The Devil's Favourite Obsession

Olga left the bedroom without putting on slippers, without taking the silk wrap that hung on the post beside the bed, without doing any of the small reflexive things a woman of her station performed without thought before stepping into a corridor that belonged to another family.

The chaos in her head had no room for accessories.

The chaos in her head had no room for anything other than the single, intolerable fact that the man she had spent decades sleeping beside, the man who had stood at the head of her daughter’s nursery the morning she was born and watched her sleep with the careful eye, had killed her firstborn.

This betrayal felt instead like the floor of her own house had been quietly excavated below her for years, and she had only just been told.

Her bare feet made no sound against the runner. The Palace was sleeping. She did not know what she was going to say to Cixi when she reached her.

She had not constructed a plan. She had not assembled the polite speech that a woman of her position would have rehearsed on the way down the corridor under any other circumstance.

Olga could not bring herself to care. The chaos in her head had left no room to consider anyone’s feelings. The chaos in her head only knew that the girl she had spent twenty years burying was, possibly, currently, asleep in this Palace.

She rounded the corner into the central atrium.

The lift was at the far end of the marble hall, and Olga began to walk toward it with the slow, unsteady gait, who had not noticed she was crying.

Two guards stood at the alcove beside the staircase, in matching black suits and earpieces, hands folded at the small of their backs, in the same practised way they had been trained for years and not to react to anything they were not specifically authorised to respond to. They saw her before she saw them.

The taller one tilted his chin in the direction of the woman in the cream nightgown drifting toward the lift, almost imperceptibly, and the shorter one tilted his head in answer, and a small, silent conference passed between them in the way only men who had worked together for a decade could conduct without exchanging a single word.

They were not authorised to detain a guest. They were not authorised to question one. They were equally not authorised to permit harm to come to one, and the woman in front of them looked disheartened.

The taller guard separated himself from the wall.

He approached her with the cautious courtesy of a man approaching a wounded animal, his palms half-open at his sides in a deliberately non-threatening gesture, his jacket already in his hand because he had unfastened it the moment he understood what he was looking at.

”Madam.” His voice was low, deferential, and careful. ”Please.” He held the jacket out toward her with both hands, the way a servant in another century might have offered a folded cloak to a queen who had stepped out into rain. ”You might feel cold.”

Olga stopped walking.

She looked at the jacket. She looked at the guard. She looked back at the jacket as though it had been offered in a language she only half remembered, as though the gesture of human concern required translation before her brain could process it. The seconds stretched, and the guard did not lower his hands, and finally Olga’s own hands lifted, slow and uncoordinated, and accepted the jacket from him with a small, ragged whisper of thanks.

”Thank you.”

She did not let him help her into it. She put it on herself, fumbling the sleeves with the same dazed concentration a child applied to her first cardigan, and when it was on her shoulders she did not button it. She simply pulled the lapels closed with one hand and walked past him toward the lift without looking back.

The guard returned to his post.

The lift accepted Olga’s hand on its panel and rose, silent and obedient, toward the floor she had asked for.

*

Inside the wing she was being carried toward, the call had ended several minutes earlier, and Cixi had not moved from the place where she had sat down to take it.

She still held the phone in her left hand. The screen had gone dark. The room around her was warm and dimly lit and entirely silent, and her dress clung to the backs of her thighs where she had folded one leg beneath the other, and she had been biting the inside of her lower lip steadily for the past two minutes without realising she was doing it.

Every few seconds, her right thigh shifted against the mattress, a slow, restless rub against the fabric of the dress, the kind of involuntary movement a body made when it had been wound tight and was looking for a permissible way to release a fraction of the tension it had no permission to release at all.

What she did not know, sitting there with her teeth in her own lip and her thigh shifting restlessly against the dress, was that the heavy oval mirror mounted on the wall opposite the bed was not, strictly speaking, only a mirror.

Cassian Crown stood on the balcony of his own apartment, leaning against the stone railing with a fresh cigarette burning between his fingers, and the corner of his mouth had not entirely returned to its resting position since the moment Cixi had said ’I miss you a lot’ into a phone line, not realising she was admitting something.

He drew slowly on the cigarette. He exhaled into the cool air. And he watched, with the patient who had paid a very high price for the privilege of watching, he watched Cixi. Every time she slept on that bed, he watched her.... without her knowing... without disturbing her... His favourite pastime had turned from punishing people to seeing her sleep...