Page 25 of The Last Dance

He watched me eat, and I watched him watch me. It could have been awkward, but I’d done enough two-way mirror interviews to know when a man was running a diagnostic. Vadim’s eyes missed nothing. They watched every movement, every hesitation.

He went first: “Where did you grow up?”

I considered lying, just for fun. Instead, “Uptown. Or, like, the part of Uptown that exists in a different tax bracket than this.”

He nodded. “Parents?”

“Dead. Cancer and, uh, industrial accident.” I said it the way you snap a Lego piece in place. “Raised by an aunt. She’s still around, but not super into Christmas cards.”

“What do you do for fun?”

I grinned, in spite of myself. “Pole dance in the city’s most expensive club. Also, I read a lot.”

“What do you read?”

I shrugged. “Sci-fi, fantasy, weird nonfiction. Stuff about conspiracy theories, but the funny kind, not the ‘storm the capitol’ kind.”

He processed that, then: “Languages?”

“English. Some Spanish. I can read Cyrillic if it’s on a sign, but don’t ask me to pronounce it.”

He made a note, invisible but absolute.

I had a weird flash of all the times I’d done job interviews, and how this felt exactly the same except that I had already slept with the interviewer and he’d bitten me so hard it left a mark. “Are you building a file on me?” I asked, a little amused, a little nervous.

Vadim didn’t blink. “I already have one.”

That derailed me for a second. “Oh.”

He waited. I waited.

The bread was too good to abandon, so I kept eating while I recalibrated. There was no small talk. He didn’t care about the weather, or the World Cup, or any of the things people used to pad silence. Vadim’s presence pressed in from every side, even though he was the stillest thing in the room.

It was starting to get to me, so I switched tactics. “What about you?” I asked. “What do you do for fun?”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t have hobbies?”

“I have interests,” he said. “But they’re not fun.”

I snorted. “That’s the most Russian thing I’ve ever heard.”

His mouth twitched. I was pretty sure that, in Vadim’s world, this was the equivalent of an inside joke.

He finished his water, set the glass down, and looked at me in a way that made my scalp itch. “You’re moving in.”

Not a question.

I nearly choked on my roll. “I’m what?”

“You will move in today. Your current apartment is unsecured. Lin will arrange transport.”

I stared at him, mind racing. I didn’t even own enough stuff to fill a minivan, but that was not the point. “I have a job.”

He nodded. “Not anymore.”

“My landlord—”