Chapter 6
Tony
Living with Sasha Kozlov is going to get me killed.
I realize this around midnight, when I can’t sleep and wander into the kitchen for water.
She’s already there in sleep shorts and an oversized T-shirt, her hair down for the first time since I’ve known her. It falls past her shoulders in messy waves, and I have to stop myself from touching it.
The shirt clings in all the wrong ways, and I catch myself wondering what she’d sound like pressed against this counter.
“Can’t sleep either?” she asks without turning around.
“Jet lag.”
“You’ve been in Moscow for four weeks.”
“Persistent jet lag.”
She smirks and pours a glass of water from the filtered pitcher. When she turns around, I notice the way the shorts ride up her thighs, and my jaw ticks with the effort of keeping my hands to myself. “There’s melatonin in the medicine cabinet if you need it.”
“I’ll be fine.”
We stand there like strangers—like we didn’t almost kiss a few hours ago.
My phone goes off in my pocket, and when I pull it out, Adrian’s name flashes on the screen.
Perfect timing, as always.
My fingers twitch with the urge to crush the phone. Or better yet, his windpipe.
“I need to take this,” I tell Sasha.
“At midnight?”
“Could be a lead. You know this world doesn’t keep normal hours.” I head back to my room and close the door before answering. “It’s late.”
“Then this won’t take long,” Adrian assures me. “I hear you’re living in a Kozlov safehouse with Sasha. Congratulations on your rapid progress.”
“How did you—” I stop myself. Of course he knows. He probably has someone watching my every move. I cycle through seven ways I could kill him if we were in the same room. The eighth would be my preference—slow and painful. “The car bombing forced their hand. They think I’m a target.”
“Excellent. That gives you direct access to her daily routine, her habits, and any vulnerabilities she might have.” Papers rustle in the background. “This is exactly the position I needed you in.”
I sit on the edge of the bed and pinch the bridge of my nose. “What is the end goal here, Adrian? You keep talking about wanting intelligence, but you’ve never specified what you plan to do with it.”
“The goal is to make her suffer the way she made me suffer. To strip everything away from her until she’s as hollow as she left me.”
“By gathering intelligence on her family’s operations?”
“No, you idiot. You’re going to make her fall in love with you.
Then you’re going to ruin her with the truth.
” Adrian says it casually, like he’s discussing the weather.
“I want her to experience the same betrayal she inflicted on me. The same humiliation of discovering that someone she trusted was using her.”
My stomach turns. “You want me to seduce her.”
“I want you to make her believe you’re real.
Make her trust you. Make her care about you.
” His voice takes on a vicious edge. “And then, when she’s fully invested, when she thinks she’s found someone outside the Bratva world who genuinely cares about her, you’ll reveal that you were hired to investigate her family, and we’ll pull the trigger on the evidence you’ve collected.
I want to see her face when it happens. You’ll record it for me. ”
“That’s not what I signed up for.”
“Read your contract again. Section seven, paragraph three. You agreed to use ‘any means necessary’ to complete the investigation. This is necessary.” Adrian pauses.
“She did the same thing to me, Tony. She pretended to be an innocent girl who wanted nothing to do with her family’s criminal empire.
She talked about art and culture and building a legitimate career.
The entire time, she was documenting everything about my operation. ”
“She worked at Christie’s. If you were running illegal operations through the auction house—”
“I trusted her!” Adrian’s voice rises. “I introduced her to my contacts. I brought her into my business dealings because I thought she was different. I thought she wanted out of the Bratva world as much as I wanted a connection to someone real. And she repaid that trust by systematically destroying everything I’d built. ”
“What did she destroy?”
“My reputation. My business relationships. My position at Christie’s.
” Adrian takes a breath, and when he speaks again, his voice is under control.
“She filed a formal complaint with the auction house, detailing every questionable transaction she’d witnessed.
She provided documentation, dates, and names.
She claimed she was ‘protecting the integrity of the art world’ while conveniently ignoring that her family built its fortune on far worse crimes.
The righteous little hypocrite. I’m going to enjoy watching you dismantle her piece by piece. ”
“Maybe she believed in what she was doing.”
“Then she’s a hypocrite. And hypocrites deserve to learn how betrayal feels.
You’re going to teach her that lesson, Tony.
You’re going to be everything she wants—honest, protective, and interested in her for reasons that have nothing to do with her family name.
And then you’re going to take it all away. ”
I stand and pace the room. My hands flex, remembering the last time someone’s throat collapsed under my grip. Adrian would look good in that shade of purple. “And if I refuse?”
“Then you breach our contract. Which, as outlined in section twelve, requires you to return the deposit plus an additional fifty percent penalty. That’s seventy-five thousand dollars, Tony. Do you have that kind of money lying around?”
I don’t. The Berlin job went bad, and I’ve been living off Adrian’s deposit for the past month.
“There are other ways to gather intelligence,” I try. “Ways that don’t involve—”
“Those aren’t the ways I’m paying for.” Adrian cuts me off.
“I don’t just want information about the Kozlovs; I want Sasha broken.
I want her to understand what it feels like to be exposed by someone she trusted.
And you’re going to deliver that, or you’re going to return my money. Those are your options.”
The line goes dead.
I sit on the bed and stare at my phone. Seventy-five thousand dollars.
Money I don’t have. Money I can’t get without taking another job, which I can’t do while embedded with the Kozlovs.
Besides, men like Adrian don’t just stop at money.
If I drop this job, he’ll come after me, and he won’t stop until I’m dead.
Unless I get to him first. The thought settles into my brain like a loaded gun, comforting in its simplicity.
Adrian has me trapped, and he knows it.
The question is whether I’m willing to destroy Sasha to get myself out.
I think about her in the kitchen just now. The way she looked in those little shorts with her hair down. The way her nipples pressed against her thin shirt, and how I wanted to back her against the refrigerator and strip it off her.
She’s not what I expected. Not a pampered Bratva princess trading on her brothers’ reputation. She’s intelligent, observant, and genuinely passionate about her work. She came back to Moscow because her family needed her, not because she wanted to be part of their criminal empire.
And Adrian wants me to make her fall for me just so I can break her heart.
I walk back out to the kitchen. Sasha is still there, sitting at the counter with her water and scrolling through her phone. Her legs are crossed, and one bare foot is bouncing absently. I track the movement up her calf, then her thigh, before forcing my gaze back to her face.
“Everything okay?” she asks without looking up.
One thing I’ve learned in this line of business is that a little bit of truth sprinkled with a lie is almost more convincing, so I respond, “A former client with unrealistic expectations.”
“Sounds familiar.” She sets her phone down. “My brothers have those, too.”
“How do they handle it?”
“Dmitri renegotiates until the client sees reason. Alexei threatens to walk away and usually gets what he wants.” She takes a sip of water. “I suspect your approach is somewhere between.”
“Depends on the client.” Some clients get a negotiation. Some get a bullet. Adrian is heading toward option two.
“And this one?”
Wants me to destroy you for sport. And I’m starting to think I’d rather destroy him instead.
“Difficult but manageable.”
Sasha tilts her head to the side and eyes me for a long moment. “You’re a terrible liar when you’re tired.”
“I don’t think that’s true. You just happen to be observant.”
“It’s my job.” She stands and rinses her glass in the sink. The motion makes her shirt ride up, exposing a strip of bare skin at her lower back. My mouth goes dry. “I’m going to watch a movie. Something old and Russian and unrelated to bombs or bullets or betrayal. Want to join me?”
I should say no. Should maintain some distance between us before I get more caught up than I already am. I’m supposed to be building a case against her family, not getting comfortable on her couch. Not imagining what she’d look like spread out on it beneath me.
“Sure,” I say instead.
A few minutes later, we’re sitting on opposite ends of the sectional sofa with a 1960s Soviet film playing on the massive television.
Sasha is wrapped in a throw blanket. I’ve grabbed a pillow and settled in with a blanket because the woman likes to keep her home at arctic temperatures but still wants to stay warm.
“What’s this one about?” I ask as the opening credits roll.
“It’s called ‘The Cranes Are Flying.’ War film. Romance. Tragedy.” Sasha pulls her knees to her chest. “My mother loved it. She’d watch it every year on Victory Day and cry through the entire thing.”
“Your mother has good taste.”
“Had. She died when I was four.”
The past tense catches me off-guard. “I’m sorry.”
“Car accident. Dmitri was fourteen; Alexei was eleven. They raised me after that, with help from Boris and some of our father’s people.” She keeps her eyes on the screen. “Our father wasn’t exactly the nurturing type.”
“That must have been hard.”
“It was normal. I didn’t know anything was different.” She glances at me. “What about you? You mentioned an uncle who raised you.”
“After my parents died, yeah. He was former army, lived alone in Michigan, didn’t know what to do with a traumatized kid. But he tried. Taught me to fix cars, shoot straight, and keep my mouth shut when it mattered.”
“Sounds like he did okay.”
“He did better than okay. He gave me structure when everything else was falling apart.” I watch the film for a moment. “He died five years ago. Heart attack.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
We fall into silence, watching the film. The cinematography is beautiful in that stark Soviet way. Black and white contrasts, sweeping shots of Moscow, and faces that tell entire stories without dialogue.
About forty minutes in, the main character receives news that her fiancé has been killed in combat. The actress’s face crumbles, and Sasha sniffles beside me.
I glance over. She’s crying. Not sobbing, just quiet tears tracking down her face while she watches this sixty-year-old film.
I’ve seen women break for stupid reasons. Sasha cries because art means something to her, and it hits me harder than it should.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine. It’s just sad.” She wipes her face with the back of her hand.
“The director uses visual metaphors brilliantly. See how he frames her between the doorway and the window? She’s trapped between the past and an uncertain future.
And the crane symbolism throughout—cranes mate for life. When one dies, the other flies alone.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Most people don’t.” She pulls the blanket tighter around herself. “Film studies was one of my electives at university. I thought I might want to work in art preservation for cinema, but then I got the opportunity at Christie’s and specialized in visual art instead.”
She was analyzing films in a classroom while I was already killing people for a living. Too young for this world. Definitely too young for a man like me.
“Do you regret it?”
“No. But sometimes I wonder what else I might have been good at if I’d taken different paths. Do you ever do that? Wonder about the alternate versions of your life?”
All the time. Especially lately. In some of them, I never took Adrian’s contract. In some of them, I met Sasha under different circumstances—circumstances where I could have her.
“Sometimes,” I reply instead. “Usually when I’m making questionable decisions at midnight.”
She laughs, and the sound surprises me. “Is watching Russian cinema with me a questionable decision?”
“The jury’s still out.”
We turn back to the film. Another thirty minutes pass, and Sasha cries twice more during particularly moving scenes. She also provides commentary on the editing choices, the symbolism of certain shots, and the historical context of the setting.
She’s brilliant. Not just smart, but genuinely passionate about understanding how art communicates meaning. The way she talks about visual storytelling is the same way she talked about authentication—looking for the details that reveal truth.
Which makes what Adrian wants me to do even worse.
By the time the credits roll, it’s past two in the morning. Sasha has stopped crying, but her face is still blotchy, and her eyes are red.
“That was beautiful,” I concede, because it was.
She stands and folds her blanket. “It always destroys me. Thank you for watching with me. Most people think old Soviet films are boring.”
“Most people are wrong.”
“Noted.” She heads toward her bedroom, then pauses at the door. “Tony? Whatever that phone call was about earlier—the one that bothered you—I hope you figure it out.”
“Thanks.”
“And if it involves my family, I hope you’ll tell me the truth instead of lying to protect me. I’ve had enough people do that for a lifetime.”
She closes her door before I can reply. Thank God for small miracles.
I sit on the couch for a long time after, staring at the blank television screen and trying to figure out how I’m supposed to betray someone who just asked me to be honest with her.
The answer should be simple. I need the money. I signed the contract. Adrian has leverage.
But nothing about this situation feels simple anymore.
Especially not because I want her safe more than I want myself breathing.
Adrian’s voice is still in my ear. Demanding I record her devastation for his viewing pleasure. My hands curl into fists. I’ve killed men for less. And the longer this goes on, the more I think Adrian needs to die, too.