Iosif
She doesn't panic.
I've just told a civilian woman, in the plainest possible terms, that the man she killed tonight was connected to people like me, and she hasn't bolted for the door or dissolved or started making the kind of noise that would require me to manage her in ways I'd prefer not to.
She's gone paler, and she's pressed her hands harder against her thighs.
She's staring at me with those wide, blue, exhausted eyes, but she's still here. Still thinking.
"People like you," she says carefully. Not quite a question.
"Yes."
"And they'll know it was me."
"Not yet." I keep my voice even. "But by morning, if Vinzlee's house hasn't been cleaned and you've been seen walking through this part of the city with blood on you, then yes. They'll know."
She absorbs this. I watch her do it in a slow, methodical way that tells me she's processing. She’s not stupid.
That was clear from the first minute I saw her.
She's in shock and she's terrified, but she's still thinking in straight lines.
Which is more than most people manage in circumstances that are considerably less severe than hers.
"What does that mean for me?" she asks.
"It means," I say, "that you have a short window in which the situation is manageable. That window closes when his men can’t reach him."
"Manageable," she repeats, and there's a thread of something in it that tells me she's noticed I've used the word manageable instead of words like safe or okay or any of the other softening vocabulary people reach for when they're trying to make bad news easier to swallow. "And are you going to manage it?"
I look at her.
This is, in fact, the question. The one I've been sitting with since the sequence of events assembled itself in my head. The question of what I do now, and why, and what the answer commits me to.
If I manage this woman, remove her from sight, clean the scene at Vinzlee's house before his people find it, control the information… I control the narrative. I determine how Vinzlee's death is understood and by whom. That is an enormous amount of leverage.
That is the rational calculation.
It's also true that she's sitting in my office in a torn blue dress with blood in her hair. She defended herself in a man's kitchen with a chef's knife and then walked through the city alone, and she answered every question I asked without ever asking me to help her.
"Yes," I say. "I'm going to manage it."
Something crosses her face.
"Why?" she asks.
"Because you walked into my club," I say. "Which means you're inside my walls. And I don't leave problems inside my walls unresolved. Vinzlee also had several of the local police in his pocket, so they aren’t going to be any help to you."
It's not the whole answer, but it's not a lie either.
She holds my gaze for a moment, and then she nods. Small and precise. A decision being made, or accepted.
I stand.
"There's a bathroom through that door." I gesture to the far end of the office.
"You'll find what you need under the sink.
Clean up as much as you can." I move to the cabinet behind my desk and open the lower drawer.
I keep a change of clothes in here, and set a dark shirt on the edge of the desk. "You need to change out of the dress."
She looks at the shirt. Looks at me.
"I'll make some calls," I say. "Take ten minutes."
She takes the shirt without a word and crosses to the bathroom door. She walks with the slightly deliberate quality of someone who doesn't entirely trust their legs. The door closes behind her.
I wait until I hear the water running.
Then I pick up my phone.
The first call takes four minutes. By the end of it, my brother and two of my men are enroute to Vinzlee's house to clean it, document what they find, and make sure the scene tells the right story before anyone else arrives to read it.
The second call is shorter. A contact who owes me a significant favor, positioned in the right place to ensure that if any noise was heard in Vinzlee's street tonight, it is quietly attributed to a domestic situation that has already been resolved.
The third call I don't make yet because the third call requires more information than I currently have, and more information is currently in my bathroom.
I set the phone on the desk and stand there for a moment in the quiet while I run the situation again in my head from the top.
And that's when it surfaces.
Not for the first time tonight. I've been keeping it at the periphery since this whole thing started, the same way you keep a bright light at the edge of your vision.
Present, insistent, but not looked at directly.
My uncle's voice, with the particular cadence he uses when he's saying things he intends to say once and not repeat.
One year. Twelve months from tonight, each of you will have produced an heir.
There were five of us at that table. My cousins and my brothers.
And one by one, over the past months, they've complied.
That's not the word they'd use. Vitali would say found her, Leon would say handled the situation, Avros would simply look smug and change the subject, but from the outside, watching it happen across the table at family dinners and in terse briefings at the estate, it looks exactly like falling.
All of them. Except me.
The deadline is not a distant thing anymore.
I have been very good at keeping it abstract.
Treating it like a logistical problem to be solved in due course, or a variable to be managed like any other.
But my uncle doesn’t make idle threats, and the time I've spent deciding how I feel about being compelled into fatherhood by family mandate is time I haven't spent actually complying with the mandate.
I’m the last one.
I'm aware that I’ve allowed this to slip. That I've been running the club and running my operations and attending the dinners, and nodding at the appropriate moments, but quietly doing nothing.
And now there is a woman in my bathroom.
I shut that thought down immediately with force.
She is a civilian. She is in shock. She killed a man tonight who had his hands on her.
Then she walked through the city in the cold, and she ended up in my club by the simple and terrible coincidence of being Sasha Vinzlee's closest friend.
Whatever my uncle wants from me, it has nothing to do with the woman currently running water over her hands in my bathroom.
That is not a door I'm opening tonight.
I put the phone in my pocket. I need to focus on the problem. The actual problem. Which is getting Mia out of this building and out of this part of the city before Vinzlee's people start making enquiries. Before someone who was outside that club tonight remembers a woman with blood in her hair.
She comes back out after eight minutes.
She's scrubbed her hands and her face and pulled her hair back into a knot on the back of her head.
She's wearing my shirt, the hem of it hitting just above her knee, the sleeves rolled to her elbows.
She looks younger than she did twenty minutes ago.
She also looks steadier, like she has used the few minutes alone to rebuild some interior scaffolding.
She looks down at herself briefly and then back up at me with an expression that has something dry in it, a hairline fracture of self-awareness that is endearing.
"It's a look," she says with a shrug.
"It is," I agree, ignoring how much I enjoy the look of her in my shirt. "Are you ready to go?"
The dryness fades. She looks at me. "Go where?"
"Out of the city." I shrug out of my jacket and hold it out to her. "I have a house on the family estate just off the north road. You'll be there tonight."
Her chin comes up a fraction. "Your house."
"Yes."
"With you?"
"Yes."
She's quiet for a moment, and I can see her working through it. The calculations running behind those sky-blue eyes, the alternatives, what this means and what it doesn't mean and whether she has the resources to argue with me about it right now.
I wait for her to come to the only conclusion.
She looks at me for a long moment with an expression I'm finding increasingly difficult to read.
"Okay," she says finally. Just like she did downstairs before I brought her up to my office.
"Good." I move toward the door.
She follows me out of the office and into the elevator.
Then her heels are clicking on the concrete again in that uneven rhythm.
I've already identified the three fastest routes out of the city at this time of night and ranked them by exposure risk.
I've already thought through where I'll put her in the house, which I keep staffed but not crowded, and I've already drafted the outline of the conversation we'll need to have tomorrow when she's had sleep and food and a few hours of distance from tonight.
What I haven't thought through, and what I don't think through now as I hold the back exit open and she walks past me, and I smell the soap she used from my bathroom cabinet mixed with something that is still faintly, inconveniently peach…is any of the rest of it.
The car is waiting at the curb. Gregor, my driver, doesn't turn around. My coat is on the back seat, charcoal wool, entirely too large for her. She gets in, and I slide in beside her, handing her the coat which she pulls over her knees like a blanket.
The city starts to move past the windows in a blur of streetlights and rain.
She doesn't speak for several minutes.
Then, quietly, she turns to me and asks: "Will Sasha be safe?"
I consider the question. "For now. She'll be questioned when Vinzlee's people realise he's missing. But she won't be harmed."
"You can't know that."
"I can," I say. "Because she is his family, and family means something in this world."
The streetlights move across her face in slow intervals, light and shadow, light and shadow.
She turns back to the window.
The city thins. The streets widen. The lights begin to space out further and further apart. The estate road comes up after twenty minutes. Gregor takes the turn onto the long drive and the trees close in on both sides before the main house appears.
We drive past slowly, heading down the hill towards my house. It’s the furthest building from the main house. I chose it for its distance from the main house, but also for its view of the lake.
It's a large house on an intimidating property. I notice it now through the lens of her looking at it, and hope it isn’t too intimidating.
“You’ll be safe here. No one can get within five miles of the property without us knowing.”
She glances at me. "Is that reassurance?"
"It's information."
Something moves in her face again. That steady working out of what my words truly mean.
Gregor brings the car to a stop. I get out first and come around to her side to open the door. She looks up at me for a moment before she takes my hand to step out. Her fingers are very cold and very small in mine, and she lets go the moment she's upright.
I lead her up the steps.
Gregor takes the car. The front door opens before I reach it. Pavlina, who manages the house, nods a greeting.
"Please prepare the guest room," I say to her. "And something warm but simple to eat."
She nods and disappears.
I turn to Mia. She's standing in the entrance hall looking up at the ceiling with an expression that is very far away.
"There's a room for you at the top of the stairs," I say. "First door on the left. Pavlina will bring you food, and I’ll see if any of my sisters-in-law have clothes that you can borrow."
She looks down from the ceiling, then hands me my coat.
"You're not going to tell me anything else tonight, are you?" she asks.
"No," I say. "Tonight, you need to recover."
She holds my gaze for a moment, and I get the distinct impression she's deciding whether to push it, deciding whether she has the energy, finding the answer is no.
"Fine," she says. “I am grateful for this, but please don’t keep me in the dark. Transparency is the only way I’ll be able to trust you.”
My eyebrows flicker with surprise, but I quickly school my expression.
“You’re in my home. Your only option is to trust me.”
“Perhaps,” she murmurs before climbing the stairs, looking all too small in my black shirt and jacket.
I watch her go as I stand in the entrance hall in the quiet of my own house.
Then I take out my phone and make the third call.