Page 35 of Crimson Curse
Daniil’s ice-gray eyes land on me. The room waits. “Tell Lucien we are tired of burying men for old ghosts,” he says, his voice like steel under velvet. “Add that the reliquary proved the point. Make the meeting sound like a final negotiation. I want it to sound like surrender.”
Lex is still typing. “I will prep backup locations in case they demand a change at the last minute.”
I breathe in and out, even and slow. “There is something else,” I say, and all the men in the room look at me at once. “I will not be hidden away or sent to a guest room like a relic you don’t want touched. I’m not coming to the meeting floor. I understand what my presence would do to the temperature in that room, but I will be there in the building. If we go down, we do it facing forward.”
I lift my eyes to Daniil’s and lock on. “You promised me a place beside you. This is where it starts.”
Daniil’s gaze sweeps over my face as if memorizing every line. “You like to test me with the hard truths,” he says, his tone tinged with a hint of pride.
“Truth is the only thing worth saying,” I reply.
He holds his silence, glancing at Lex, then Timur, before letting his gaze settle back on me.
“At the edge of the room,” he decides. “In a secured booth with a private exit that leads directly to the service tunnel. Lex and Timur will build it. Roman will place two men with you who take orders only from me. If you see anything I miss, you say it in myear. You do not move unless I tell you to. If the moment turns, you walk away even if I’m not at your side.”
“I will walk away with your voice in my ear,” I say, feeling heat rise behind my eyes. “That is the only way I walk.”
Nikolai clears his throat gently. “While you two negotiate the rules of breathing, I will send the message.” He disappears into the hall.
The next hour unfolds with mechanical rhythm. Phones keep ringing. Men move in and out with reports. Somewhere between the security checklists and the map of the river frontage, a trembling finds me and will not be soothed. I excuse myself and step into the hall where the portraits are hung. Galina Zorin looks down from her frame with that unblinking calm that made entire cities change their routes. The air feels cooler here. I lay my hand against the wall and breathe until the world settles back into the edges of my skin.
Footsteps approach quietly. Daniil doesn’t touch me when he comes to stand beside me. He lets the silence linger a moment longer.
“You hate that they pulled you into a choice like this,” he murmurs. “You hate that your first language is not this one, and yet you speak it better than men who have spent their lives practicing.”
“I hate that they want to make me small,” I reply. “And I hate that I almost let them.”
“You looked at the empty case and told me what needed to happen next.” His gaze cuts toward the office. “The reliquary was never their prize. Your reaction was but they won’t get it.”
I look up at him then, feeling the ring of power that seems to live around him like heat. “I think we’re both going to bleed before this is over,” I respond honestly.
“We are going to win,” he answers, as if correction is a kind of tenderness.
“I’m not asking you to be gentle,” I say. “I’m asking you to be smarter than they are.”
“That,” he replies, “has always been the plan.”
We walk back into the office, and the momentum sweeps us up again. Nikolai returns with a brief nod. “Message sent through our friend in Montreal. Acknowledged by a number tied to a closed Prague exchange that has belonged to Lucien for seven years. He read it. He is thinking about it.”
“Good,” Daniil says. “Make him think faster.”
Nikolai’s smile is quick. “I included a line about the museum. I mentioned that men who steal without being seen often die without an audience. He will get the poetry of it.”
“The police,” Lex says from the doorway, “want a statement. I will handle it with your museum contact, Naomi, if you want me to run interference.”
I nod. “Yes, please. Tell them I will provide the label text for the gap in the case if they need it for their reports.” The scholar in me is still there, wanting to make a record of the loss in the catalog. It’s a tiny act of order in a night that feels like a long corridor without windows.
Timur brings in a set of blueprints he is tracing by hand. He points out load-bearing columns, catwalks, and the place where the floor changes grade, a detail that can break an ankle if aperson runs without looking. He circles a square blank room near the service tunnel entrance. “Your booth,” he tells me. “We will build it there and dress the hallway, so it looks like storage if anyone wanders.”
Daniil’s mouth hardens into a line. He doesn’t want me near Viktor or Lucien, but he knows I won’t bend. I’ll be at his side, no matter the cost. I reach across the desk and cover his hand with mine.
The intercom crackles, and one of Daniil’s men announces that the vehicles for the first sweep are ready. Maksim appears long enough to outline the roof walk and vanishes again with a grunt that sounds like satisfaction.
Midnight gives way to one, then two. I balance on the arm of a chair, nursing lukewarm tea that has lost its warmth and turned into stubborn resolve. In the dark pane of glass, a stranger looks back at me, a woman reshaped from a nervous museum intern into someone who belongs in this dangerous world.
Daniil has changed his shirt and rolled his sleeves, and somehow that little detail makes my throat tight again. He looks up, the line of his mouth softening.
“They accepted,” Lex announces before turning on his heel and leaving to find Nikolai.
