"Anastasia."

"There is a faint shimmer in the wall now. I have not had it replaced. I am keeping it as a souvenir."

I almost laughed despite the anger!

That was exactly what Anastasia would do. The wall a goddess walked through is now décor. You don’t fix it. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

You hang a small brass plaque next to it and start telling guests it’s a gift.

"And the four things about your grandfather."

"Were correct."

"And the one thing about your mother."

"Was correct."

"And the message."

She held my eyes.

"Was that she knows exactly where I am positioned in your life. That she knows the sequence of how I came to be here. That she knows what I gave up to be here, and what I have not yet given you, and what I am still holding back."

The closet held its breath.

"What you have not yet given me."

"Yes."

"Anastasia."

"I am giving it to you now."

"Why now."

"Because that Senithe knows it, Peter, and I will not let her hold leverage over us that I have not first laid in your hand myself."

I sat up and she slid off my chest in one long unhurried motion and rearranged herself beside me on the floor with one knee folded under her and one hand flat on my thigh, the way she anchored herself to me whenever the conversation was about to require her to be fully truthful. Her grey eyes did not leave my face.

The shake at the bottom of her composure was—I would have missed it, six months ago. I did not miss it now.

"Talk."

She did.

She did.

"My family—what is left of my family, муж, the part that did not die in a basement in Yekaterinburg in 1918—runs three intelligence assets inside the European industrial spine that nobody outside the family is supposed to know exist. Inherited and Three generations old. The first generation built them in exile, because of the basement. The second generation expanded them quietly, in three different European capitals, under three different surnames that were not ours.

"The third generation—me—has only ever had to maintain them until I get to run those asset after my parents hand them over.

"They are off the books and not aligned with any state, because every state on this continent in the last century has, at one point or another, been the state that wanted my line dead. We use them for two things. Knowing which of our partners is about to betray us before the partner does. And knowing which gods are moving in our hemisphere.

"Because the family has known for a long time, муж—we have known since the night the Bolsheviks came down the basement stairs—that there are players above us. And the family has been very careful, for three generations, to keep our heads low enough that those players do not bother to finish what the men in 1918 started. Although speaking of such things made us being looked down at."

She paused.

"Senithe knows about the assets. Senithe knew the names of all three of them before she walked into my home. Two of them she has already acquired—not violently, not with money—by visiting them the way she visited me.

"The third is still mine and I own that company although my family hasn’t completely stepped out... and they keep my informed each 60 hours."

"What was the word."

"Mine."

"Last sent?"

"An hour before I came into your closet."

"Renewable."

"Until it isn’t."

I breathed out, slow.

This was not, as a category of news, in the worst tier my morning could have produced. Worst would have been Senithe has acquired all three. Or Senithe has kidnapped her family. Or Senithe has enslaved her, or whatever these guys were capable of.

My wife was telling me that in three generations of careful silence, her family had built a private intelligence layer in the European industrial spine and she had been holding the existence of it back from me for six months because she had not yet decided when to give it to me—that was, by the standards of my life, Tuesday.

She was watching my face.

I knew exactly what she was watching for, because I knew Anastasia, and Anastasia was watching for the moment I began to look at her differently. The instant the math changed in my head from she is the woman I want to be with forever to she is the asset I once thought I would live with forever.

Because the instant that flicker showed up, even by accident, even for half a heartbeat—the part of her that had been holding the morning together would, very privately, in a corner of her chest only she had access to, break a little.

I cupped her jaw with one hand.

Pulled her in the inch and a half required to put her forehead against mine.

"Anastasia."

"Yes."

"Listen to me."

"Yes."

"I do not love you less because you are, from this morning, also a strategic asset."

She breathed out, shaky.

"I love you and nothing can chnage that and incase you forgot... I am not exactly a saint myself."

She closed her eyes.

Two tears slipped out of them, ran down her temples, vanished into her hair.

That was the allocation. Two. Anastasia did not exceed.

I kissed her forehead. Drew back.

"Peter—"

"I also gonna take care of all your problems."

"You—"

"Take the leverage off the table. So that the next time Senithe sits in your home, the leverage she came to imply she had—"

"—she does not have."

"She does not have."

She made a small involuntary sound. I did not catalogue it. It was hers.

"And the two she’s already acquired."

"Already acquired means already lost. We don’t chase those. We let her have them. We adjust around them. We let her be convinced she’s holding two cards she’s actually been handed, because in twenty-four hours the only card on her side of this game that she picked up legitimately will be a card that, by its sheer existence, insults her."

She laughed.

Wet. Real. Anastasia’s laugh, the one she did not give in public.

"My king."

"Your husband."

"You are admitting it, now."

"Don’t push your luck."

She put her face against my bitten shoulder.

Warm against the small clean ache.

We sat like that for a long quiet beat.

The closet held us in its underglow, dimmed to candle. ARIA, somewhere on the other side of the residence, was already three calls deep into the Charlotte-routing without me having said a word about it out loud, because I had not, for one second of the conversation, dropped the tether to her, and ARIA had been receiving the entire architecture of the move from my chest as I built it.

ARIA, you know what to do.

"Peter."

"Mm."

"After Paris."

"Mm."

"I am moving the rest of the family to US. All of them. The aunts. The cousins. The grandfather—and yes, муж, the grandfather, the one I told you was dead because the world needs to think he is dead. He is not. He has been alive in a house in Provence for forty-three years under a name that is not his, and I am tired of leaving him in a house Senithe can sit in. All of them, whether they wish to come or not."

"Done."

"You did not even—"

"Done, Anastasia."

She breathed out, settled, deep.

Then she rolled onto her elbow, propped her chin on her knuckles, and looked at me with the slow returning amusement of a woman whose strategic burden had just been transferred to a competent third party and who therefore had bandwidth, again, for the rest of the morning.

"Then get up, муж. The morning is no longer young."

"You said I had not earned the privilege."

"You earned it eighteen sentences ago. Pay attention."

I laughed.

She laughed.