9. Inessa #2
"The warrant is in process," she says. "Federal judge in Houston. A few hours at most."
"We don't have a few hours."
"I'm doing everything I can, Ms. Volkov. You need to be patient.”
I hang up. Dmitri is on his way, I can feel him getting closer.
My phone buzzes on the mattress beside me. My fathers number again. A number that's changed four times in the last year but that I always recognize because he taught me the pattern himself, rotating through Moscow area codes like a man shuffling cards.
I stare at it for three full rings.
Then I pick it up, and I become someone else. The way he taught me. Spine straight, breath even, voice cool. You don't perform fear for Viktor Volkov. You don't perform anything unless you've chosen it.
"Papa." The word tastes like rust.
"Inessa." His voice is warm this time. That's the most dangerous thing about him, the way he flips from cold to warm and back again. "You've been difficult to reach."
"I've been busy."
"Yes. I hear you've been very busy." A pause. Ice clinking in a glass. He's drinking, which means it's late where he is, which means Moscow, not stateside. He knows what’s coming and he’s got out of the country. "Dmitri tells me you've found yourself some new friends."
"Dmitri tells you a lot of things. Most of them to make himself look important."
A soft laugh, but not at all genuine. "You sound like your mother."
He does this. Drops her into conversation like a grenade, waits to see if I flinch. I don't. Not anymore.
"Call him off," I say. "I'm not asking."
"No, you never do. You demand. Also like your mother.
" The faux warmth is still there, but underneath it, something is shifting.
Recalculating. I can almost hear the gears.
"Dmitri is acting on my authority, Inessa.
These men you're hiding behind, they have no idea what they've invited into their house. "
"They know exactly what they've invited. I told them everything."
Silence. Two seconds. Three. I count them against my heartbeat.
"Everything," he repeats. Flat now. Testing.
"The shipments through Vladivostok. The arrangement with the Georgians.
The Cypriot accounts." I rattle them off like a grocery list, bored, clinical, the way he taught me to deliver information that could get people killed.
"I also have the communications from last March. The ones you thought you deleted."
I don't have those communications. They don't exist, as far as I know. But Viktor is a man with so many secrets that he can never be fully certain which ones are still buried, and that uncertainty is the only crack I need.
"You wouldn’t dare cross me."
"I already have. Encrypted backup, held by a third party. If anything happens to anyone in this club, to me. They’ll come for you.”
My voice doesn't waver. My hands are shaking, but my voice is glass. Steady, clear, ready to shatter.
"You're bluffing." Quiet. Almost a whisper.
"You taught me better than that."
Another silence. Longer this time. I hear him breathe, and in that breath I hear something I've never heard from Viktor Volkov before. He's not sure. For the first time in my life, he isn't sure about me, and that uncertainty is either going to save us all or get us killed.
"These people," he says slowly. “I assume you are sleeping with one of these bikers?”
“Why do you ask? Are you just upset you can’t pimp out your own daughter to your arms dealer friends anymore?”
“Inessa, do not be like this.”
“Anyway, if you must know, I’m with Forge, the Savages president.”
“Of course, I should have guessed. And that is worth it enough to burn your own father?”
"You burned yourself a long time ago, Papa. I'm just the one holding the match this time. I’m burning this family down Papa, I’m not yours to use anymore.”
I hear him set the glass down. When he speaks again, the warmth is gone. What's left is older, raw, and it takes me a moment to recognize it because I've never heard it in his voice before.
It sounds like loss.
"One hour," he says. "Dmitri will pull back. I have no intention of coming back to the states, the feds can do what they like. After all of this, you and I are finished.”
"We've been finished for a long time Papa."
He hangs up without another single word and the line goes dead.
I set the phone down on the mattress. I press my palms together in my lap and hold them there, tight, knuckles white, until the shaking slows to something manageable. My eyes sting but I can’t bring myself to cry. I won't let it. Not yet.
I just stood up to the most dangerous man I've ever known. I just used every skill he spent twenty-three years teaching me, and I pointed all of it directly at his throat, and it worked.
And part of me, some small, feral, irreparable part, wants to call him back and say I'm sorry.
The door opens. Forge fills the frame, and his eyes find my face the way they always do. Immediately. Like I'm the first thing he looks for in any room.
He reads it in two seconds.
"What did you do?"
“I spoke to my father. Told him I had extra evidence that would destroy him."
Forge is quiet for a beat. "Do you have that evidence?"
“No. I may have bluffed a little, but it’s not like there isn’t enough evidence already.”
His jaw works. I watch him cycle through it.
Fury that I did it without him. Fear at what could've happened if Viktor had called the bluff.
And then, underneath all of it, rising slow like heat from pavement, admiration.
Reluctant, furious admiration for the woman who just stared down a monster with nothing but nerve and a voice that didn't shake.
"One hour," I tell him. "Dmitri pulls back in one hour."
Forge crosses the room in three strides. He takes my face in his hands. His thumbs trace my cheekbones, rough and impossibly gentle, and he studies me like he's trying to memorize the exact shape of whatever I've just become.
"You're out of your goddamn mind," he says.
"Probably."