Page 58 of Captured By the Pakhan

"No."

"Andrei—"

"Ilya has one man in this world he does not have to check." He stands up, and he's himself again, closed and enormous and done with this. "If I take that from him this year, he has none."

I let it go for now.

Because I've got about four days before I stop letting it go, and both of us know it.

"Andrei. The kitchen. The cereal."

He stops halfway to the door.

"You said I was the woman in the house."

"I did."

"You meant it."

"I did." He doesn't turn around. "I was raised by a woman who fed nine people every day of her life on nothing and did not consider it an insult to be asked. I didn’t understand that it was different with you until after I said it. And by then you had thrown a pan at me, which I felt was proportionate."

"And now?"

"Now I have watched you go up a hill in the dark and come back down it," Andrei says, "and I do not think anything at all about what you should be. I think about what you did."

"Is that an apology?"

"No." He opens the door. "It's better than one. An apology is words about the past."

Then, from the doorway, with his back still to me:

"He has smiled four times since Kansas. In eleven years I have counted the total for a whole year, and it was six." A pause. "I'm telling you this so that you understand people are watching, and that some of them are on your side, and that this is not necessarily a comfortable thing to be told."

He's gone before I can find anything to say to that.

Thursday, I see a car I’m beginning to recognize.

Grey sedan, four doors, parked on the residential street that runs below the property — the one the staff stair comes down onto, two hundred meters from our gate and forty from the bottom of that stair.

I've seen it twice before, once on Monday and once the week we arrived.

Same car. Same street. Different parking space each time, which is the tell — a resident parks in the same spot out of habit. Somebody working a position moves so nobody notices their shape.

There's a man in it.

I take Sergei inside, hand him to Karina with an instruction and a look, and go and find Andrei on the terrace.

"Grey Impala on Rennick. Man in the driver's seat, been there ninety minutes."

He doesn't ask if I'm sure.

"Plates."

"Couldn't read them from up here."

"Then we read them from down there," Andrei says, and goes to get his coat.

Here's how you do this, and both of us know it without a word: you walk toward it like two people who live on this hill and are going for a walk, and you do not split until the last thirty meters, and then you split.