Chapter 20
Alina
I don’t realize I’m breathing shallowly until the edges of the room start to shimmer. Dominik’s “Go when you think it’s time” is still hanging in the air.
He lowers his phone without looking away from the night beyond the glass.
He doesn’t pace. He just stands there, one hand loose at his side, the other grasping his phone as if the device might disappear if he puts it down.
The bandage under his shirt pulls when he shifts his weight.
The pull registers in the small dip at the corner of his mouth.
I file the information away the way I’ve started filing all the small things about him.
“Tell me what happens now if Archer was actually honest with you,” I say, because the silence feels like a cliff and I don’t know how long I can stand with my toes hanging over the edge.
“Real words, not… code.” I hear the way that comes out and wince.
“I mean, I know your men are there, in position, I just—”
“You want to be inside it with them,” he says, turning his head toward me.
“Yes.” The honesty surprises me because it’s not pretty.
“Here’s what happens next,” Dominik says. He glances at the time on the phone’s screen then looks back up at me. “If this all blows up in our faces and we don’t manage to recover the guns, then I’ll pay the price before it gets to you. I don’t want you to worry about that.”
As if worry is a switch I can flip just because he tells me to.
Still, his words land warm and terrible in my chest. “I’m not worried,” I lie. “And you shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“I’m not,” he replies, and that’s worse, somehow.
I start to tell him that I’m not worth it and stop myself. Instead, I wrap my arms around my waist, wishing I wasn’t putting him in this position, but not that we hadn’t ever met.
The phone vibrates once and I startle. Dominik doesn’t comment on my reaction. He slides his thumb over the screen and listens. His mouth curves into something so slight I’d miss it if I blinked before he ends the call.
“What?” I ask.
“Everything is going as planned, just the way we want it. The other day was…an anomaly. I learn from my mistakes.”
I shake my head, a physical attempt to push out the feeling that I’m in a class I didn’t even sign up for but now I can’t afford to fail. “You like all this,” I say before I can stop the thought from becoming sound. “Figuring them out. Not just winning. Understanding where they’ll make mistakes.”
His eyes find mine. “It’s what I’ve been trained to do my entire life; keep a cool head and make smarter decisions than the enemy.”
It sounds like he was trained to be a statue holding a shield, forbidden from feeling anything that might put a chink in his armor.
Dominik says, “The bikers think their patches are made of steel. But they’re just flimsy pieces of fabric stitched onto leather. And bullets pierce leather just fine.”
“I hate that I’m starting to understand you when you talk like that,” I tell him.
His phone vibrates yet again. Dominik reads the screen silently then shows me a message from an unknown contact and the words sent.
UNKNOWN: Alina, are you safe?
“It’s Archer.”
Dominik doesn’t bother answering since it’s obvious.
I can see the image of my nervous brother in those four words and the absence of him too.
I see a boy in a hallway outside our mother’s door, counting to ten every time she cried, and a teenager counting cash in a car outside a party, and a man counting a debt wrong on purpose.
I don’t know which version is texting, worried about me now. Maybe they all share the same fingers.
Dominik types back Yes and nothing else.
He then lays the phone where we can both watch the screen. The dots appear then disappear again and again, almost frantically.
ARCHER: Don’t fall for any of his pretty lies or bullshit.
I almost want to laugh. Archer doesn’t want me to fall for anyone’s lies and bullshit but his. My brother is so damn selfish. When did he become that way? Did I miss the shift? Or have I always been na?ve to his selfish ways?
Dominik picks up the phone. He reads it and sets it back down as if it’s just another object and not a small knife meant to cut me. “His concern for you is too little, too late,” he says. “He’s angry at himself. Warning you to be careful now makes him feel like less of an asshole.”
“Have you lied to me?” I ask, because I hate that I’m starting to trust my captor more than my own brother.
“No, I haven’t lied to you,” Dominik says simply, a fact laid on the table between us. “Keeping you close is the biggest risk I’ve ever taken, but it’s the only version of this world that makes sense to me now.”
The ground shifts underneath me at those words.
Dominik’s phone barely vibrates before he answers.
I hear Petrov’s voice, louder than it was before, like he’s feeling even more confident in their mission. Dominik responds with agreement at the correct intervals. When he ends the call, he takes a deep breath that I interpret as relief.
“Tell me,” I plead.
“Two pallets of guns are loaded,” he says. “Two more to go.” A pause. “Several bikers fled. No bodies we care about.”
“You mean—?”
“My men are all alive and unharmed,” he says.
I don’t know if it makes me a monster for being relieved for them or human for being honest about what I care about first. What I do know is that Dominik’s men mean something to him, and it would pain him if he lost any of them that are truly loyal to him.
I let the tension leak out of my tense neck and spine one vertebra at a time.
Then, the elevator chimes. My spine goes rigid, fingers curling around the edge of the table as if I can hold myself in place by force alone.
It’s followed by the faintest mechanical sigh of doors opening. Dominik turns his head. The slow shift of his attention is a thing I’m starting to recognize as a kind of violence. He doesn’t reach for the gun I know he always carries on his hip. He doesn’t need to.
“Stay,” he says as he places his phone down on the table. I brace my hands on the table and nod. He steps toward the foyer and opens the door.
I stay and hear their voices from the hall. One is Dominik’s, the other is a rumble of dread.
Gavriil.
I stand before my body decides to. When Dominik told me what to do if his brother arrived, I pictured myself doing it—stammering, stepping aside, being a polite disaster. I don’t want to be that person anymore.
I walk softly, careful that my steps make no sound.
When I reach the edge of the hallway, I stop because I promised.
The men are three feet away, right in front of the elevator bank.
Dominik standing strong, tall, even though his wound must be shouting at him.
Gavriil is broader than his brother, more rigid.
His suit and tie are perfect, his hands empty but still dangerous.
He looks at me like a man accustomed to weighing objects he might invest in or break.
I meet his gaze because he doesn’t scare me.
But also because there’s a sort of magnetism that surrounds him that’s hard to fight.
“I told you—” Dominik begins.
“I’m behind you,” I remind him, and it’s absurd how much that pleases him.
His shoulders dropping half an inch like I just gave him permission to breathe.
Gavriil’s jacket tells its own story: the slight, weighted pull on the left side where something heavy sits inside his inner pocket.
A gun, carried close to his heart. It would be lunacy to ever put myself between two men built to kill each other.
Gavriil’s mouth shapes something like a smile and then changes its mind. “You’re not going to invite me in?”
“Not tonight.”
He opens his mouth as if to challenge that, or make a smartass remark, then suddenly closes it again before he asks, “The guns?” thankfully in English.
“Four pallets, as I’m sure you’ve already been told,” Dominik replies. “That should be most of them.”
“And the money?”
That question hangs in the air there. After what feels like years, Dominik answers, “We’ll need something more persuasive than fear to locate the cash.”
Gavriil makes a small sound that might be his agreement.
His attention slides over to me again, slow, clinical, not leering, which is worse, in a way, because it’s the way men look at property before they decide if they want to own it.
He says something in Russian that I know pertains to me because Dominik’s hand balls at his side, a clenched fist that pretends it doesn’t want a throat in it.
“It’s rude to talk about a person in another language like they’re not here,” I say to them, my voice thankfully steady.
Gavriil doesn’t blink. Then he tips his head, an acknowledgment, like a chess player accepting that the person across the board found the move he didn’t think she’d see.
“You are still here,” Gavriil says. “That is the problem and the solution, as my brother would say.”
Gavriil stares at him. Something passes between them that isn’t words, or maybe it is a word I don’t know yet. The bigger man breaks the look first, not because he’s weaker, I think, but because he’s playing the long game and we don’t yet know the rules he’s set.
“You have forty hours,” he says. “Not forty-eight. My patience is expensive, and I intend to be paid.”
“You’ll have your guns by morning,” Dominik answers.
“Too bad there was more to our deal than guns,” Gavriil says. “And I have a reputation to uphold.”
“Nobody but the three of us knows about the deal I made you. Your reputation will not suffer for being reasonable,” Dominik says. Gavriil’s eyes warm a degree. Then he inclines his head a millimeter to me, as if a final warning to his brother, then he returns to the waiting elevator.
I don’t breathe until the doors close. That’s when I suck in air so hard I have to put my palm on the wall next to me until my lungs decide to behave.
Dominik waits until the faint hiss of the elevator cables fades before he pivots toward me.
He doesn’t ask if I’m all right. He doesn’t say I did well.
He just steps closer and fits his hand around the curve of my shoulder, his thumb pressing once into the bone there, like he’s telling me I did something correct.
“Let me speak to him,” I say, surprising myself. “If Archer reaches out again. One sentence.”
His thumb stills. “Okay,” he says. “One sentence. Choose it now because you won’t have time later.”
I open my mouth and close it. If I had hours, I would use them and likely end up with something worse than silence. I think about what would hurt Archer enough to help me, and the thought makes me cold.
“I’m still breathing for now,” I say finally. “I don’t know for how much longer if you don’t bring the money where he tells you.”
Dominik’s mouth twitches again, that almost-smile. “Wordy,” he says. “But I admire the function.”
“I’m not good at poetry,” I say, and the way the sentence echoes his earlier barb at his brother pleases me in a small, petty way that tastes like victory.
“No,” he says. “But you’re good at getting results from your worthless brother.”
The phone on the dining table hums again, and we both turn. Dominik gets there first, of course. He listens, nods once, twice, and then says, “Warehouse,” and “Not that one.” When he ends the call, there’s enough tension left in the line between his eyebrows to hang a picture on.
“They’re coming into town,” he says.
“Good. Can I see them?” I ask, meaning the pallets of guns, the items my brother stole and Gavriil demanded be returned.
“Yes,” he says without hesitation. “On a screen.”
He retrieves his laptop from the study, something I would’ve done for him if he had asked.
A little while later, the screen splits into four quiet squares: a mostly empty warehouse; the front of a van; a slab of concrete painted with lines that mean things to people who back trucks into places; the shadow of a man I think is Renat.
Then the pallets slide into view, gray and solid and stupidly ordinary.
If I squint and lie to myself, I could decide they hold something harmless like commercial refrigerators and not guns.
“There they are,” Dominik says, not like he’s confirming it for himself.
“If those are all full, then that’s…a lot of guns,” I whisper, uselessly.
The magnitude doesn’t register the way I expected it to.
It should feel like weapons that decide whether a man keeps breathing.
Instead, it’s a relief, a promise my brother kept.
One that will ensure Dominik’s peace with Gavriil for a little longer.
“Tomorrow we’ll start hunting down the money.”
“We,” I repeat. I don’t know when I went from hostage to plural, only that the word hooks into something deep and aching inside me.
“Yes, we.” Dominik closes the laptop as if he’s seen all he needs to see. “Come on, dikaya koshka. You should try to get some sleep for a few hours.”
“And you? Will you sleep, eventually?” I ask.
“I’ll sit down,” he replies. “Come on.”