CHAPTER SEVEN
Mikhail
He'd told himself he wouldn't go to the gala.
Three times in four days he'd told himself this and he was aware, with the particular honesty he applied to himself about things that mattered, that the telling was doing nothing. He was going. He had always been going. The telling himself otherwise was simply the last formality of a man trying to maintain the illusion that he was still in control of something that had stopped being controllable approximately two years ago.
He stood in front of the mirror in his hotel suite and Dmitri stood behind him and to the left, where Dmitri always stood, and neither of them said anything.
Then Dmitri said, "Your tie is fine."
Mikhail looked at his own hands. He'd adjusted it twice. He put his hands down.
"The car is ready," Dmitri said, with the careful neutrality of a man who had noticed everything and was choosing, out of loyalty and something close to affection, to mention only the car.
"Is she there yet."
A pause. Not long. Long enough. "She arrived twenty minutes ago. She's with Michelle Blackwood." Another pause. "King David arrived with Ding an hour ago. They're already inside."
Mikhail turned from the mirror. "Good."
"Venue is at capacity. Approximately four hundred guests. Your team has the perimeter." Dmitri handed him his jacket and Mikhail put it on and Dmitri smoothed the shoulder once with the back of his hand, a gesture so habitual neither of them noticed it anymore. "Are you ready."
Mikhail looked at him.
Dmitri looked back with the expression of a man who had known him for nine years and understood that the question he'd just asked was considerably larger than its four words and had asked it intentionally.
"No," Mikhail said.
The most honest thing he'd said out loud in two years.
Dmitri's expression didn't change but something in his eyes did. Something warm and brief he didn't bother concealing because there was no one else in the room. "You will be," he said. "You always are."
Mikhail held his gaze for a moment. Then he picked up his phone, put it in his inside pocket and said "let's go" and walked to the door and Dmitri fell into step beside him in the easy way of someone who had been walking beside this man through difficult rooms for nearly a decade and had never once considered walking anywhere else.
In the elevator Dmitri looked straight ahead and after a moment said without turning his head, "Everything I've found about her in two years suggests she's exactly who she appears to be."
Mikhail looked at him.
"Which is rare," Dmitri said simply. "In case you needed reminding."
Mikhail said nothing. But something in the set of his shoulders changed. The particular shift of a man receiving something he needed without knowing he needed it.
The elevator opened.
The gala was everything MVK events were. Precisely calibrated and quietly extraordinary. One of Kazan's restored historic buildings, warm lighting against pale stone walls, string music beneath the weight of four hundred conversations. The air smelled of candles and winter and something rich coming from the kitchen.
Mikhail moved through it with the ease of a man accustomed to being the most powerful person in any room. Stopping where he needed to stop. Saying what needed to be said. Expression pleasant and closed, performing sociability with complete competence and minimal investment.
He found Ding and King David at the far end of the room near the bar and felt, the way he always felt in their company, something loosen slightly at the back of his neck.
King David was in a dark suit that fit him correctly, broad shoulders relaxed, his expression carrying the warmth of a man entirely comfortable in himself. He was scanning the room with the easy attention of someone looking for a specific person and when his eyes landed his whole face shifted.
Mikhail followed his gaze.
Michelle Blackwood had just come through the main entrance. Floor length silver dress catching the light, red hair up with a few strands loose, looking across the room with the expression of someone who had just found what they were looking for.
Beside her was Suzanne Paul.
Mikhail went very still.
He'd seen her on a screen for two years. Read every report. Studied every photograph. Watched every interview and runway clip Dmitri had compiled. He'd thought he understood, in some functional way, what it would be like to see her in person.
He had not understood.
She was in deep burgundy, a gown structured at the bodice and fluid everywhere else, moving with her the way clothes move when they've been made by someone who understands the body underneath. Her hair was down and pressed smooth. Her earrings caught the light when she turned her head. Her skin was deep brown and luminous and her face was doing what he'd watched it do on screens for two years but had not been prepared for in person. That particular quality of open attention. A woman who looked at the world with her whole face rather than the careful portion most people offered in public.
She was more. That was the only word for it. More than the screen had been able to contain and the screen had contained quite a lot.
Beside him King David said quietly, "There she is," and moved away from the bar toward Michelle with the unhurried certainty of a man who knew exactly where he was going, and Ding watched him go and turned to look at Mikhail and said nothing for a moment.
Then, "So that is her."
"Yes," Mikhail said.
Ding looked at Suzanne with the assessing attention of a man who had heard enough without being told directly to have formed considerable curiosity. Then he looked back at Mikhail with an expression that was several things at once. Amused. Understanding. Something more serious underneath both.
"She's remarkable looking," Ding said.
"Yes."
"That's the second time you've said yes without looking at me."
"I'm aware."
"Mikhail."
"Ding."
A short silence. Then Ding said "alright" in the tone of a man standing down from something he hadn't fully deployed yet, and picked up his drink and looked back at the room. "King David is going to introduce them. Which means she's about to be standing in a group that includes you and you have approximately ninety seconds to decide how you want to handle that."
Mikhail looked at him.
Ding raised his eyebrows. I'm simply noting the facts. The tactical decisions are entirely yours.
Across the room Michelle had reached King David and they'd done the thing people do when they've been apart and are now together again. The specific gravitational pull of it. Suzanne was standing beside them with the expression of someone pleased for her friend and suddenly aware she was about to be introduced to someone she hadn't anticipated meeting tonight.
King David said something to Michelle. Michelle turned and looked directly across the room at Mikhail and Ding with the directness of a woman who'd been told something and was deciding what to do with it. Then she leaned toward Suzanne and said something.
Suzanne's head turned.
She looked across the room.
She looked at Mikhail.
He didn't look away.
For a moment, across the warm crowded space, they simply looked at each other. Less than three seconds. It felt considerably longer. Her expression was composed and curious and entirely unreadable to him, which was unusual because he could read most people and he had been studying her for two years and he still could not read her, and something about that, something about the particular challenge of it, moved through him like a current.
Then Michelle was pulling her across the room and the moment ended and became a different one.
"Ding Douglas," King David said warmly when they arrived, hand already extended toward Suzanne, smile genuine and immediate. "This is Suzanne Paul. Suzanne, Ding Douglas. And this," he glanced at Mikhail with an expression that contained a question Mikhail hadn't answered yet, "is Mikhail Volkov."
Suzanne looked at him.
Up close she was more again. The brown eyes steady and direct, holding a quality of intelligence that assessed without performing assessment. The kind of looking that missed very little. There was a small scar at the edge of her left eyebrow he hadn't been able to see in any photograph. She smelled of something warm and slightly floral he couldn't immediately identify and didn't want to stop trying to.
"Mr Volkov," she said.
He felt her voice before he processed it. Low and clear with a faint trace of Lagos that years in New York had softened but not erased. Hearing it directed at him specifically did something to his chest he was going to examine later in private.
"Ms Paul," he said. His voice came out even. He was grateful for that. "I've admired your work."
Something moved briefly across her face. Not suspicion exactly. The careful attention of a woman who'd learned to note when a compliment was genuine and when it was the opening move of something else. "Thank you," she said after a moment. "This is a beautiful event."
"Kazan is a beautiful city. It deserves beautiful events."
Beside him Ding made a sound that wasn't quite anything and looked away at the room with the expression of a man who was absolutely listening to every word.
King David had drawn Michelle into a separate conversation with the easy social grace of a man who understood when two people needed a moment of relative privacy within a group without making the giving of it obvious. Michelle went with him and glanced back at Suzanne once. I see everything and we will talk later.
Which left Mikhail and Suzanne standing beside each other in the warm noise of the gala with Ding technically present and functionally absent and the particular charged quality of two people aware of each other in a way neither had acknowledged out loud.
"You're the owner," Suzanne said. "Of MVK Brewery Group."
"Yes."
"Based in Moscow."
"Primarily. I travel considerably."
She nodded slowly. Eyes moving briefly around the venue before returning to him. "What brought you to Kazan specifically."
"It's home," he said simply. "Moscow is where I work. Kazan is where my family is from. This launch mattered to me personally."
Something shifted in her expression. Not softening exactly. A recalibration. The small adjustment of someone who'd received information that didn't fit the category they'd already placed you in. "That's not what I expected you to say."
"What did you expect."
"Something about market strategy." The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one, the shape of it without the full commitment, and it was the most compelling thing he'd seen in two years of watching her.
"Market strategy also exists," he said. "But it wasn't what I thought of first."
She looked at him with those steady brown eyes and he held it and didn't look away and didn't fill the silence because the silence was doing something and he wasn't going to interrupt it.
A passing waiter offered them both a glass. Suzanne took one and looked at it. "What is this."
"Medovukha. Russian honey wine. Traditional to Tatarstan."
She tried it and her expression did something immediate and genuine. Surprise and pleasure arriving at the same time without any management of either.
"That's excellent," she said.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
She looked at him again. He was aware of Ding to his left radiating carefully contained amusement. Aware of the four hundred people around them. Aware of all of it at a distance, the way you're aware of weather when you're indoors. Present and irrelevant simultaneously.
"My sister," he said, "is interested in commissioning a piece. She's been following your work for some time." He reached into his inside pocket and produced his card and held it out. "If you're willing to discuss it while you're in Kazan I'd be grateful."
She took the card. Looked at it for a moment with an expression he couldn't fully read. Then looked back up at him and he had the distinct and slightly destabilising sensation of being seen by someone who was seeing him rather than the version of him that rooms like this one were accustomed to.
"I'm here for two weeks," she said.
"I know," he said.
Too much. He understood that immediately. It had come out with a certainty that required explanation he couldn't currently provide, and he watched her eyes note it. That small flicker of something. Before her expression settled back into its composed curiosity.
"Then I'll be in touch," she said, with a slight emphasis on I that told him she'd noted the I know and filed it somewhere she was going to return to.
She was perceptive. He had known this from two years of watching her. Knowing it and experiencing it directed at him were very different things.
"I look forward to it," he said.
She held his gaze one moment longer and then Ding appeared beside him with the timing of a man who had been waiting for exactly the right moment and said to Suzanne with his most pleasant expression, "Ms Paul the piece you showed at New York Fashion Week last spring was one of the most interesting things I saw all season," and Suzanne turned to him and the conversation expanded and Mikhail stood in it and said the right things and watched her talk and listened to her laugh at something Ding said and felt, with a clarity that was almost physical, that two years of watching from a distance had not prepared him for this.
Nothing had prepared him for this.
Later, when the gala had thinned to its final hour and Ding had gone to find King David and Michelle and Suzanne had been drawn into a conversation with someone from the Russian fashion press, Mikhail stood at the edge of the room with a glass of medovukha he hadn't touched and Dmitri materialised beside him the way Dmitri always did. Without announcement. Simply present.
"Well," Dmitri said.
Mikhail said nothing.
"She's exactly what the reports suggested." He was looking at the room rather than at Mikhail, voice low and even. "And also completely different."
"Yes."
"The reports couldn't account for the in-person version." A pause. "No report can."
Mikhail looked at him sideways.
Dmitri's expression was doing something that on any other face would have been called a smile. On his it was more restrained than that but no less genuine. "I'm simply making an observation."
"Make fewer of them."
"I make exactly the right number." He picked up a glass from a passing tray and held it without drinking. "She noticed you too. In case you were uncertain."
Mikhail looked back at the room. At Suzanne across it, laughing at something the journalist had said, her hand moving the way it did when she was genuinely engaged rather than performing it.
"I know," he said quietly.
"Good." Dmitri was quiet for a moment. Then, with the ease of someone who had fully earned the right to say what he was about to say, "Ask her to dinner tomorrow. Stop standing at the edges of things."
Mikhail looked at him.
Dmitri looked back with the steady unintimidated expression of the only person on earth who could say that to him and remain standing.
"You've been standing at the edges of this particular thing for two years," he said simply. "It's time."
Mikhail was quiet for a long moment. Across the room Suzanne laughed again and the sound of it carried through the noise of the gala and reached him and did what it always did.
Made everything else in the room slightly less significant.
"Yes," he said finally. "It is."
Dmitri nodded once. Said nothing further. Didn't need to.
He simply stood beside Mikhail in the easy way of a brother who has been beside you through enough difficult things that standing beside you through one more requires no discussion at all.