Page 37

“Modest, too.”

“Modesty is what people recommend when they’d prefer you didn’t notice your own competence. I’d rather notice.”

He stands. He buttons his jacket, a gesture so automatic and precise that it looks like a reflex. He walks toward the door, and as he passes my chair he stops. Not close enough to touch. Close enough that his heat reaches me, that warm radius that I’ve stopped pretending is normal body temperature.

“Have dinner with me,” he says. Quietly, so the hallway doesn’t hear.

“Is that a request or an instruction?”

“Which one gets you to say yes?”

“Neither. A compelling argument might.”

He looks down at me. I look up at him. The distance between us is narrow and it feels like the distance between a match and the thing it’s about to light.

“I’m a very good cook,” he says.

“You cook.”

“Don’t sound so surprised. I’ve had a lot of years to learn.”

I almost ask how many. The question is right there, sitting on my tongue, and I can feel the weight of it, the way it would crack the surface of whatever careful fiction we’re maintaining. How many years? How many, exactly. Because the man standing above me looks thirty-five and moves like someone who’s been navigating rooms full of people for far longer than thirty-five years, and the question would force us both into territory that neither of us is ready to map.

“Friday,” I say instead.

“Friday.”

He leaves. I sit in the empty conference room and press my palms against the table and breathe. My heart is racing. My skin is flushed. But underneath the physical response, underneath the pull and the heat and the relentless want, there’s something else. Something lighter. Something that feels dangerously close to fun.

He makes me laugh. Not with jokes, not with charm, but with the precision of his responses, the way he parries what I throw at him and sends it back sharper. I’m smart and he knows I’m smart and he’s not intimidated by it. He’s attracted to it. I can see it in the way his eyes warm when I push back, the way his mouth almost smiles when I say something that would make a lesser man defensive.

That’s the part I can’t blame on a biological mechanism. That’s the part that’s mine.

I go back to my desk. Katya is waiting in her usual spot by the window, reading something on her phone. She looks up when I sit down.

“Good meeting?” she asks.

“Productive.”

“Mm.” She puts her phone away. “You know, for two people who are pretending nothing happened, you’re both terrible at it.”

I stare at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You came out of that conference room looking like someone turned a heat lamp on inside your chest. And he walked past me on the way to the elevator and he was almost smiling. Dominic Voronov does not almost smile. Not at work. Not ever.”

“Maybe Gregor told him a joke.”

“Gregor has never told a joke in his life. Gregor’s idea of humor is a correctly formatted spreadsheet.” Katya crosses her arms. “I’m not asking you to tell me anything. I’m telling you to be careful.”

“Careful of what?”

She holds my gaze. There’s something in her expression that I’ve been seeing more often lately, a tension between what she wants to say and what she’s allowed to say, the visible strain of a woman caught between loyalty and honesty.

“This family,” she says slowly. “When they care about someone, they care completely. There’s no halfway. And the things they do to protect the people they care about... you might not always agree with the methods.”

“That sounds like a warning.”

“It’s context. For whatever you’re deciding.”