CHAPTER NINE
Mikhail
He'd been to forty three countries.
Sat across tables from heads of state. Closed deals that restructured markets. Walked into rooms where the collective net worth exceeded the GDP of small nations and felt nothing more than the focused calm he brought to everything that required his full attention.
He had never once in his adult life been nervous about a dinner.
He was nervous about this dinner.
Not in a way that showed. Nothing showed with Mikhail unless he permitted it. But it was there, underneath everything, a low hum of something he couldn't fully name, as he stood outside the restaurant and checked his watch and confirmed that he was four minutes early which meant he had been standing here for four minutes which was not something he did.
Dmitri was in the car behind him. He'd declined to come inside on the grounds that he had a call to take, which was true, and also because he'd seen Mikhail's face in the forty minutes between the hotel and here and had made a decision, with the quiet discretion of someone who knew exactly when his presence wasn't required, to give him these four minutes alone.
Mikhail checked his watch again.
The restaurant door opened and she walked out of it.
She'd arrived before him.
She was in deep plum, a dress simple in its structure and extraordinary in its effect, hair down, small gold earrings, looking at her phone with the focused expression of someone reading something that required attention. She hadn't seen him yet and he had approximately three seconds before she did and he used those three seconds to simply look at her the way he'd been looking at her for two years except that now she was twenty feet away and real in a way that still did something to his chest he'd stopped trying to categorise.
Then she looked up and saw him and her expression did something quick and unmanaged. A flicker of something warm that came and went before she replaced it with the composed version.
He filed that flicker away carefully. It told him something she hadn't said out loud.
"You're early," he said, walking toward her.
"I'm always early. It's a Lagos thing. We arrive early and then complain that nobody else does."
He stopped in front of her and they looked at each other and the evening air moved between them cold and unhurried.
"You look," he started, and then stopped. Which was not something he did. Starting sentences without knowing where they were going.
She raised an eyebrow. The tiniest movement. Waiting.
"Remarkable," he said.
Something moved across her face. Not the flicker from before. Something quieter and more considered. "Thank you," she said, and meant it the way she meant things. Simply and without performance.
They went inside.
The restaurant was one he'd been coming to since childhood. Family owned, uncompromising about its food and completely indifferent to its own reputation because its reputation had been established long before anyone currently eating there was born. Deep red walls. Warm low lighting. Tables close enough together that the room felt inhabited rather than arranged.
Galina appeared the moment they were seated. Broad, sixties, with the frank assessment of someone who'd been watching people walk through her door for thirty years and had developed opinions about all of them.
She looked at Suzanne and said to Mikhail in Russian, without lowering her voice, "She is beautiful."
Mikhail looked at Galina with an expression that communicated clearly this was not a conversation he had invited.
Galina was entirely unbothered. She switched to accented English and looked at Suzanne directly. "He never brings anyone here. You must be important."
Suzanne looked at Mikhail. Her expression was trying very hard not to be amusement and failing.
"Galina," Mikhail said.
"I'm simply making an observation." She handed them their menus with the satisfaction of someone who had said exactly what they intended to say. "I'll send Yuri."
She left. Mikhail looked at his menu with the expression of a man reconsidering several recent decisions.
"She seems lovely," Suzanne said.
"She's interfering."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." She opened her menu and looked at it and then looked up at him over the top of it. "You never bring anyone here."
"I come here for the food."
"Hm." She looked back at the menu. The corner of her mouth was doing something.
"It's not a significant detail," he said.
"I didn't say it was."
"Your face said it was."
She looked up at him and this time she didn't suppress it and she smiled, full and genuine, and it was the first time he'd seen her smile completely and without management and it did to him exactly what he'd suspected it would do. Made everything else in the room temporarily less significant.
He looked at his menu.
Yuri came and they ordered. Mikhail ordered the beef stroganoff because Galina's was the standard against which he'd measured every other stroganoff in thirty five years and none had compared. Suzanne ordered the same after he described it and then the bread basket arrived and she took a piece and tried it and closed her eyes for one second.
"This bread," she said.
"Yes."
"What's in it."
"I've been asking Galina that for twenty years. She won't say."
Suzanne tore another piece. "Smart woman."
"Infuriating woman."
"Also not mutually exclusive." She looked at him across the table. "Tell me something about yourself that's not in any interview."
He looked at her. "I don't do interviews."
"I know. I looked." She held his gaze with the directness he was beginning to understand was simply how she looked at things. Fully and without the performance of looking. "So tell me something true."
He considered it. People didn't ask Mikhail Volkov to tell them something true. They were generally too occupied with what they wanted from him to be curious about who he was.
"I can't cook," he said. "At all. I've tried. It has never once produced anything edible."
She stared at him. "Nothing?"
"I set fire to toast once."
"Toast isn't cooked. Toast is heated."
"And yet."
She laughed. It came out of her suddenly and completely, her head tilting back slightly, and the sound of it filled his chest in a way he felt before he could manage it. When she brought her head back down her eyes were bright and she was looking at him differently. The composed assessment replaced by something warmer and less guarded. The look of someone who has discovered an unexpected thing and is pleased about it.
"The youngest Russian billionaire on Forbes," she said, "cannot make toast."
"It's a design flaw. I've accepted it."
"Have you tried to fix it."
"I've decided it doesn't require fixing. Other people cook. I eat what they produce. The system functions."
She shook her head slowly and took another piece of bread. "That's either very honest or very lazy."
"Both," he said. "Probably."
She smiled again and looked at the table and when she looked back up something had shifted in her expression. Still warm but with something more considered underneath it. "Can I ask you something."
"Yes."
"Why Kazan. You built your empire in Moscow. You could have launched anywhere." She held his gaze. "Why here."
He was quiet for a moment. "My grandmother lived three streets from this restaurant. She died four years ago. She never saw the company become what it became." He looked at his glass. "This launch was for her. She would have enjoyed the fuss."
Suzanne was quiet. She was looking at him with an expression he hadn't seen directed at him before. Not pity, he wouldn't have tolerated pity. Something more careful than that. Something that recognised what he'd just said for what it was, which was more than he usually gave.
"She sounds like she was wonderful," she said.
"She was the only person who was never afraid of me." And then, because it was true and he'd already started, "She used to say that fear was a waste of everyone's time and that she hadn't lived eighty years to start wasting time now."
Suzanne's expression did something that moved through her face and settled. "I would have liked her," she said quietly.
"Yes," he said. "She would have liked you too."
The stroganoff arrived and the conversation moved and shifted the way good conversations do, covering ground without appearing to cover it. She told him about Lagos. About her mother who taught secondary school English and had strong opinions about everything and communicated them without apology. About her father who died when she was fourteen and whose hands she had inherited, the same shape, the same way of moving, which she'd only noticed years later when she was sewing something and looked down and saw him in her own fingers.
He listened the way he did everything. Completely. Without the performance of listening that most people offered. Without waiting for his turn to speak. He simply received what she gave and she noticed that and it affected her in a way she didn't entirely conceal.
"You're very easy to talk to," she said at one point, with the expression of someone slightly surprised by their own observation.
"People don't usually say that."
"What do they usually say."
"That I'm very difficult to read."
"You are that too," she said. "Both things are true." She looked at him steadily. "Difficult to read and easy to talk to and I'm not sure yet what to do with that combination."
He held her gaze. "You don't have to do anything with it."
"No," she agreed. "Not tonight."
Not tonight. He filed that too.
They finished dinner and Galina reappeared to clear the plates and looked between them with the satisfied expression of a woman whose read on a situation had been confirmed and who considered this a personal victory.
"Coffee," she said. Not a question.
"Please," Suzanne said.
Galina looked at Mikhail with an expression that said you see and left before he could respond to it.
"I like her," Suzanne said.
"She's going to be insufferable about this."
"About what."
He looked at her. She looked back with the expression of someone who knew exactly what and was going to make him say it anyway.
"About you being here," he said.
"Hm," she said, for the second time that evening, with the same quality of saying nothing while communicating everything.
The coffee came and they drank it and the restaurant had thinned around them without either of them noticing and when Mikhail looked up the room was nearly empty and he had no idea when that had happened.
They walked back through streets that were quiet now, the cold serious and the sky above them clear and salted with stars in the way that city skies rarely manage. Their breath made small clouds in the air between them. They were walking close enough that their arms occasionally touched at the shoulder and neither of them adjusted the distance.
He walked her to the hotel entrance and they stopped and faced each other and the warm light of the lobby fell across her face.
"Tomorrow," he said.
She tilted her head. "That depends."
"On what this time."
"On whether you're going to tell me more things that aren't in any interview." Those steady brown eyes on him. "I find I've become quite interested in those."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "I think I can manage that."
"Then tomorrow," she said.
She went inside. He stood on the pavement after the door closed and watched her cross the lobby toward the elevator through the glass and watched until she stepped in and the doors closed and then he turned and walked back to the car.
Dmitri looked at him as he got in.
Mikhail looked straight ahead.
"Well," Dmitri said.
"Don't," Mikhail said.
Dmitri pressed his lips together. Started the car. They pulled away and drove in silence for approximately forty five seconds before Dmitri said, without looking away from the road, "She laughed."
Mikhail said nothing.
"I could hear it from the car. Through the window." A pause. "I didn't know you were funny."
"I'm not funny."
"She seemed to think differently."
"Dmitri."
"I'm simply making an observation."
"Make fewer of them."
Dmitri said nothing further. But in the dark of the car his face was doing something that on any other face would have been called a grin and that on his face was considerably more restrained than that but no less genuine.
Mikhail looked out the window at Kazan moving past in the dark and felt something he hadn't felt in so long he'd genuinely stopped expecting to feel it again.
Something that felt, quietly and without announcement, like the beginning of something.