The days settled into something that wasn't routine exactly, but wasn't chaos either. Jane had always been the kind of person who, when denied the ability to control external circumstances, controlled internal ones — her reactions, her thoughts, her time.
She was given the run of the ground floor of the estate during daylight hours. This was not a concession she'd asked for so much as a boundary Dimitri established without explanation on the second day, arriving at her room in the morning and saying, with characteristic lack of ceremony, "You may use the lower floor during the day. The library is yours. Irina will bring you anything you need from outside."
"How kind," Jane had said. "What are the terms of my parole? Good behaviour? No attempted escapes?"
"You're welcome to attempt an escape," he said, and for a fraction of a second there was something in his eyes that looked, inappropriately, like the beginning of amusement. "The nearest road is fourteen kilometres away. There are wolves in the forest between here and there. The temperature at night has been minus twenty-three."
Jane absorbed this. "Okay. Terms accepted."
The library was the best room in the house. This was Jane's opinion after three days of exploring the lower floor, and she maintained it firmly: a two-storey room lined floor to ceiling with books in six languages, a rolling ladder, deep leather armchairs, and a fireplace big enough to stand in. She spent most of her daylight hours there, working her way through shelves with the systematic thoroughness that had served her well through three years of literature studies.
She was on her fourth book — a Russian novel in translation that was doing uncomfortable things to her sense of narrative irony — when Dimitri appeared in the library doorway.
He didn't say anything. He crossed to the shelves on the opposite wall, pulled out a book, and settled into the armchair on the other side of the fireplace with the absolute ease of someone who hadn't noticed, or didn't care, that this was her space.
Jane watched him for a moment. "Do you require an invitation, or is that a concept you've never encountered?"
"It's my library," he said, without looking up.
"Technically," Jane said. "But morally, anyone who installs this many books in a room is required to share it graciously." She paused. "That's a rule."
He looked up. That almost-expression again. "Is it."
"Yes. Section four of the International Library Accord."
He returned to his book. But the corner of his mouth was doing something. Jane filed this carefully away — small pieces of information about a man she was determined to understand, because understanding was its own kind of power.
They read in silence for two hours. It was not an entirely unpleasant silence. This, Jane told herself sternly, was simply because silence in a room full of books was objectively pleasant, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the company.
~ * ~
"Who taught you chess?" he asked that evening, over the board.
Jane considered whether to answer. Information was currency here; she didn't want to spend it carelessly. But she was also — she would admit this only to herself — beginning to feel the specific loneliness of a person removed from every familiar thing, and conversation, even with her captor, was still conversation.
"My grandfather," she said. "He was the kind of man who believed every problem could be solved with either a cup of tea or a game of chess, and he wasn't wrong often enough to be corrected."
Dimitri looked at the board. "Is he still alive?"
"He died three years ago. Heart attack." She moved her knight. "He would have had opinions about this situation."
"What kind of opinions?"
"Loud ones. With Welsh vocabulary I can't repeat in polite company." She looked up. "Were you close to your family? Your parents?"
The question landed differently than she'd intended. She watched something in his expression close off — not dramatically, not with obvious emotion, but with the quiet, practiced efficiency of a man who had spent years walling off certain rooms.
"My mother died when I was nine," he said. "My father made me what I am." He moved his rook. "I'm not sure 'close' is the right word for either relationship."
Jane looked at him across the firelight and felt, against every sensible instinct she possessed, a faint and completely inconvenient thread of something like understanding.
She pushed it aside and studied the board.