She found him in the study the following morning, standing over a map spread across the desk, two men she hadn't seen before flanking him. They spoke in rapid Russian and when she appeared in the open doorway — she'd knocked; she was determined to maintain basic civility even under protest — he looked up and the conversation stopped.
"I'll come back," she said.
"Stay." He said it the way he said most things, without question mark or qualification, and Jane opened her mouth to object on principle and then noticed the map.
She was, by education and instinct, observant. The map showed Western Europe. There were marks on it — London, notably — and several photographs, paper-clipped to the side, of men she didn't recognise.
Dimitri dismissed the two men with a word, and they left with the efficient soundlessness of people professionally trained to be absent.
Jane crossed to the desk. "Is this why I'm here? Because of whatever's happening on that map?"
He looked at her. "Yes."
"Who are those men in the photos?"
He was quiet for a moment — not the silence of someone deciding whether to lie, she thought, but of someone deciding how much truth to give. "They are people I am in conflict with. People who, two weeks ago, were made aware that I had developed an interest in you."
Jane stared at him. "An interest in me."
"It was observed at the gala," he said, with the flat factuality of someone describing a weather event rather than a situation he had created. "In my world, people who observe weakness in others — or what appears to be weakness — use it."
"I'm not a weakness," Jane said, with enough edge to cut.
"No," he agreed. "You're not. But they don't know that." He paused. "Bringing you here removed you from their reach while I dealt with the problem."
Jane pressed her palms on the desk and looked at the map, the photographs, the careful notations in a language she didn't read. She thought about being moved like a chess piece to protect a flank. She thought about how she'd been turned from a person into a variable in someone else's equation without being consulted.
"You should have told me," she said.
"You wouldn't have come."
"No, I wouldn't have. Because I'm a person, not a piece of luggage, and kidnapping is illegal in every country including Russia." She looked up at him. "You could have explained. You could have asked."
He met her eyes. Something in his expression shifted in that barely perceptible way she'd started to recognise — the slight loosening of the iron composure, the micro-adjustment that, in a less controlled man, would have been an emotion.
"You're right," he said.
Jane blinked. That was not the response she'd been braced for. She'd been ready for deflection, dismissal, that particular coldness he deployed like a shield.
"You're right," he said again, more quietly. "I should have found another way."
Jane looked at this man — this enormous, dangerous, impossible man — who had just said something she suspected he said to approximately no one, ever, and felt the ground shift slightly beneath her feet.
She picked up the photograph of the man closest to the London marker. "Tell me about them," she said. "If I'm in the middle of this, I want to understand it."
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he began to talk.