Page 49 of Captured By the Pakhan

"I'm aware."

"You said it. I didn't ask, you just said it, and now it's in the room."

Yes. It's in the room, and it has been in the room since I put down the feather, and I have spent forty minutes doing what I always do, which is standing at the edge of a thing deciding whether to enter it.

I get up and pour two whiskeys from the bottle on the side and hand her one, and I sit against the headboard, and I tell her.

"Her name was Nadia."

"I know."

"You do not know it from me."

"No," Raven says. "I know it from a boy who says it about once a week and watches my face afterward to see what I do."

That is new information, and it goes in somewhere under the ribs.

"She was twenty-four," I say. "I was thirty. Her father was Yevgeny Sokolov, who controlled a great deal of the Baltic freight I needed and who was, by every account including his daughter's, a man who should have been killed twenty years before I met him. The alliance was arranged without her present."

"Was she asked?"

"No."

"Were you?"

The question stops me. Nobody has ever put it that way.

"I was thirty, and I wanted the Baltic," I say. "That is not the same as being asked, but it is not the same as her, either, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend the two of us were in the same situation."

She doesn't say anything, which I appreciate.

"What I knew about her before the wedding was on a single sheet of paper. What I learned afterward took me perhaps six months, and I learned all of it by observation, because she did not speak to me for the first year except in the presence of other people." I turn the glass. "Her father had been giving her to men since she was fifteen. Not selling — lending, as favors, to close arrangements. There was a word for it in that family, and they used it at the dinner table."

Beside me, the mattress shifts. Raven has gone very still.

"I did not know that when I married her. I found out four months in, from her aunt, who told me at a party as though it were a piece of amusing family history." I take a drink. "So I understood, rather late, what had been standing in front of me on a wedding day being pleasant to eleven people. And I made a decision, and the decision was wrong, and I have had ten years to look at it from every side, and it is wrong from all of them."

"What was the decision?"

"That I would take nothing from her that she had not offered."

"That's not wrong."

"It's not wrong as a principle. It was wrong as an entire policy, applied to a whole marriage, by a man who found it very convenient." I hear my own voice go flat. "I never touched her. Not once, in six years, except the night she asked me to, and she asked me for one specific reason and got what she wanted from it and never asked again."

"Sergei."

"She wanted a child. She said it to me perhaps three months in — the only direct request she ever made of me, delivered like a business proposition, which is the only register either of us had. She wanted something in that house that was hers and had not been arranged by anyone." I look at the ceiling. "So we have a boy asleep two doors from here who was, and I want to be precise about this because I have never said it out loud, the only thing his mother ever chose."

Raven doesn't move.

"And after he was born she wanted me out of the room," I say. "Not out of the house. She was scrupulously correct in front of staff, at dinners, at every function for six years. But the nursery was hers, and my presence in it made her — " I look for the word, and there isn't a good one " — braced. She would stand differently. She would put herself between me and the crib without any evidence that she was doing it, and she would be courteous the entire time, and that was worse."

"So you stopped going in."

"I stopped going in. And I told myself it was respect." I finish the whiskey. "It was not respectful. Respect would have been six years of sitting in a corridor, unwanted, or finding her a doctor she would actually see, or a single conversation in which I asked her what she needed instead of waiting to be told. I did none of those. I removed myself, entirely, on grounds that flattered me, and I got a great deal of work done in the years I was not being difficult about it."

I set the glass down.