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That surprises me enough to turn around and face her. “Why would you do a thing like that?”

“Because I wanted to be the one to tell you,” she says simply. “In person, out here, where he could not stand between us and soften it for you the way he softens everything for me.”

I purse my lips.

“Our two families have been interdependent for two whole generations.” She says it like a history lesson she has recited so often it is honed smooth. “Everyone has always known that I would marry Lev one day.”

My stomach churns at the word, and my heart gives a stutter.

“What does any of that have to do with me?” I ask, keeping my face unconcerned.

“It has everything to do with you.” She smiles. “This entire party is about my marriage to Lev. My father is hosting it to settle the terms.”

My hands are shaking, and they grip the railing behind me tighter.

“We’re getting married,” Yelena says. “He loved me long before he ever laid eyes on you, and when the moment comes, he’ll choose me without a single second of hesitation. I wanted you here to see it with your own eyes, and then to leave quietly afterward. That is the lesson I want you to learn. It is kinder this way. A clean cut heals faster than a slow one.”

Something in me feels carved right out, and I cannot find a single word to throw back at her. Everything she is saying fits too neatly against everything I already believe. The plain truth is far more brutal than any lie she could have told, and she knows it, and she is watching my face to see it land.

“Whatever Lev decides about marriage is his own business,” I force out. “I’m only his assistant.” The lie tastes like ash.

“Oh, don’t do that.” Her eyes see straight through the facade. “You can drop the act. It’s only the two of us out here now.”

“It must be exhausting,” she goes on, her voice dripping with pity, “loving a man who will never love you back. Trailing after him from floor to floor, planning the wedding he will have with someone else. And over a cheap little necklace he most likely handed you without a second thought on his way out the door.”

“Don’t,” I plead, and my hand comes up to the pendant without my permission.

“Oh, but I think I will. I do what I want, take what I want.” Her laugh is low, dark.

She knows how to strike where it hurts. She hooks one sharp nail under the pendant, and the point of it drags a slow, scraping line across my skin. I try to pull back from her.

Her grip tightens around the pendant, and she yanks the chain hard, and it snaps clean off with a tiny snick like the sound of war being declared. The crystal drops into her waiting palm. My neck feels slashed where the broken chain tore away from it, a thin hot line of pain that makes my eyes sting. It is such a small thing, a stone on a broken chain, and I have to press my lips together to keep from making a sound over it.

“Did you know,” she says, turning the crystal over in her fingers, “that Lev once had a one-of-a-kind diamond ring made just for me? It was not bought from a case. It was designed to my hand at an absurd cost. He had the whole evening planned to propose, and I walked away before he could ask, and do you know what he did afterward?” She waits, and I refuse to answer her. “He kept it. For twenty years he kept it in a drawer. A man doesn’t keep a ring for twenty years for a woman he’s truly forgotten.” Her gentle voice slides into my heart and lodges there.

And I understand something I don’t want to understand at all.

A man as proud as Lev doesn’t forgive a woman who walked away from him unless she mattered to him more than his own pride, and Lev has never once in his life put anything above his pride. He meant to get on his knee for her. He got on his knee for me too, in his office, and I had let myself believe that meant it was mine alone.

“Give it back to me,” I say, and I hold out my open palm. My voice comes out steadier than I feel, because I will not stand here and let her tell me that my treasure is nothing but a common stone. Whatever it means to him, it means something to me, and she doesn’t get to take that too.

“This little thing?” She holds it up between us, letting it catch the last of the light. “You want it back that badly? You still have not given up on him.” Something in her calm turns strange and unhinged, a flatness dark as ink sliding in behind her eyes that was not there a moment ago.

A distant cheer rises from the party behind us, an all-out riot of glasses and music and someone laughing, and it might as well be coming from another world entirely. Out here it’s only the two of us and the dark water and the wind.

“Then go and get it yourself.” Her voice is frosty, and with one flick of her wrist the crystal is flung out over the railing toward the water.

I’ve already lunged for it before I can think, and my fingers close on nothing but cold air. The pendant vanishes into the sea below, and Yelena’s laughter rises up behind me.

I whirl back around to face her. “What do you want from me?” I shout, and my voice cracks over the wind. “You took the necklace. You have him. What else is left? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

She’s close now, closer than she was a moment ago, close enough that I can see the delirium swimming behind the calm in her eyes. Whatever she came out here to do, it was never about the necklace. A terrible premonition sweeps through me all at once, and I take an involuntary step back toward the railing, and there is nowhere left to go.

She shoves my shoulder, hard, both hands flat against me, while I’m standing there on the wet deck with the railing at my back and nothing beyond it but air. My shoes slip out from under me on the slick boards. My hip catches the rail, and my weight carries me over it, and the whole world tilts onto its side, sky where the deck should be.

I’ve been pushed into the sea, and the last thing I know is the freezing water that gurgles up to swallow me whole.

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