The peace lasted three weeks before Natasha made her move.
Jane had begun, in those three weeks, to believe that something like ordinary was possible. Not ordinary in the way her life before had been ordinary — the essays and the lectures and the Tuesday evenings on the sofa — but a new kind of ordinary, one that included chess on Thursday evenings and Dimitri appearing in her kitchen at strange hours and the particular, careful rhythm of two people learning how much space to take up around each other.
It was fragile, this ordinary. She knew that. She held it the way you held something you understood might not last — carefully, but without pretending it was more permanent than it was.
She was at the library when it ended.
The university library — her library, the one she'd been using since her first year when she'd discovered the back corner with the good light and the chair that didn't squeak. She was surrounded by the smell of paper and old bindings and the distant, steady sound of keyboards, and she had almost finished the chapter she needed to read, and everything was fine.
Her phone rang.
"Where are you?" Dimitri said.
"Library. Why?"
"Natasha is in London." A pause that contained several things she'd learned to read. This one contained caution, and something underneath the caution that was more complicated. "She has requested a meeting. With both of us."
Jane closed her book slowly. The page number registered somewhere in the back of her mind — she would need to find her place again later. "Both of us," she said.
"She was specific."
Jane sat with this for a moment. Outside the tall library windows, the London afternoon was doing its grey, efficient thing. Students moved past on the path below, heads down, absorbed in their own concerns. Nobody in the library looked up from their screens. The ordinary world continued its ordinary business, entirely indifferent to the fact that Natasha Volkov had come to London and was asking for a meeting.
"When?" Jane asked.
"Tomorrow evening. I could decline—"
"No," Jane said. "We go." She paused, turning it over in her mind the way she turned over an argument before committing to it — looking for the holes, the places where it could come apart. "I want to hear what she has to say."
A silence. The kind that meant he was choosing his words. "Jane. Natasha is—"
"Clever, dangerous, fond of you in her own way, and playing a longer game than any of us have fully mapped yet," Jane said. "I know. Which is exactly why I want to be in the room." She picked up her bag and began gathering her things with her free hand. "Book somewhere she can't make a scene. Neutral ground. She'll want somewhere public as plausible deniability — a restaurant, probably. Somewhere with good acoustics and enough ambient noise that adjacent tables can't hear clearly."
A pause. She'd learned, over months, to interpret his pauses the way you learned to read weather — the specific quality of the silence told you something about what was happening on the other side of it. This one was the particular pause of a man encountering something that managed to surprise him even when, by rights, it shouldn't anymore.
"All right," he said.
"Good." She stood, slipping her book into her bag. Around her the library continued its quiet business, indifferent and reassuring. "Also — and I'm asking this genuinely because I don't have a reference point — what is the etiquette for meeting the family member who tried to orchestrate your removal from power and may or may not have had feelings about your current situation? Is there a protocol? A recommended approach?"
"There isn't one," he said.
"Then we'll make it up," she said. "We're good at that."
Another pause. Shorter this time. Warmer, in the specific way his warmth operated — quietly, without announcement. "Yes," he said. "We are."
She walked out of the library into the grey London afternoon, her bag on her shoulder and her mind already turning over the problem of Natasha — what she wanted, what she knew, what she was willing to do to get it. Natasha was not an enemy. Jane had understood that since Russia, since the early morning conversation in the kitchen when the housekeeper had been moving quietly in the background and Natasha had looked at her with those calculating grey eyes that were so like Dimitri's.
Not an enemy. Something more complicated than that. Someone who loved him in a way that had curdled into something controlling, and who was smart enough to know that Jane knew this.
The question was what she intended to do about it.
Jane pulled her coat tighter against the London wind and thought about chess. About the way a good player didn't just respond to the last move — they were already three moves ahead, mapping the board for what came next.
Natasha had made her move.
Now it was Jane's turn to decide what the board looked like.