The room stilled.

The curtains at the window swayed with the fresh wind. The clock on the mantle, which had been ticking for over a century without complaint, seemed to lose its rhythm for a single beat before recovering it.

Lorian’s hand went still on her foot.

"That is not possible."

He said it too quickly. He heard himself say it too quickly.

And from the way Olga’s eyes did not leave his face, from the way she watched him without blinking, without softening, without permitting him the comfort of his own denial, he understood, with a clarity that landed somewhere cold beneath his ribs, that she had heard it too.

The silence between them lengthened.

He waited for her to look away. To soften. To accept the lie the way she had accepted so many things in their twenty years of marriage, with the quiet, swallowed grace of a woman who knew when to spare him.

She did not look away.

"She has my eyes." Olga’s voice was the same as it had been before. The tone she used to ask the housekeeper about the linen. "She has similar features to mine. Did you not see?"

Lorian’s jaw tightened.

"Many women have similar features. Doesn’t turn out they all are relatives or your daughter. You need to stop thinking about her. She is gone and never coming back."

"She has a beauty mark on his left eye just like you have." Olga tilted his face toward the lamp and turned her cheek, exposing the soft underside of his left eye. A small, faint mark sat there, paler now than it had been twenty years ago, but in the same exact position. "Inherited from your mother. Your grandmother. The Romanovs women have worn it for six generations, Lorian. I used to kiss it on the morning of every anniversary."

Lorian’s hand, still resting on her foot, had not moved in over a minute.

"Olga."

"Our daughter would be 20 now."

"Olga."

"I think Cixi is—is the same age."

"Stop. It doesn’t tell that she is our daughter. Stop making yourself crazy. And are you forgetting that Tina has no beauty mark? Stop getting your hopes up."

"She has my mouth. The same upper lip. The same way it tightens at the corners when she is being polite and disagreeing at the same time. I watched her do it three times tonight, and three times I told myself I was imagining it. I am not imagining it, Lorian. A mother does not imagine her own face."

Lorian set her foot down on the couch.

He stood up.

He crossed the room, pulled back the curtain by an inch, and looked out at the dark grounds of the Crown estate. The security lamps cast soft halos on the gravel drives. The hedges had been cut into ruthlessly geometric shapes. Everything outside the window was controlled, ordered, and paid for. He did not look at his wife.

"You are tired," he said again. "She died Olga."

"Why are you not believing me?" After seeing Cixi, Olga wasn’t sure anymore if her daughter had to be dead all this while.

Lorian’s grip on the curtain tightened. "Olga."

"WHY ARE YOUR NOT BELIEVNG MY WORD? TELL ME, WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS SURE THAT SHE WOULD NEVER RETURNED BACK TO US? YOU SAID SHE DIED.... WHY DO I NOT BELIEVE YOUR WORDS ANYMORE...? ARE YOU HIDING SOMETHING FROM ME?"

Lorian said nothing for a moment and the silence stretched between them.

His shoulders, which she had read the topography of for two decades, drew together in a way she had not seen since the funeral of his father.

"I looked for her." His voice was low. "For years. I searched for her... and every time I received nothing but disappointment."

Olga’s hands, still folded in her lap, tightened by a fraction.

"How long were you looking for? I remember if you gave up on my first-born daughter after Tina was born. You said she died! Did you lie to me?"

Lorian bit the insides of his cheeks, clenching his fists. "Fine! I lied to you. You were so traumatized after our daughter disappeared that you didn’t take care of yourself during your pregnancy, and you had to go through therapy. But when Tina was born, you didn’t even look at her—your thoughts were only on the first one, hoping she would come back. So I made the decision to lie... I had no choice."

He pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the window. The condensation from his breath bloomed and faded around the curve of his nose.

"What was I supposed to tell you, Olga? That I had paid investigators across three continents for five years and found nothing but burnt passports and dead aliases? That every man I sent came back with the same answer? That the kindest thing I could do for both of us was to bury her in our minds because no one else was going to bury her properly?" His hand fell from the curtain. "I did not stop loving her. I stopped surviving the search."

Olga lowered her gaze to her hands.

A single tear slid from her left eye and tracked down the side of her nose. She did not raise her hand to wipe it away.

"You saw her tonight, right?"

Lorian did not answer.

"You saw her, Lorian. You saw her tilt her head when Tamara spoke. You saw her hold the water glass with her left hand, even though she eats with her right. You saw the way she looked at the silverware before she touched it, the way our daughter looked at everything new when she was one-year-old, with that exact pause between curiosity and trust."

"She is not our daughter."

"How can you be sure? You only said you found nothing about her, which means she could still be alive. There’s a chance that Cixi could be our daughter..."

He turned slowly. The colour had drained from his face. The cool, composed Lorian Romanov, who had aligned his cufflinks earlier this evening as though preparing for a war he intended to win, looked twenty years older under the lamplight, and the cracks in his expression were the kind that did not close again once they appeared.

"It was I who hired people to kidnap our first daughter and paid money to — kill her." He stopped and swallowed.

Lorian’s laugh was sharp, almost bitter. "I couldn’t give my first daughter to Cassian Crown. That’s why I thought it would be better for her to die." He glanced at Olga, whose ashen face revealed the depth of her betrayal. "After she was gone, I felt guilty. Seeing you cry every day for our first daughter made me decide to search for the one I had paid for but never found. I assumed they had killed her and disappeared..."

"What did you say?... You killed our daughter?"

Lorian couldn’t meet his wife’s eyes and looked at the ground.

For the first time in twenty years of marriage, the wife he had spent two decades protecting from grief looked back at him as though grief had finished with her, and something colder had moved into the rooms it had vacated.

*

Cixi’s eyes flew open.

Her chest heaved. Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard she could feel the pulse in her teeth, her wrists, the tips of her fingers. Her breathing came in short, ragged gasps, as though she had been running, or drowning, or doing something her brain refused to put into words.

She stared at the ceiling. At the mirror.

Her own reflection stared back. She looked flushed, dishevelled. Her hair stuck to her forehead and the sides of her neck in damp, tangled strands. Her dress was twisted around her waist, the hem hiked halfway up her thighs.

She looked wrecked.

She sat up to see that the room was dark. The bed was empty. The sheets beside her were cold and undisturbed, pressed flat, without a single crease or indent to suggest that another body had ever been there.

Cassian was nowhere to be found.

Her phone buzzed on the bedside table, vibrating against the polished wood with an insistent, rattling hum that sounded obscenely loud in the silent room. The screen glowed white in the darkness.

Cixi did not pick it up at first. She sat in the middle of the bed, her knees drawn to her chest, her fingers gripping the sheets, and tried to make her brain work.

Where did Cassian go?

Was it a dream?

No, it can’t be... It was not possible because it felt very real.

She pressed her thighs together. The ache was still there. Dull and heavy and very, very real, pulsing between her legs with a persistence that made her face burn so hot she could have fried an egg on her cheekbones.

But Cassian was nowhere.... where did he go?

Did she have a wet dream?

How? Why?

Then why did she feel he had touched her? His calloused fingers on her thigh. His breath against the back of her neck. His chest pressed against her spine. The slow, firm circles of his thumb. The way her body had arched into his hand. The sound she had made when he found the spot that turned her brain to static.

She pressed her palms against her burning face and groaned.

She, Cixi McLore, had just had a wet dream about Cassian Crown. A detailed, vivid, cinematic wet dream complete with dialogue and kissing and his hands in places she could not think about without wanting to crawl under the mattress and never come out.

Her phone buzzed again, distracting her from her thoughts.

She grabbed it from the table and squinted at the screen. The brightness stabbed her eyes.

One missed call.

One new message.

She swiped the notification open.

Her stomach dropped through the floor.

She received two words from Cassian.

Two words glowing on the screen in the dark room, and they made every hair on her body stand up.

"Sleep well?"