“one piece of advice, Dimitri Fedorov, from me to you. When you spend enough time with someone, as I have, you begin to learn them like a muscle. You learn their little ticks, their eccentricities, their thoughts. You learn the signs and read them like stars, like lines in a book. And after a time,” he murmured, tapping his fingers pointedly on the counter, “you learn them like a pulse. Like your own pulse.”
