Page 95
A maid passes first with a basket of towels. Then one of the gardeners crosses the frame carrying a hose attachment. Two guards appear near the glass doors, speak briefly, and separate.
Then Kirill enters the corridor.
I lean forward.
He’s alone.
He walks toward the garden entrance, pauses near the door, and looks out toward the pool. For a few seconds, he is still.
Too still. Then his right hand shifts.
It’s a small movement. Easy to miss. His fingers close around something in his palm, or perhaps they only curl because he is adjusting his grip on nothing at all. The footage is not clear enough to say.
Sergei slows the clip.
Kirill’s hand is partly hidden by his body, but there is a brief flash of something pale or silver before his fist closes.
I watch it again. Then again.
The shape could be a coin. A reflection from his watch. A trick of the light. Or it could be the bracelet.
Kirill looks once toward the pool, then steps outside. He is gone from the frame for forty-two seconds. When he returns, his hand is open.
Empty.
He walks back through the corridor and disappears from view.
Sergei stops the footage. Neither of us speaks for a moment.
Finally, I say, “That’s not enough.”
“No,” Sergei says. “It is not.”
I keep looking at the frozen image of Kirill’s hand. “Why would he do this?”
Sergei sits back slightly. “If he did?”
“Yes.”
“Money. Pressure. Blackmail. Someone found something we missed,” Sergei says surgically.
“Kirill has been with Anya for years.”
“I know.”
“He has stood between her and danger more than once.”
“I know that too.”
“He would not hurt her.”
Sergei doesn’t answer.
I look at him. “You disagree?”
“I think loyalty is easier to trust when it hasn’t been tested quite yet.”
I don’t like that answer. I like less that he may be right.
