Chapter 1105: Red Flag Plot: Peter’s Quiet Rage

The closet smelled of warm skin and expensive perfume, and the soft white floor under my back was holding the weight me and my wife with the unbothered competence of architecture that had been built for exactly this kind of morning-after reckoning.

ARIA’s design philosophy, in three words: keep the king happy.

The lighting had dimmed itself another shade ten minutes into the proceedings, switched the holographic styling field to off about four minutes after that, and was now running an ambient warm-gold program along the underside of the suit racks that was, frankly, more thoughtful than half the hotels I’d ever booked on this sad little planet.

The mirror at the end of the island was respectfully dark.

Even the ventilation had slowed its rhythm to match Anastasia’s breathing, which was a little detail I noticed because I was a man who noticed details, and because it was exactly the kind of small unbidden flex an architecture-tier goddess threw in when she wanted me to know she was paying attention.

Thanks, ARIA.

Anastasia was draped across my chest in the dignified collapse like she had won what she came in for and was now resting on the trophy. Dark hair across my ribs. One leg hooked over my thigh. Her cheek on my pectoral.

The bite mark on my left shoulder was hers, signed in teeth, the small clean half-moon she always left as a Russian standard receipt—proof of attendance, proof of satisfaction, proof of ownership.

I stared at the ceiling.

She wasn’t speaking.

That was the first red flag.

Anastasia post-coital was a woman with two settings. Smug, and quiet.

Smug meant she’d come into the closet wanting to settle a score from another room, and she’d settled it, and now she was going to lie on me and grin at the ceiling for forty minutes before getting up to start her day.

Quiet meant she’d come into the closet carrying something, and the morning we’d just had had been her deciding whether to give it to me before Paris.

Today was quiet.

Quiet was the bad one and meant my morning was about to develop a plot.

I waited.

I don’t prompt Anastasia because gives information at the speed Anastasia chooses and poking her on the timeline of a delivery is the verbal equivalent of attempting to renegotiate the cost of a Hermès bag with the salesperson—it doesn’t get you the bag faster, and now they remember you.

I closed my eyes. Felt her breath against my ribs. Let her have the silence she’d earned.

Three full minutes.

She lifted her face.

"Peter."

"Mm."

"Be Peter for the next part."

"...I am Peter."

"Be him more. I am about to tell you something you do not want to hear in your other voice."

I opened my eyes.

She was looking at me grey to mine, no smile, no smirk, no Anastasia gloss on the surface of her face—just her, naked, propped on one elbow on my chest, hair spilling forward, the faintest pink mark on her own collarbone where my mouth had been an hour ago.

I turned into my Peter Carter Form, and let the Eros body underneath the shell do what it always did when something serious was about to land—went very still, lowered the public temperature of the man around it by several degrees, and quietly opened ARIA’s threat-intelligence wing in the back of my skull, because whatever my wife was about to say, my goddess was going to want to hear it the same instant I did.

Taboo, in my head, made the small alert sound she made when she’d already clocked an incoming weather system. [She like she’s about telling the truth, Master. I am curios]

Dark Seduction, lower, slower: [the woman is afraid of giving this to you, and she is giving it anyway.]

I didn’t answer them.

"All right."

Anastasia took a breath.

"A woman named Senithe came to Moscow eleven days ago."

There are roughly four sentences a man in my position does not want to hear at six-fifty in the morning, and Senithe came to Moscow eleven days ago was three of them at once.

Senithe.

In my wife’s city.

Eleven days ago.

You couldn’t have given me worse news with a personalised envelope.

I kept my face nueatral.

"In Moscow."

"In my Moscow, when I went back to visit my ancetral home."

I knew her home and she’s gone back home there before she came back... Anastasia had mentioned the ancestral home the way she mentioned a pair of shoes she was not prepared to share—once, at a distance, with the implication that asking again would be impolite.

I had not asked again. The number of people who knew where her parent’s home was, evidently, did not include me... I knew the loaction but had never visited there. I was not going to be petty about that this morning.

Other mornings, sure. Today, it could wait.

"Did she announce herself."

"She waited for me. She was sitting in my home lab when I came home from the diner with my parents. She was simply there, in my chair, with a glass of my best vodka she had poured for herself, watching the snow."

"How did you know it was her."

"Because I did not pour the vodka, Peter, and the bottle in question lives in a vault behind a Rothko that does not, if I have not personally opened it, open."

I let that sit.

A goddess walked through a wall. Helped herself to my wife’s private vodka. From a vault behind a Rothko. And then waited in my wife’s chair for my wife to come home from the diner so they could have a conversation about the snow.

That was a calling card.

A calligraphy-invitation-to-your-own-funeral calling card. Beautifully made. Personalised. Hand-delivered.

THE AUDACITY OF THEM!

"What did she want," I said.

"Conversation."

"Anastasia."

"Conversation, Peter. She did not ask me for anything. She did not threaten or propose anything... I did not even know the fuck she was until recently when I came back. She drank the vodka, complimented the snow, told me four things about my own grandfather I did not know—and one thing about my mother I have been assuming was a private family matter for twenty years—and then she rose, set the empty glass on the table, and walked out."

I knew ARIA knew about this... not everyone knew of Senithe, she must’ve told Anastasia afterwards. But hadn’t told me Senithe had confronted my woman!

"Through a wall I guess?"

"Politely."