“It’s been too long.”
“No,” I say. “It hasn’t.”
His wife coughs into her champagne to hide the laugh.
I let him suffer for a second before nodding to her. “You look well.”
“Thank you,” she says smoothly. “You look expensive.”
My mouth almost moves. “That’s because I am.”
Pavel laughs too loudly, relieved by the hint of humor. That’s the thing about these people. They all want to believe they understand me. The dangerous ones know they do not. The weak ones mistake my restraint for an invitation.
I move on before he can ask for anything.
That’s when they really begin to gather.
They come one by one and in pairs, smiling, nodding, touching my arm, lowering their voices, offering compliments shaped like questions.
Roman, wonderful to see you.
Roman, I hear New York is treating you well.
Roman, your foundation has done such interesting work in port security.
Roman, perhaps later we should talk privately.
I answer just enough.
A man like me survives rooms like this by becoming exactly what everyone needs and nothing they can hold.
But even as I move through them, some part of me keeps counting the absences.
Andrei Morozov is not here.
Neither is his wife. Neither are the old loyalists who used to arrive with him like a second coat of skin. Half the men who once stood at his shoulder are dead, missing, retired, in prison, or suddenly devoted to healthier lives in countries without extradition treaties.
That’s my work.
Lev is dead.
That part still sits differently than the rest.
Not because I mourn him. I did not know him well enough to mourn what he was. But blood is blood even when you hate the vein it came through.
There are five different versions of what happened that night, all of them half true and not useful.
He’s gone.
Andrei disappeared underground after that.
Not vanished completely. A man like my father does not vanish. He shrinks his visible shape. He changes houses, changes routes, stops appearing in rooms that once rose for him, sends younger men in his place, tests the ground for mines using other people’s feet.
That should satisfy me.
Instead, it unsettles me.
Andrei Morozov is too proud to hide for long unless he’s building something in the dark.