Did you think there’d be no consequences? (Moscow | London)

[Natalie Grey]

She was working from a coffee shop when the message she’d been waiting for came through. DeGarmo wanted to meet; he finally thought he had something for her. Her expression stilled; not displeasure, but certainly something guarded as she swiped the message away and sat back in her chair, hands wrapped around her coffee cup. Contemplation furrowed her brow, and she stared at her work screen, but her thoughts were all inward. She remembered what Jay had said that night by the lake, about the powers he feared were involved. They’d never spoken of it since, and so much had happened in the days afterwards that perhaps his desire for answers had buried itself under the trauma. She wouldn’t blame him for that. But her sense of the shadowy game being played above their heads was too insidious to ignore. Being caught unknowingly in its currents had cost Jay everything, and Natalie couldn’t let it lie. Even if she never admitted to him the dangerous game she was playing.

Her eyes swept suddenly upwards as a figure loomed over her table. For a moment fear tightened her chest at the disturbance, especially given the measure of her thoughts. But the tension fled when she recognised the man who presently slipped himself into the space opposite. Little betrayed her reaction further despite her surprise at seeing him here. A heavy coat draped his shoulders against the Russian cold, a mildly discomforted twist pursing his lips as he cleared the condensation from his glasses with a pocket square. It had been years since she’d last seen him, and though grey pierced his neatly manicured beard and new lines tightened his eyes, he had barely changed. Transported unexpectedly to memories of her distant childhood, Natalie said nothing, only raised her brows in belligerent askance. Oscar Chamberlain was her grandfather’s aide, and he was a long way from home.

“You’ve ignored calls, messages and plane tickets. Are you really surprised to see me, Natalie?”

“It's inconvenient,” she said levelly, as though men who ought to be in London showed up at her table all the time. The unexpectedness of his presence had not dimmed, but she parsed through it quickly in the moment; realised what it must mean if Oscar was here. She knew he’d be alone, that there would likely be a car idling out on the street for them. He was perched on his seat for propriety’s sake, and not because he intended to wait long for her obedience. The only irritation he outwardly displayed was in the lenses of his glasses, but it wasn’t what he was annoyed with.

In truth Natalie had been diligently avoiding this reckoning. She’d understood the moment Brandon had made his oblique threats in exchange for his permission that she’d just passed a threshold to consequence – because she was never going to bring Jay back to the Custody unwillingly. Not that she could have remotely predicted how badly things turned out. Her mother had already made Edward’s Northbrook’s fury at her decisions perfectly clear to her, but she’d convinced herself it would wane if she managed to keep her head down for long enough. This made for an unwelcome complication, and poorly timed.

“It most certainly is,” Oscar agreed, hooking the glasses back on his nose, and gesturing with one gloved hand to the exit. Natalie’s jaw tightened, but she did not argue. Instead she closed her screen and slid her wallet from the table. DeGarmo’s message burned in the back of her mind; the tangibility of answers denied. Oscar stood when she did, but was clearly reluctant to trust her trailing behind him. A smirk revealed the measure of his trust. He recalled the recalcitrant teenager she had been, clearly. She shot her response before she tucked the phone away – |Three days. Send me the location| – and then shouldered out the door.

---

They did not return to her apartment; Oscar assured her all her travel needs had been dutifully accommodated for. Resigned to the escort, Natalie was keen to get it all over with, and she made no complaint. Now the soft hum of the engines filled her ears. The last time she’d been on a plane had not exactly been a pleasant experience, and the plush luxury of the Northbrook jet did little to offset the cascade of memory. Her thoughts were mired in the past as she stared out of the window. She doubted her grandfather planned an interrogation, and he would certainly know more of what had actually happened than the sanitised version shared with her mother. But the quiet found all the cracks in her defences. It was one of the reasons she kept herself so busy.

Work on the refurbishment would continue easily without her, but some things could not be so easily substituted. She’d shot Emily a quick message before take-off – |I’ve been summoned to London. I might not make it.| Then she'd shut her phone off. Touchdown was still a good few hours away, and she wouldn’t see any reply before then, but neither was she keen for the concealed disappointment of any response. Or worse, the acceptance. Their friendship was tentative, forged from a dry cleaning bill for a bloody backseat and a concerned phone call. Emily had plenty of older and better friends. It still didn't make her keen to miss something so important.

But as clouds sped by the window, it was Jay she was thinking of.

[Natalie Grey]

She didn’t turn her phone on again until the car was rolling into the estate belonging to her grandfather. Natalie had managed to doze a little, but it was superficial rest at best and had mostly left her in a realm of weird and unsettling lucid dreaming. Fortunately most of it sieved straight through her mind by the time she was properly alert. On arrival Oscar Chamberlain led her to one of the guest suites, not to one of the rooms she’d stayed in as a girl with her sisters. She showered until her thoughts ran quiet, and then sat on the canopied bed, wrapped in a towel. The wallet beeped as soon as it rewakened.

While I’ll be sad at your absence if you cannot be there, I understand completely. You will be missed! If you can’t - let’s schedule a lunch/dinner date for when you get back. I miss your beautiful face!

Followed almost immediately by another message from Emily with a later timestamp:

Oh crap - I just fully comprehended what you sent me earlier. Sorry - wedding brain! Is everything alright? Are you okay?

There was nothing else from DeGarmo, though she supposed she did not expect it. She compartmentalised the frustration, concerned with what the delay would cost her. There was nothing she could do about it.

Emily presented a different quandary, one that made Natalie feel in equal measures warm and guilty, because the other woman offered empathy and understanding in quantities that Natalie didn’t truly deserve. Her internal life was not something she had ever shared easily with others, and truthfully it would have been the same here except Emily had breezed into her life at such a difficult time. It meant she’d seen far too much in person to be convinced by the flippant stoicism with which Natalie usually waved away the things that haunted her. And Emily simply wasn't the sort to turn away from it.

The day after that shitstorm of a night in Moscow, Natalie had used every resource available to her to secure an audience with Nikolai Brandon, determined to uncover where Jay had been taken after his arrest. To know he was safe. Yet once that knowledge was in hand, she’d found herself alone in a city she hated, and trapped by a family obligation she was not sure she could ever happily fulfil. Back at the sterile apartment, chewing over uncomfortable guilt about how she’d manipulated Evelyn – and would continue to do so, from the moment she’d realised the Congresswoman had a hold on Brandon – her wallet had rung. She’d answered because she’d agreed to pay the dry-cleaning costs for the back seat of Emily’s car. But it wasn’t why Emily called.

A Patron’s granddaughter discovered barefoot and bloody outside one the city’s most dangerous nightclubs ought to have been great fodder for leverage, especially given the scandal that already shadowed her past. That was what Natalie was prepared for, as she would have expected from anyone embedded in Moscow’s cutthroat business scene. So she was genuinely surprised when it transpired Emily had called out of concern, simply because she cared. Natalie could be evasive with the truth, but she rarely outright lied, and not when she was asked something directly. After Emily had driven to collect Jared from the alleyway she saw something Natalie had much rather she didn’t, a peek into a layer of self-destruction Natalie never freely admitted to. No one else ever asked what she’d been doing at the Devil’s Lair in the first place, just as no one asked about what had really happened in Africa. Of course, Emily knew too much about that too, through Jared.

They’d kept in touch since, a little distanced on Natalie’s part, though she wholeheartedly supported Emily’s charitable endeavours in lieu of repeating the sorts of confessions she’d shared that first time they properly talked. Emily was genuinely nice in a way few people ever were, and her past was not without its own tragedy and challenges; she was good despite it. If Natalie was tentative with the friendship, it was only because she realised how strongly its foundations were forged, and life had taught her repeatedly how breakable such important bonds could be. She couldn’t do that again.

In any case, by now Emily knew enough about Natalie’s circumstances to realise London wasn’t likely to be a good thing. It brought a wry smile – she ought to be thinking about her wedding, not the troubles of a friend who more often than not was entirely responsible for her own shitty problems, and who couldn’t even manage to make it to watch the exchange of vows. It was touching, though.

I’m fine I promise. Let’s do dinner either way. After the honeymoon, obviously ;)

That fine was a smokescreen, one she knew Emily would recognise, but also one she would accept for now. This wasn’t life or death, this was just… family.

She hesitated over contacting Jay afterwards, at least to tell him she was out of the country. But he had an astronomical talent for misunderstanding, and she wasn’t certain if he’d interpret her having left Moscow as abandonment, despite London being the very last place she was likely to run to. The problem was that admitting why she was here would only burden an extra shovelful of dirt on that open grave he was burying himself in with his guilt. He’d been present when Nikolai Brandon had veiled his magnanimous permission with a not so subtle hint at the potential consequences for her disloyalty, but she knew he would not have internalised it. And it was better that he didn’t. She made her own choices, and owned the consequences.

She dressed in clothes she found hanging ready in the wardrobe, though they were rather more formal than she would have chosen for herself. More like something her sister would wear. Or her mother.

It was early evening outside, the view of the grounds from her window velvet dark. Her grandfather was most likely still in the city, which was at least an hour’s commute. Natalie’s restlessness warred with her desire to get this over with. The faster she could pass the time the better, so instead of cracking the vaults of childhood memory by re-exploring the manor, she sat herself at the antique carved desk and set up a makeshift workstation. Most of her unanswered communication was benign, and could have waited until she was back in Moscow, but she worked through it diligently anyway. One message stood out, though, and it had nothing to do with Belizna.

Since their return Jay had been ignoring everything connected with his family, like it was all too painful to bear. It was why Natalie brushed aside the questionable morality of interfering in his affairs without his permission (not to mention the small detail of it being pretty illegal). Mostly that had involved the slow untangling of his father’s debts in order to ensure the farm, land and other valuable assets were not cut up and sold to cover it. Who knew tractors were so damned expensive? She’d outsourced the task of finding suitable tenants, knowing little about farming but unwilling to allow everything to decay into ruin. Her only stipulation was that the land was well cared for. That process was ongoing, but eventually there would be a small yield filtering into a bank account opened under Jay’s name. Fraud was… surprisingly easy.

The message was from a legal firm. They’d unsuccessfully tried to contact Jay several times since his family’s death, and had finally reached out to her instead because she’d been dealing with settling the final matters of the estate. They were evasive with the explanation, asking for her to put Jay in contact with their representative so they could carry out their instruction. But Natalie had been through all the financials. There was no evidence of a trust fund for either of the children – or at least not one set up by the Carpenters. And the state of David Carpenter’s gambling debts spoke for itself. Cayli's medical bills carved out what little was left. They couldn’t have known about this.

She stared at the screen for several long moments. Then she snatched up her wallet to make a call. It’d be lunch time in the US, or round abouts.

---

When Oscar knocked on the door some time later, declaring it time for dinner, Natalie was pensive enough to go quietly. Shifting gears to anticipate Edward’s admonishments took her longer than she’d like, but as it was she needn’t have bothered. Though the grand dining table had been fully regaled, and the room was large enough to accommodate a generous party of guests, there was only one placement set.

“He’s not here?”

“It took me rather longer than anticipated to find you in Moscow,” he said. “And Patron Northbrook’s schedule is extremely full and finely tuned, as I’m sure you will appreciate.”

“I could have just gotten something from the kitchens myself. This is…” entirely unnecessary. Yet as she glanced at Oscar’s expression, she understood that it was in fact entirely the point. This was the isolation she chose when she relegated the family interests. It was why she was in the bloody guest room. She suppressed the irritation of a sigh. “I see,” she conceded instead, and sat herself down for a lonely meal.