrived. But the words wouldn’t come out. Not yet.

I think he knew. I think that was the point.

At length, he said, “I have to go downtown. Meetings. Will you be here when I get back?”

“Where else would I go?”

He liked that answer. It showed in the set of his jaw.

“Yuri will take you if you want to go anywhere,” he said. “But it is safer if you stay here.”

“Roger that,” I said, and the joke was lost on both of us.

He left first, in that way of his: not rushing, not lingering, just moving on to the next battlefield. I sat in the empty office, staring at the door he’d closed behind him. The room felt bigger now, as if the energy he’d packed into it had dissipated and left only air.

Sasha was out. I was still in. The world had not ended, but it felt like a clock somewhere had reset itself. I wondered how long the new hour would last.

I filed the thought away, in the drawer marked “to be opened later.”

For now, I just let the quiet work on me. It was better than rage. It was better than fear. It was the sound of being kept, at least for one more day.

Chapter Eleven

~ Vadim ~