Page 24 of Nikolay

I said nothing. Anything I said would have worsened it.

Then I removed myself with measured steps, refusing both haste and backward glance. I crossed the room through scattered books and linen paper with the care of a man passing through a chapel after having blasphemed in it, opened the door, and stepped into the corridor. The carved wood clicked shut behind me with maddening softness.

I did not go farther.

My back found the wall paneling beside the door as if some hidden force in the corridor had struck me there. One hand remained on the brass handle. The other hung uselessly at my side. The estate breathed around me in low, expensive silence—old timber settling, distant movement below stairs, the thin gold hiss of candle sconces fixed along the hall. I stood there while one flame bent and righted itself, then another. Long enough, I thought absently, for the house to mark that I had ceased functioning like a rational being.

I could still see the room in my mind. The shirts thrown aside in bright, careless folds. The early editions. The notes in the margins. The ugly little instant when she slapped my hand away as though I had not earned contact with the thing I reached for.

She had been right.

That knowledge did not arrive nobly. It came with the sick, slow heaviness of swallowed iron.

“Brother.”

Lucia’s voice carried from the far end of the corridor, quiet enough that another listener might have missed it entirely. I turned my head.

She was already there, of course. Of all the people in this house, my sister moved most like a verdict one did not hear approach. Black curls framed her face in dark abundance tonight, though not so loosely as to soften the military exactness of her bearing. She wore black, as she often did, the fabric fitted and elegant, severe enough to remind a man she could kill in it if required. One brow had lifted. At the corner of her mouth sat the faintest curl, not kind, not cruel, simply interested in the spectacle before her.

“What exactly,” she asked, “are you doing lurking outside our guest’s room?”

I straightened off the paneling at once, because no older brother with any self-respect remained caught slumped against a wall by his younger sister and then continued to lean there. My hand fell from the handle.

“You knew,” I said.

Lucia came no closer yet. “I know many things. You will need to narrow your accusation.”

“You knew about her.” My voice stayed low, controlled only because anything else would have made me sound unhinged. “The books. Her education. You knew who she was, and you said nothing.”

At that, the amusement left her face entirely. She crossed the distance between us without hurry, stopped close enough that the familiar scent of her—dark florals, steel, faint ash from the fire lit rooms she favored—reached me, and took my arm with the calm authority she usually reserved for extracting incompetents from active danger.

“Come,” she said.

“I am not a child.”

“No,” she replied. “At present, I find that more disappointing.”

She did not argue further. Neither did I, which perhaps proved her point better than any protest could have. Lucia turned and steered me down the corridor, her hand neither harsh nor optional. The estate spread around us in old-night grandeur: runner carpets over dark polished floors, portraits whose eyes had watched several centuries of family disgrace, gilded mirrors reflecting a brother and sister moving toward one more private reckoning. We passed a junction where the hall opened toward the library and another toward the guest wing stairs, then descended one level and turned into the formal sitting room reserved for occasions when comfort had to wear ceremonial clothes.

The room received us in burgundy and shadow. Deep wine-colored walls held the light close; heavy brocade curtains shut out the night, and two wingback chairs faced one another before a low-burning fire. The grate glowed red at its heart, the flames neither lively nor dead, merely enduring. Silver-framed miniatures sat on the mantel beside a clock too old to need proving. The place smelled of polished wood, old fabric, and the ghost of prior conversations nobody had enjoyed.

Lucia released my arm only once we had fully entered.

She crossed to one wingback chair and sat with deliberate grace, crossing one leg over the other. Then she gestured to the chair opposite her as though inviting me to negotiations rather than family censure.

I sat.

The fire threw a thin, moving line of amber across her cheekbones. In this light, and among family, the Eastern European cadence of her speech thickened, the syllables settling deeper and slower, each word considered before it left her mouth.

“What would you like to know about Maddie?” she asked.

Politeness, from Lucia, often preceded dismemberment.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, hands loosely clasped so she would not see how much I wanted to flex them open and shut. “The books,” I said. “I would like to know why a mechanic and a cocktail waitress possesses a curated collection of classical literature.”

The moment the sentence left me, I hated the shape of it. Not enough not to have said it. Enough to hear it.

Lucia’s espresso-dark eyes held mine. She did not blink. The silence that followed was not long, but it deepened until I felt each second strike the room separately.