Chapter 11
PIPER
Two weeks after Vogt called Lazar from the club, Platon puts an unloaded pistol in my hands and tells me I’m not leaving until I know how to keep someone from taking it away from me.
Lazar made no direct move in all that time, and the waiting wore on everyone.
Two weeks of tracing accounts, recovering pieces, and waiting for a hit that didn’t come.
Nikita took the silence as a warning, doubled the estate detail, rotated Callum’s guards twice, and finally decided that if the wait was going to stretch, I wasn’t going to spend it unable to defend myself. He scheduled this before sunrise.
“Fix your grip,” Platon says for the fourth time. “Your grip is a handshake, not a fist. You hold it firmly, as if you’re shaking hands with someone you don’t trust but won’t insult.”
The private range sits two floors underground beneath a building Nikita owns through three shells, soundproofed and empty except for the four of us.
Nikita runs his own drills at the far lane while Platon starts me on the pistol.
Maren watches from behind the glass at the observation window, arms crossed, a coffee going cold beside her, and every time I glance over, she’s wearing an expression that’s going to become a sentence the second we’re alone.
“Nobody’s grabbing me,” I say. “I’m holding a gun.”
“The gun is the least likely thing to save your life.” He holsters the training pistol and walks me to the padded section behind the lanes.
“Most bad days happen inside arm’s reach, and there, the gun just gives one of you something to fight over.
We start with what you do when someone already has hold of you. ”
He steps into my space without warning, one hand closing around my forearm, the other pinning my upper arm. I freeze for a second before I make myself listen. Across the range, Nikita stops running his own drills.
“You can panic later,” Platon says. “Right now, you learn the sequence. Somebody grabs you from the front, you have four moves in order, and you run them the same every time. You stomp his instep with your full weight, you drive your elbow into him below the ribs, you twist free against the thumb because the thumb is the weak point of any grip, and you create distance. Instep, elbow, twist, and distance.”
I run it slowly then faster. The first time I try it at speed, I catch him uselessly in the sternum.
“You wound up like you’re chopping wood,” Platon says. “The power comes from your hips, not your arm. Again.”
We drill it until my forearm goes purple where his grip keeps bruising it and the four moves stop needing me to think before using them. It reminds me of learning to carve a notary stamp, where the hand takes over once the brain stops arguing, except a botched stamp never left a bruise.
Nikita hasn’t gone back to his own lane. He’s watching Platon’s hand on my arm, and he’s holding still with obvious effort, and I notice it before I decide to.
“You could try blinking,” Platon says without turning around. “It doesn’t help her grip, you standing there like that.”
“I’m supervising.”
“You’re hovering. She had it two reps ago.” Platon resets my stance with two fingers. “He knows I’m the better teacher for this. It bothers him to watch anyway, which is the only reason I let him think he’s supervising.”
Nikita doesn’t argue, so it’s true. He hired the person who could keep me alive and now has to watch him put hands on me. He chose the version that works over the version that’s comfortable for him. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s done for me in a while, even if it’s going to bruise.
“That’s good,” Platon says finally, with sincerity. “If you remember nothing else, remember the sequence.”
“I stomp the instep, drive my elbow in, twist free, and create distance,” I say back.
“You should be able to say it in your sleep.”
When Platon steps away to walk the perimeter with Nikita, I go into the observation room, and Maren hands me the cold coffee she’s been guarding like it’s a peace offering and an accusation at once.
“I have something to say,” she says.
“You already started.”
She looks confused. “I didn’t say anything yet.”
I snort. “You’ve been saying it through the glass for two hours.” I close one hand around the cup. “Say it, then.”
“You’ve started letting him stand where he can catch you if you fall,” Maren says.
She takes the cup out of my hand and drinks from it herself, because I still haven’t.
“I’m not warning you off him. I want to know if you can still spot a mark when it’s you, or if you’ve just decided this once not to look. ”
I don’t have anything to say, because she’s not wrong, and she’s the only person alive allowed to say it to me.
Nikita drives us up to Riverdale after the range, Platon working the overnight reports from the front seat, Maren beside me in the back. Maren stays in the car when we arrive, because Callum asked to see me alone and I won’t make my brother perform for an audience.
The apartment is on the fourth floor of a Riverdale building. A doorman who works for Nikita controls the lobby, and two of Platon’s people occupy the unit across the hall. It’s a step up from what I’ve heard about the cottage, more secure and less like a place you’d hide a body.
Nikita waits in the hallway with the guards, and I go in alone.
Callum opens the door looking better than the last time I saw him, before all this, but also angrier.
“You didn’t have to come,” he says, stepping back to let me in.
“This is the nicest place I’ve ever lived, but I hate every minute of it. ”
“You look better.”
“They feed me. There’s a guy across the hall named Yuri who taught me chess and won’t let me win.” He drops onto the couch and stops trying to be lighthearted. “This started with my debt, Pipes. You robbed that house because I couldn’t dig myself out. I know I’m the reason.”
“Your debt is how they found a way in. You didn’t choose any of what came after it. Most of this isn’t yours to carry.”
“It feels like mine.” He braces his forearms on his knees. “There’s something else, and I need you not to screen your reaction so I don’t feel bad.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“You’re doing it right now.” He picks at a callus near his thumb.
“I already told you they knew Dad’s name.
What I couldn’t stop chewing on is the order they said it in, because Platon’s people keep asking me to walk through it from the top, and the fourth time, I finally heard it.
” He looks up. “Your name came first. Then the Rusakov house. Then Dad’s provenance work, like old news.
The money came last, Pipes. My debt, the thing they supposedly showed up about, was the last thing out of his mouth. ”
I straighten in the chair and grip the arm of it, because I understand what he’s telling me before I want to.
“If they found you through the debt, they’d have led with the debt,” I say slowly. “That’s the leverage. You lead with the leverage.”
“Right. Instead, the debt was an afterthought.” Callum leans forward, and for a second, he looks less like my little brother and more like Dorian working a problem.
“They didn’t find you through me. They already had you.
I was just the address they happened to have.
The guy even laughed when he finally got to the money, like the loan was the boring part, like he already knew it wouldn’t matter, because they had a better hold on us than that. ”
A better hold on us than the loan. I can’t dismiss the phrase, because it describes the visit too accurately.
The debt didn’t lead them to me. Somebody had already connected my name, the Rusakov estate, and Dorian before these men ever walked into Callum’s shop, and I can’t place who put me at the center of it, which stays with me alongside the other things I can’t solve yet.
“Have you told Platon this?”
“Three times. He said the order matters, then wouldn’t tell me which theory he’s testing.” Callum shrugs. “I figured you should hear it from me before it turns into one of their reports that bypasses you.”
The buzzer goes before I can answer. Callum looks toward the door and stops picking at his sleeve, and I know who it is before he says it.
“That’s Ma.” He won’t meet my gaze. “She’s been calling for days. I gave her the address and told the doorman to let her up. I thought if she saw I was fine, she’d stop.”
Nikita steps in from the hall, and his attention goes straight to Callum. “You cleared a visitor into a protected location and told her about the guards,” he says coldly. “Neither happens again.”
Callum freezes and nods, then crosses the room to open the door before Nikita can stop him, and the buzzer gives me no time to decide what that obedience means.
One of Platon’s men steps in ahead of her, wearing a displeased expression, and checks her bag and coat in the entryway. His attitude is unhurried and impossible to argue with, because nobody crosses this threshold unsearched anymore, not even a furious mother.
Then Celine comes through in a cloud of the perfume she can’t afford and the grievance she wears just as easily, already mid-complaint about the doorman and the search both. She hugs Callum too hard and holds him too long, which is how she hugs when there’s an audience.
Over her shoulder, Callum catches my eye and mouths sorry, the same apology he’s been mouthing at me since I was nine, and she started using him to control me.
Then she turns to me and puts on the wounded expression she saves for when I’ve frightened her, but she’s decided to be furious about it instead.
“Do you have any idea what it does to me, not hearing from either of you for weeks? I called and left messages. All ignored.” She wrings her hands for maximum drama.
“I had to find out from Callum’s cryptic little texts that you’re both mixed up in something with dangerous people, and neither of you thought to call your mother. ”