Clause Four

For a long moment Mikhail Zakharin doesn't say anything at all.

He looks at the folder. He looks at you. Somewhere below the mezzanine the bass drops and a hundred people cheer, and he doesn't so much as blink.

"Sit down, Ms. Wickstrom," he says.

His voice is low and unhurried, with the faintest edge of an accent sanded almost smooth by Chicago. It's the kind of voice that never has to be raised.

You sit. The leather is warm. You keep your hands flat on the folder so he can't see them shake.

"My doorman says you have my father's books."

"My father kept them. Fifteen years. In a cipher only he and I can read." You make yourself hold his eyes. "He died seven months ago. Last week someone searched my condo. There's been a black Genesis outside my building for three days. Tonight his partner texted me at two in the morning asking about old notebooks."

"Lester Hruska," he says, as if he's reading it off a page.

So he knows the name. You file that away.

"I've seen how this goes," you say. "I audit people for a living. I know what happens to loose ends. So I'd rather not be one."

"And your solution is to marry me."

He says it without inflection, the way he might say and your solution is to set yourself on fire.

"My solution is to become family." You open the folder and turn it toward him. "Your people have rules. Older than this city. A man doesn't touch another man's wife. A father doesn't touch his son's. And in Illinois, spousal privilege means neither of us can be compelled to testify against the other. You'd be protecting me. I'd be protecting you. That's not romance, Mr. Zakharin. That's a balanced ledger."

Something moves at the very corner of his mouth. It's gone before you can name it.

"You could take it to the FBI."

"And be a witness in a Zakharin case." You let that sit. "How many of those are still alive?"

He doesn't answer. Which is an answer.

"Or," he says, very quietly, "I could have someone follow you home, find where you hid it, and save myself a wedding."

The music thuds on. Your pulse thuds louder.

"You could," you say. "If I die or disappear, a sealed copy goes to the FBI and the Tribune. It's already with a lawyer. You'll never know which one." You lean in a little. "And you'd have done it already, if you were going to. You didn't even get up."

He studies you for a long, silent beat. Up close he's almost unfair to look at, the kind of handsome that makes your brain stall like a bad engine. Pale gray eyes, black lashes, a small white scar through one eyebrow. The woman at the next table has given up pretending she isn't watching.

Then he picks up the contract and starts to read.

He reads the way you do. Every line. He goes back to clause two and reads it again. He turns a page, then turns it back.

"Twelve months," he says.

"Long enough for whoever wants that ledger to lose interest. Short enough that neither of us has to pretend forever."

"Separate bedrooms."

"Non-negotiable."

"Clause four." His finger rests on it. No physical intimacy of any kind without the express, present consent of the wife. "You expected me to argue."

"I expected you to ask what's in it for you."

"I'm getting to that." He sets the page down. "What's in it for me, Ms. Wickstrom, is that the woman holding my father's books sleeps under my roof instead of someone else's. That's worth a great deal to me. You know that, or you wouldn't be here."

"So you'll want to see it."

"Yes."

"Not yet," you say. "It stays where it is. That's clause six."

"I read clause six." He looks almost amused now, the way a wolf might look amused. "You wrote a contract to marry a stranger, and the only clause you're nervous about is whether I'll sulk about a book."

"I'm nervous about all of them," you say, honestly. "I'm just better at hiding it on that one."

He looks at you then. Really looks. For the first time since you sat down, you feel like he's seeing a person and not a problem.

He takes a fountain pen from his inside pocket, uncaps it and bends over the page. You crane to see. In the margin beside clause four, in small, sharp, upright letters, he writes:

He will ask.

He turns it so you can read it, and caps the pen.

"Consent isn't something you should have to grant," he says. "It's something I should have to request. Every time. If we do this, that's how it works."

Your throat goes tight in a way that has nothing to do with fear.

"So that's a yes," you say.

"It's an amendment." He slides the contract back into the folder and keeps it. "I'll think about it."

"How long?"

"Not long. Long enough to find out who's sitting outside your building in a Genesis."

You glance down over the rail without meaning to. At the long bar below, among the beautiful people, one man isn't dancing or drinking. He's leaning on his elbows with his back to the bottles, looking straight up at your booth. Blond, handsome, a sharp fox face, a smile with too many teeth in it. When he sees you see him, he lifts his glass.

"My cousin," Mikhail says, without looking. "Taras. Don't wave."

"I wasn't going to."

"Good."

He lifts two fingers. A man the size of a refrigerator detaches himself from the shadows by the stairs: big, bearded, maybe forty, in a gray suit that has lost a long war with his shoulders.

"Timo," Mikhail says. "Ms. Wickstrom is leaving."

Timo looks you over with an expression of profound, weary skepticism. Then he takes a phone out of his pocket, a plain black one still in its plastic, and holds it out.

"He'll text you on this," Timo says. His voice is gravel in a cement mixer. "Nobody else has the number. Don't give it to anybody. Don't put a password on it you'll forget."

You take it. It's heavier than it looks.

"Ava Wickstrom." Mikhail has opened his book again, and your name sounds different in his mouth, like he's testing its weight, but he isn't reading. "Go straight home. Don't stop anywhere."

"Is that an order?"

He lifts his eyes over the paperback. "It's a request," he says. "I'm practicing."

The rain has stopped. Your car is where you left it on Hubbard, a parking ticket fluttering under the wiper. You drive north with the new phone on the passenger seat and the radio off, and you keep checking the mirror for a black Genesis.

It isn't there.

You don't know whether that's good.

Halsted is quiet. Your building is quiet. The doorman, Ferdie, is asleep in his chair with a crossword over his face, and you don't wake him. The elevator smells like somebody's pad thai. Third floor. The hallway light flickers the way it always does.

You get your keys out. You look up.

Your door is standing open.

Just a few inches. Just enough to see that the light inside is on, and you turned it off this morning. You always turn it off. Your father used to tease you about it, Ava and the electric bill, like it was a personality.

You stand very still, and from inside your apartment, quite clearly, you hear a drawer slide shut.