Page 129 of Marrying the Savage

“Yes,” she says. “I suppose you are.”

The air shifts slightly. There it is again. The strange awareness everyone in this house carries around me. Curiosity, suspicion, pity, calculation. Sometimes all of them at once.

I reach for my coffee. “You don’t have to like me,” I say. Her brows lift. “I know I arrived in a dramatic way.”

“That is one word for it.”

“I had limited luggage and no time to prepare a better entrance.”

This time, she does smile, small but real. Then it fades. “I was frightened yesterday,” she says. “When I saw Maksim on the terrace.”

“He was not close to the edge.”

“I know.”

Her fingers tighten in her lap. “But that terrace…” She stops, then looks toward the windows, where the sea glints darkly beyond the glass. “It has history.”

My hand stills around my cup. A cold feeling begins at the base of my spine.

“What kind of history?”

Irina looks back at me. For a second, I think she will not answer. The Volodin talent for shutting doors is apparently hereditary, marital, and possibly airborne.

Then she says, “Elena fell from there.”

The room goes quiet. Even the sea seems farther away.

“Elena,” I repeat.

Damir’s wife. The woman in the photograph.

The woman whose dress I wore last night.

The woman my uncle said Damir killed.

Irina’s face closes slightly, but she doesn’t stop. “Yes.”

I set my cup down carefully. “She fell?”

“From the terrace.”

Simple words can hide terrible things.

“Was it an accident?” I ask.

Irina looks away. That’s answer enough, though not enough at all.

“I don’t know,” she says finally. “Nobody truly knows except the people who were there, and one of them is dead.”

My mouth goes dry. “And Damir?”

“He doesn’t talk about her, and it was a long time ago. But from what I’ve heard, he was in the house when it happened.”

That’s why Sergei said it the way he did. Not merely gossip. Not some distant rumor about a dead wife found in a locked room. Damir was there when Elena fell.

Or jumped.

Or was pushed.