Chapter 14 #4
“You’ve been keeping me occupied. I haven’t had time to demonstrate all my skills.”
“What other skills exist?”
“None that are appropriate for the living room.”
I laughed. He turned me—a slow, deliberate rotation that moved us across the floor in a way that felt less like dancing and more like being transported.
The living room was small. The furniture pressed in.
We had to navigate around the sofa and the coffee table and the lamp that I had already knocked into once with my hip.
I took the lead.
I shifted my weight forward, pressed my hand against his shoulder, and stepped into him — reversing the frame, turning the lead upside down.
He resisted for half a second. Then he followed.
His body adjusted, his feet moved, and I danced him backward across the room with the particular satisfaction of a woman who had found a new way to challenge a man who was difficult to challenge.
“You’re leading,” he said, amused.
“I noticed.”
“This is not traditional.”
“Neither is marrying a Bratva Pakhan due to strategy and then liking it. Life is full of surprises.”
He let me lead for eight bars. Then he took it back—smoothly, without force, a pressure through his hand on my waist that redirected my momentum until I was turning under his arm and coming back to his chest. The turn was clean.
The catch was precise. I ended up against him with my back to his front, his hand on my stomach, both of us breathing slightly harder than the dancing warranted.
“Show-off,” I said.
“You started it.”
The song changed. Slower. The man’s voice dropped lower, and the instruments thinned until it was just a guitar and the voice and the particular silence of a room where two people were standing very close and not moving.
Daniil’s chin rested on my shoulder. His hand lay flat on my stomach. I could feel his breathing against my back—slow, even, the rhythm of a man whose body had found the place it wanted to be.
“Thank you for tonight,” I said.
I turned in his arms. I faced him. His hands found my waist. My arms went around his neck. The music played. We barely moved—a small sway, a shifting of weight, the kind of dancing that was really just standing together with an excuse.
He kissed my forehead. My temple. The spot below my ear where my pulse beat and where he always paused, always lingered, as though the rhythm of my blood was something he wanted to learn.
His phone rang.
The sound cut through the music—sharp, insistent, the particular ringtone he had assigned to Nikita. Not a text. A call. The kind of communication that meant the summary could not wait for a summary.
“I fucking hate phones,” he growled.
Daniil’s arms tightened for one second. Then he released me. He crossed to the shelf and picked up the phone.
“Nikita.”
I heard Nikita’s voice. Not the words—just the tone, the particular clipped efficiency that meant information was being delivered in the order it had been verified.
Daniil listened. His face did not change.
His posture did not change. But his hand—the one not holding the phone—curled into a fist at his side, and the fist tightened, and the knuckles went white.
“Put it on speaker,” I said.
He looked at me. I was standing in the middle of the living room in my blue dress, my arms still holding the shape of him. He put it on speaker.
“—manager of Volna,” Nikita was saying. “Semyon Orlov. Forty-three. Been running the building for eleven years. Arkady brought him in this afternoon. He talked.”
“What did he say?” Daniil asked.
“He said Kostya approached him three weeks before the murders. Asked him to keep him informed about Volna’s security arrangements. On the morning of the meeting, Semyon gave him the temporary code.”
The living room was very quiet. The music had stopped—the phone call had interrupted the playlist, and the silence that replaced it had a physical weight.
“Kostya told him Lev had asked him to check the arrangements. Semyon believed him—or said he believed him. He wrote the code down and handed it to Kostya that morning.”
“The code for the service cupboard.”
“Yes. The one Gusev used to get the gun.”
I pressed my hand to my mouth. The implication landed—not slowly, not in pieces, all at once. The security code. The private room. The meeting where two fathers had died.
“Why didn’t he come forward?” Daniil asked.
“He says he was afraid. He says after the murders, he realized what the code had been used for. He tried to talk to Kostya. Kostya told him to forget it. Semyon says Kostya’s exact words were: ‘You remember nothing. You gave no one anything. If you speak, I will make sure you have nothing left to speak with.’”
“Kostya threatened him?”
“Directly. Repeatedly. Semyon kept silent because he believed the threat. He’s been running Volna for eleven years and he’s never been so frightened of a man that he couldn’t sleep.”
I sat down. I did not choose the sofa—my legs simply found it. The blue dress pooled around my knees. My hands rested in my lap. I stared at the phone on the shelf.
“Where is Kostya now?” Daniil asked.
“Arkady went to find him. His apartment in Bay Ridge. His wife says he left this morning and hasn’t returned. His phone is off. His car is still in the garage. He’s gone, Daniil. We’re checking the safe houses and the known contacts, but he’s in the wind.”
Daniil was silent. I watched him process it.
Kostya. My father’s brother-in-law. The man who had stood at Mikhail’s funeral with his hands folded and his face grey. The man who had raised the issue at Volna—the Maspeth arrangement, the dependency, the renegotiation.
My uncle.
“Nikita,” I said. “What happens next?”
Nikita’s voice was careful. The gentleness he used when he understood that what he was saying cost something.
“We find him. Arkady is running the known locations. I’m pulling his financials and communication records now—the access Anton gave us. If Kostya has been working with Viktor, there will be a trail. Money, messages, meetings. Men who betray organizations leave fingerprints. Even careful ones.”
“And if he’s already with the Voronins?”
“Then we have our answer about how deep this goes. And we plan accordingly. For war. Bloody, violent war.”