Page 76 of Nikolay

I filed that away immediately, because I had survived among wolves long enough to know when a person was carrying information with unusual satisfaction. Then he continued down the corridor, crisp and composed as ever, leaving me with the distinct sense that everybody in this house except me had already joined some committee on my emotional ruin.

I entered my bedroom.

The room greeted me with familiar quiet—lamp light on the bedside table, fresh flowers on the dresser, heavy curtains half-drawn over the dark window, the old radiator giving off a mild metallic warmth under the sill. My suitcase sat where I’d left it. My books remained stacked on the desk in their crooked little tower. Nothing looked wrong.

Fresh flowers came every day.

Not at this hour.

I turned toward the desk.

The parcel rested against my stack of books like it had been trying very hard not to make a fuss and had failed simply by existing. Heavy cream linen paper wrapped it with careful folds. A pink ribbon sat tied around it in a bow that was not bad exactly, but had no business being called graceful. One loop was slightly larger than the other. One tail hung longer. It looked as though a man more accustomed to fastening weapons or cufflinks had attempted whimsy under duress and nearly conquered it by force.

No card.

Of course not.

I stared at it long enough to feel my pulse in my throat.

Then I crossed the room, lifted it in both hands, and carried it to the bed as carefully as if it contained something breakable. The mattress dipped when I climbed up and folded myself cross-legged in the middle of the duvet. For a moment I only held it in my lap.

It had a little weight to it.

Book weight.

My heart did one strange, painful little turn.

“Don’t be insane,” I told myself softly, which was not useful because I was already being insane.

I slid one finger beneath the ribbon and loosened it slowly. The pink satin gave way with a whisper. I drew it free and laid it beside me, then opened the paper at each crease one by one instead of tearing through it. It felt wrong to be rough with anything that had come from his hands, even hands capable of such crimes against symmetrical bows.

The linen fell back.

The scent met me first.

Winter pine. Citrus. The faint copper undertone that lived in my dreams, whether I wanted it to or not, braided through old paper and cloth binding and the ghost-scent of some private collector’s shelf. My fingers tightened around the edges of the wrapping.

I knew.

I knew before I saw the title clearly. Before I read the publisher line. Before my mind finished catching up to the impossible shape of it.

Still, I looked.

The book lay there in my lap in a dust jacket so clean it almost shocked me. My breath caught hard enough to hurt.

“No,” I whispered.

I opened the cover.

The copyright page stared back up at me in quiet black print.

First Edition. 1960. J.B. Lippincott Company. Philadelphia.

My hands went still.

For a second, the whole room seemed to draw away from me. The lamp. The flowers. The old radiator ticking softly. Even my own body felt far off, like I had stepped outside it and was looking down at some other woman sitting frozen in the center of a bed with treasure in her lap.

I turned to the jacket flap because my brain needed proof stacked on proof before it would dare call this real.