London was exactly as she'd left it: grey, damp, magnificently indifferent to the various dramas of its residents. They landed at a private airfield at eleven p.m. and were in a car moving through the rain-glossed streets by midnight.
Jane pressed her hand to the cold window and watched the familiar city pass and felt something so specific and complicated that she couldn't find a name for it. She was here. She was back. In forty-eight hours, presumably, she could call her parents, see Maya, return to her flat and her books and the life she'd been building.
The thought should have felt like relief. Mostly it felt like an ending.
"Stop thinking so loudly," Dimitri said, from the other side of the car.
"I'm not thinking loudly. I'm thinking at a perfectly normal volume."
"For most people. For you—" He looked at her across the dark interior. "You think in italics. I can always tell."
She looked at him. "You cannot tell when I'm thinking in italics."
"Your face does a specific thing when a thought has particular weight. A small compression, here." He indicated his own jaw. "You've been doing it since we landed."
Jane stared at him. The car moved through rainy London. She thought about a man who had catalogued her expressions with the attention usually reserved for intelligence files.
"This is very strange," she said. "Just so you know. All of this is very strange."
"I know," he said. "I'm aware."
"Good," she said. "I'd hate for only one of us to find it strange."
The car stopped outside a building she didn't recognise — a converted townhouse in a quiet Mayfair street, glass and clean lines, discreet. Two men she recognised from Italy were waiting at the door.
This was not, she realised, the penthouse.
"Alternate location," Dimitri said, pre-empting her question. "Safer until things are resolved."
She followed him inside. She was in London. She was in London with Dimitri Volkov in someone else's safe house and tomorrow he was going to deal with a traitor and after that she was supposed to go home.
"I can't go home yet," she said suddenly.
He turned. "What?"
"If you deal with Holt tonight or tomorrow — what about the people he was working with? The ones who know about me? Are they dealt with too?" She met his eyes. "I'm asking practically. Not because I don't want to go home. But because 'go home' only works if home is actually safe."
He looked at her. She saw something move in his expression that was not quite pride and was not quite tenderness and was something in the space between them.
"You'd have been good at this," he said quietly. "If you'd been born into a different world."
"I'd have been good at this in any world," she said. "The question is whether 'this' is a world I want to be in."
He had no answer for that. She hadn't expected one.