“Hello, Vassily. How are you?” Charity. Charity was calling the motherfucker. Nick froze, every cell in his body dedicated to listening to the call.

“I am fine, my dear. Did you have an enjoyable weekend?”

“Yes.” Nick could almost feel her blush through twenty miles of wire. “Yes, I did, actually. Um … a very nice weekend. Vassily, I was wondering…”

“Yes, my dear?”

“You know your musical soirée on Thursday?”

“Ah, the soirée. Samuel Cha on the cello. It will be exquisite. We arranged the playlist just the other day. And I asked him to include Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor, because I know it’s your favorite.”

“Oh, Vassily—” Charity’s voice turned warm and affectionate. Nick clenched his fists. It was the tone she used when she whispered in his ear while he was in her. “You remembered! I do so love that concerto, thank you. I’m going to love hearing Mr. Cha play it.”

“My pleasure, my dear. It will be very enjoyable listening to it with you.”

“Yes, indeed. Speaking of which, um, Vassily…”

“Yes, my dear?”

Listening hard, Nick could detect an oily undertone, as if Worontzoff knew what was coming. Like a villain in a movie inviting the heroine into his den. Yesssss, my dear?

“Um, I know that you don’t like to invite more than thirty people to your soirées, Vassily—”

“Quite right. Too many people ruin the acoustics of the room. Chamber music was composed exactly for that—for chambers. Most chamber music was written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for a court. Never for general consumption. With a royal family and perhaps some courtiers in attendance, no more.”

“Well, I’m certainly not royalty. But what I wanted to ask you was, may I bring a friend along? He’s a busy man and I don’t even know if he’d be free, but if he is, could I invite him? I wanted to ask you first before broaching it to him.”

“A friend? You want to bring a friend? To my soirée?”

Could Charity hear the dead, frozen tone in Worontzoff’s voice? Nick could. He heard the instant morph from avuncular intellectual to dangerous mobster. Every hair on Nick’s body stood on end and his pulse raced. This was one of the most dangerous men on the planet and Charity had just angered him.

Shit, tell him to forget about it. Say it was just a silly thought. Come on, Charity, let it go. I’ll find another way to get into that damned house. Just stay out of this guy’s way and out of the way of his anger.

He bit his back teeth, hard. Looked at professionally, this was a stroke of good luck, in a job that had all too few of them. This is what he’d been angling for all along. What he’d engineered the meet with Charity for. Ostensibly, what he’d been fucking her for.

It was the job. Just the job. Getting into Scumbag Central.

Di Stefano high-fived Alexei, who was grinning. Mission accomplished. An elaborate ploy had paid off and a federal agent was just about to be introduced into the home of a suspected criminal.

“Vassily?” Charity’s soft voice came through the speakers. Hearing her voice made him ache, as if he’d taken a punch to the chest. Thank God she’d sensed something, though she misunderstood the reason. “Will this be a problem? Do you have too many guests coming? Because I could renounce my invitation, if you can’t fit everyone in.”

“No, no, my dear. Of course that won’t be necessary. I wouldn’t dream of not having you. Your enjoyment makes my evening. Your friend is very welcome, if he can make it. I trust he enjoys classical music?”

A startled silence. Nick realized that Charity had no idea whether he liked music or whether he was tone deaf. It simply hadn’t come up. Actually not much beyond his dick had come up over the weekend.

“Y-yes. Yes of course he does.”

She was such a lousy liar.

“Well, then, my dear,” Vassily said smoothly, “of course he can come. Any musical friend of yours is a friend of mine.”

Not in this lifetime, scumbag.

“Thank you, Vassily. I’ll see you on Thursday.”

“Yes, my dear. I’m looking forward to welcoming you.” Delicate pause. “Welcome you both.” Worontzoff waited until she hung up, then punched a button to close the connection.

Silence. Then an explosion of sound, a two-syllable word.

Nick looked over at Alexei. “What was that?”

“Pizdets,” Alexei said.

“Thank you, Alexei,” Di Stefano said, rolling his eyes. “So what does it mean?”

Alexei’s eyes gleamed. “Fuck.”

Charity put the library phone down thoughtfully, wondering whether she’d done a good thing or a bad thing.

Vassily hadn’t sounded pleased. At all. She knew his voices and this was his I Am Not Amused voice. He lived in a large home, a mansion, actually, and what he termed the Music Room was large. But he’d told her he didn’t want more than thirty people and he’d probably already invited as many people as he felt the room could comfortably hold. His soirées were catered and the caterers had probably already been told the exact number, as well.

Vassily was a charming man. He had enriched her life in so many ways, she couldn’t even begin to count them. However, Charity also recognized that the man had a dark side, a granite hardness to him that she sometimes saw people tripping over unexpectedly, like a rocky outcropping in a meadow. Part of that dark side was that he didn’t like being crossed, in any way.

She respected that, always. She’d inherited from her mother an ability to read people and from her father an ability to avoid antagonizing the difficult. Charity knew exactly when to keep her mouth shut, and she did.

With Vassily it was easier than with most people she dealt with and who tried her patience, like the mayor or old Mrs. Lawrence. However difficult he became, he had earned every wrinkle in his character, and he was entitled to that dark side of his.

Vassily never spoke of it, but his body spoke eloquently. His grotesquely scarred and shattered hands, with all the fingernails missing. A thin, deep scar running from his temple to his jawline, just missing his eye. An inability to lift his right arm higher than his chest. A limp that was exacerbated in the winter when it was damp. And when was it not damp in Vermont in winter?

Vassily was endlessly fascinating to everyone—he was, after all, one of the world’s greatest writers. A man who would be lionized in any of the world’s great cities, even though he had chosen, inexplicably, to bury himself in a small provincial town in Vermont.

No one could give him back his lost years and his ruined health, however. No matter how famous and rich he became, he had been through hell.

So Charity forgave Vassily everything—his moodiness, his harsh, granite core, his dark side. She had no right to judge him, and she didn’t.

Maybe she shouldn’t have asked if Nick could come with her. It appeared that it was a breach of Vassily etiquette. It’s just that with each passing day, she was more and more certain that Nick would soon move on. How many business opportunities could there be, after all, in the Green Mountain State, for an investor? Smart as he was, he was surely running them all down to the ground. And once he’d finished, what was there to keep him here?

Charity had no illusions about the two of them, as a couple. There was nothing here to tie Nick down. He had money, looks, health. A bachelor pad in Manhattan. Potent male charm. Charisma. He was a superb lover.

The world was his oyster.

There was no reason whatsoever for him to stick here with a small-town librarian who led a quiet life and was responsible for two elderly, frail relatives who tethered her as much as—perhaps more than—two small children would have.

Charity’s life was circumscribed, hemmed in on all sides. His was not. It was wide open.

So, he’d be going soon. He might even be gone by Thursday, and maybe she’d just humiliated herself in vain, asking Vassily for this favor for a man who wouldn’t even be here.