She did not tell Dimitri about the conversation with Natasha.
She spent two days deciding whether this was a mistake, turning the information over in her mind from every angle the way she turned over problems in seminar: What did she know? What could she verify? What were the possible interpretations? What were the stakes of each possible action?
What she knew: Natasha Volkov wanted the Organization. Natasha viewed Jane as a variable in her plans — either a liability to be neutralised or a tool to be used. The conversation had been a test of some kind, and Jane wasn't yet certain what she'd revealed by passing it.
What she couldn't verify: whether Natasha's aims were a genuine threat to Dimitri, or to Jane herself, or both.
What the stakes were: significant, in directions she didn't fully understand yet.
So she waited. She gathered more information. She watched Natasha at dinner — the estate's dining room had become an increasingly interesting theatre over the three days of her visit, with Dimitri and his cousin moving around each other with the careful, practiced wariness of two people who had grown up in the same dangerous house and never fully trusted each other.
Natasha was charming at dinner. That was what made her dangerous. She was warm and funny and asked Jane questions about her studies with what appeared to be genuine interest, and twice made Dimitri's aide Anton laugh out loud, which Jane suspected was not a common occurrence. She was, Jane thought, the kind of woman who could be whatever the room needed — and who used that ability with the precision of a scalpel.
And Dimitri — Dimitri watched his cousin with something behind his eyes that wasn't quite suspicion and wasn't quite affection and was, perhaps, the complicated residue of a history Jane didn't know.
On the third evening of Natasha's visit, Jane was coming down the main staircase when she heard voices from the study. The door was not quite closed.
She stopped.
"—girl is making you soft. You know that."
"Watch your mouth."
"I'm watching the Organisation, Mitya. Someone has to. While you're playing chess with a university student in the Urals—"
"The Brennan situation is handled. The Marchetti problem is resolved. Everything is—"
"Everything is proceeding because Anton and I are managing it. What are you doing?"
A long silence.
"Send her back," Natasha said. Her voice had changed — softer, almost gentle, which was somehow worse. "Send her back to London, Dimitri. Give her money, a story, a new phone. Let her go back to her small life. Before this becomes something neither of you can undo."
Another silence, longer.
"No," Dimitri said.
Jane descended the remaining stairs very quietly and went to the library and sat for a long time in the dark with the fire for company, thinking about what she'd heard, and what it meant, and why the word no, spoken in that tone, had done something strange and complicated to her chest.