Red Sparrow

“Vsego dobrogo, my friend,” said MARBLE. “Good luck to you. I will keep an eye open and signal in the event poor Nasarenko jumps out a window.”

“Very helpful,” said Benford, “and if you could keep your eyes open for any other clues…”

“I have something in mind, but later,” said MARBLE.

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Nate and Dominika sat together in his room and talked quietly. He acted nonchalant, but she knew better, she could see the intensity of his aura. He repeated that he had been worried about her, they all had been waiting for some word, and they all had been relieved when General Korchnoi reported that she was safe. He blamed himself for what had happened, her recall to Moscow. But now they could restart the relationship, they would work together again. Dominika thought he sounded like a case officer handling an agent, which was exactly what he was. He had been worried, then relieved. Chto za divo! Wonderful.

Nate heard himself prattling on. He was conscious of the men in the adjoining room, conscious of the awkwardness of the moment, he knew he had to maintain control. He stumbled and stopped talking when he saw her face. She was elegant, stunning, poised. He remembered that expression, the set of her mouth. She was becoming angry. The endless months spent apart, not knowing if she was dead, and in the first hour together he was pissing her off.

Now what? she thought. They had been separated and she had built up expectations, but things, apparently, would be different. They could not return to the heady days of Helsinki, with her sneaking out of Volontov’s rezidentura with pilfered documents under her sweater. The long afternoons in the little sun-splashed safe house, cooking on the little stove, were past. So was the little moonlit bedroom.

She was a silly fantazerka, a woolly-headed dreamer. All right, she could be all business and she wasn’t about to make it easy for him. Dominika brutally told Nate about her recall to Moscow, about the cellars of Lefortovo, the endless days of questions, and the slaps and the purple lips, and how the cabinets at the ends of the corridors had creaked when she was shoved inside them.

His face was ashen when she told him she had kept his image in her mind and it helped her survive, bringing him along with her at her side, down the corridors and into the next room. Nate did not react but she saw it in his eyes, the purple haze behind him was intense with emotion. Rattled, he got up from his chair.

He was pouring wine at a sideboard across the room, and Dominika got up and went over to him. His hand was shaking as he filled the glasses. He wouldn’t look at her. He knew that if, in that moment, they touched, he would be lost. Nate turned to face her. He looked at her hair, her lips, the fifty-fathom blue of her eyes. His eyes told her, No, we mustn’t, but his throat closed up and his guts ached, and he took her face in his hands and kissed her, remembering the taste of her.

They kissed each other madly, as if someone were coming to pull them apart. Dominika clutched his neck and she walked him backward out onto the little marble balcony in the dying light. Doves were darting between the tips of the cypresses, black against the sky. There was no sound and not a breath of wind. She pushed him against the balcony railing and wordlessly they fumbled with his belt buckle and hitched up her dress and Dominika was on her toes, facing him, like a five-minute tart in an alley off Kopevskiy Pereulok. She gripped the wrought iron with white knuckles, lifted one leg, and hooked her shoe on the railing. She mashed her mouth over his and moaned into his throat down to his belly. Her body shivered and she let go of the railing and wrapped her arms around his neck to hold on. All the bucking and shuddering and shaking on the little balcony made the doves in the trees jumpy, and they dipped and turned and flared among the cypress tops.

Clinging to each other was sweet and natural and logical, and the little balcony became Dominika’s entire world, and Nate became the only thing in it as he trailed his lips across her mouth. His arms tightened around her waist and her legs began to convulse. She whispered, “Dushenka,” in his ear, and the doves swooped in the night sky.

They didn’t move for two minutes, then Dominika breathed raggedly through his kiss and pulled away from his embrace, smoothing her skirt. He tucked in a trailing tail of his shirt. They went back inside. Nate turned on a lamp and handed her a glass of wine. They sat beside each other, looking straight ahead, not speaking. Dominika’s legs trembled and she could feel her heartbeat in her head. It seemed that Nate was about to say something, but Benford entered the room just then to fetch them for dinner.

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