Chapter 9
Daniil
Iread the agreement twice before dawn.
The leather folder lay open on my desk. Ksenia’s signature at the bottom — Ksenia Mikhailovna Orlova — each letter formed with incredible precision. My name beneath hers.
Three rules. Ten strokes. Green, yellow, red.
Service offered in desire is received in gratitude. Service offered in fear is rejected and replaced with care.
Nothing in the language explained why I had not slept.
I had walked her to the door of her suite.
She had turned, the ivory blouse catching the hallway light, and said good night.
I had said good night. She had closed the door.
I had stood in the hallway for four seconds too long, listening to the lock turn, and then I had gone to my own room and lay in the dark and replayed every moment of the evening.
The folder sat on my desk. I closed it.
At seven-fifteen, I poured coffee and opened the security folder Nikita had left for me. I couldn’t take in a word.
Ksenia appeared at seven-twenty-two.
She wore sensible, well-cut black pants. A fitted sweater in deep burgundy, soft at the neckline. Her hair was down, loose around her shoulders. She had pinned nothing. Pulled nothing back. She wore the ring on her left hand and small gold studs in her ears and nothing else.
She was beautiful. Perfect. Understated. Gorgeous.
My gaze went to her mouth.
I could not stop it. The movement was involuntary and immediate—my eyes found her lips before she had crossed the threshold, before she had said good morning, before she had reached the table. Her mouth was faintly pink. I wanted her so badly it almost hurt me.
She saw me looking.
I did not look away.
“Come here, Ksyusha.”
She stopped two steps inside the door. Her eyes held mine. The morning light from the garden windows fell across her face, catching the warm tones in her chestnut hair, the green in her hazel eyes. She crossed the remaining distance and stopped beside my chair.
Her hand came to my shoulder. Light. Deliberate. Her fingers rested on the wool of my sweater, and I felt the pressure of each one individually—four points of contact, mapped carefully onto my body.
“Is this our morning check-in?” she asked.
“Part of it.”
I set down the coffee. I turned in the chair to face her. She was close—close enough that I could smell her shampoo, something faint and clean, and beneath it the scent of warm morning skin.
“How do you feel about last night?”
Her hazel-green eyes held mine for a long, measured second. Then she bent and kissed me.
Her mouth was warm. Soft. She kissed me with the same confidence she had brought to the checklist—no hesitation, no testing, no tentative first contact.
She placed her lips on mine and pressed and held, and her hand tightened on my shoulder, and I felt the contact move through my body in a single slow wave that started at my mouth and ended somewhere I could not afford to think about this early in the morning.
I kissed her back. My hand found her waist. The burgundy sweater was soft under my palm.
I drew her closer—not enough to pull her into my lap, not enough to forget the security folder and the car waiting outside and the meeting at Beard Street.
Enough to feel her lean into me. Enough to taste the coffee on her lower lip.
She lingered. Her fingers moved from my shoulder to the back of my neck.
The touch was light, barely perceptible, her fingertips tracing the line of hair above my collar.
I kept my hand on her waist. I did not pull her closer.
I did not push her away. I held the line between morning and everything the morning wanted to become.
“That’s how I feel,” she said.
“So . . . broadly positive?” I smiled.
“Broadly positive,” she replied, matching my smile with one of her own.
The car horn sounded from the drive. One short blast. Ilya, punctual to the second.
Ksenia pulled back. Her hand slid from my neck. Her fingers traced along my jaw—a brief, deliberate touch, her thumb brushing the edge of my chin—and then she stepped away.
“We should go,” she said.
Her voice was steady. Her eyes were not. The green in them had darkened. The composure she wore was already rebuilding itself, brick by brick, but the mortar was still wet.
I stood and picked up the security folder. I picked up my coffee and drank the rest of it in one swallow.
We walked to the car. Ilya held the rear door. Ksenia slid in first. I followed. The door closed. The car pulled out of the drive.
She sat beside me with her bag on her lap and her hands folded on top of it and her posture immaculate.
The composed professional. She looked out the window at the row houses passing on Van Brunt Street and gave no indication that three minutes ago she had kissed me in a way that made me want to cancel the entire day.
Fuck.
She had knelt for me last night. She had taken me in her mouth and made sounds I could hear in the silence of the car. She had looked up at me from the floor with her knees on the carpet and her eyes wide and dark and she had swallowed me down like she was dying of thirst.
I turned back to the security folder. The words sat on the page. I read the first line three times.
The car turned onto the BQE. The harbor appeared between buildings, grey and flat beneath the November sky. Ksenia set her phone in her lap and looked out the window.
I watched her reflection in the glass. The faint curve of her mouth.
The way her hair moved against her jaw when the car turned.
I had wanted to cancel the day. I had wanted to carry her upstairs and close the door and learn the rest of her.
I had wanted to hear her say my name the way she had not said it last night.
Instead I was driving to Beard Street to discuss the assassination of my father.
I closed the folder.
Maksim had converted the operations room into something closer to an interview suite. Two chairs faced each other across the central table. The wall monitors displayed route maps and harbor feeds. A recorder sat between the chairs, small and black, its red light steady.
He took Ksenia first.
I waited in Anton’s office down the hall.
His desk held a brass lamp, a calendar stopped at the week of his death, and a photograph of Ksenia and Anton as children.
She was perhaps eight in the picture. Dark curls.
Missing tooth. Anton stood behind her with both hands on her shoulders, grinning at the camera with the unguarded joy of a boy who had not yet inherited anything.
I studied the photograph for longer than I should have. Then I read the overnight reports on my phone and waited.
Twenty minutes. Maksim brought Ksenia back. She looked composed. Her face gave nothing away. She sat in the chair outside Anton’s office and pulled out her phone and began working through a list of calls.
My turn.
Maksim’s questions were methodical. He walked me through the evening of the assassinations chronologically—my arrival at Volna, my movements between floors, my knowledge of the meeting between Lev and Mikhail, my awareness of the security code distribution.
I answered each one directly. He recorded everything.
His dark eyes stayed on my face, watchful and patient, and I understood that his thoroughness was not suspicion.
It was the same thoroughness I had demanded when I said investigate all six names.
When we finished, Maksim turned off the recorder. “I’ll have a transcript by tomorrow. Anton wants to review both accounts together.”
“Good.”
I left the operations room and found Ksenia at a desk in the administrative office. She had taken over the space—papers spread across the desk, her phone pressed between her ear and shoulder, a pen in her right hand, making notes on a printed invoice.
I stood in the doorway and watched.
She was confirming her father’s memorial inscription with someone—a stonemason, from the vocabulary. She spelled Mikhail’s patronymic. She confirmed the dates. She asked about the font, the stone color, the mounting bracket. Her voice was steady and precise and carried no tremor.
She hung up. She dialed again. A different voice—the funeral director.
She questioned the invoice line by line.
The casket upgrade that had not been authorized.
The floral arrangement charged at retail rather than wholesale.
The transportation fee that appeared twice.
She found four hundred dollars in overcharges without raising her voice.
She hung up. Dialed again.
This had to be a freight client. One of the Orlov captains had referred him.
His container had cleared customs and was sitting on a Sokolov truck and he wanted reassurance that the route was safe after the Hamilton Avenue attack.
Ksenia gave him the revised security protocols.
She gave him the convoy schedule. She gave him the name of the Sokolov dispatcher who would handle his cargo.
I heard the muffled sounds as he congratulated her on the marriage.
I watched her face. The smile that appeared was warm and genuine and cost her something. She thanked him. She accepted his condolences for Mikhail. She promised to have Anton call him personally by end of day. She hung up.
She set the phone on the desk. She reached beneath the desk with her left hand and began turning the ring on her finger. Around and around. The white gold caught the fluorescent light, flashing small bright signals against the underside of the desk where no one could see.
She looked exhausted, emotional. It was so much to deal with. She needed me, but she didn’t know it yet. Time to help her see.
I crossed the room, stopping beside her chair.
“Let’s take an hour. Have a break. It’s hard.”
She looked up. Her hand stilled on the ring.
“There’s a car outside. Ilya can drive us. One hour. No calls. No paperwork. Just . . . us.”