Razvan
She said she would kill me.
I’ve had grown men beg for their lives in front of me.
I’ve had soldiers, actual soldiers, men who’ve held weapons and used them, go to pieces when I walked into a room.
This girl, zip-tied in the back of my car with a gun two inches from her spine, looked at the serpent on my wrist and told me she was going to kill me with her eyes absolutely dry.
I’ve been thinking about it for six hours.
“You have the face again,” Mike says, from the armchair he has claimed in the corner of my office like he lives here.
I look up from the window and glare at him. “I don’t have a face.”
“Razvan.” He sets down his coffee. “She’s been in the lower level since three this morning. It’s almost ten. You haven’t gone down once, which means you’re either being strategic or you’re hesitating.”
“Strategic,” I grunt. “I’m not hesitating.”
Mike says nothing.
Lyosha has no such restraint.
He’s been in the doorway for the last five minutes, rolling his neck, practically vibrating with the specific energy of a man who has been promised violence and not yet delivered it.
“If you’re done being strategic,” he says, “I’m happy to go down and have a cute little conversation with her.
She tells me where the file is, we’re done before lunch and the men can take her body out. ”
“No.” The words comes out faster than I intend it to. Lyosha raises both eyebrows. Mike, God help him, looks at his coffee to hide something in his expression.
“I’ll do it myself.” I narrow my eyes at Mike.
“Right.” Lyosha sounds genuinely confused. “Then why haven’t you gone down yet?”
“Because I said I’ll do it myself and I’ll do it when I’m ready.”
Lyosha looks between us and leans against the doorframe.
Mike looks at me directly. “I understand the Bratva rule. The debt doesn’t die with the father.
I understand it. But Razvan.” He pauses.
“You have to admit this feels different. She’s not a soldier.
She’s not connected. She’s a girl who lost her father the same way you lost yours, maybe even worse because from the way she was screaming in that street, she was there. She watched it happen.”
“Don’t,” I snap.
“I’m just saying we’re talking about a girl who witnessed her father’s execution and ran into the night with nothing.
Viktor’s not gentle, Razvan. We both know what his men do when they’re executing.
Whatever she saw in that apartment, it wasn’t clean.
” He picks up his coffee again. “She’s carrying the same thing you are right now.
Just from the other side of it. This has to be complicated. ”
“She is the daughter of the man who had my father killed,” I say, each word deliberate. “She ran with files that can take this family apart. There is nothing complicated about this.”
Mike nods slowly and doesn’t push further. That’s the thing about Mike, he says what he needs to say then he lets it land and doesn’t keep poking at it.
I turn from the window. “Where the fuck is Dmitri?”
A pause.
“Asleep,” Mike says, with the specific diplomatic tone of someone not saying everything they know.
“It’s ten in the morning.”
“There were two of them. Possibly three. I stopped asking questions after the second girl walked in last night.”
I stare at him.
“He’s Dmitri,” Mike says, spreading his hands. “What do you expect?”
I leave them to it and head downstairs, moving through the corridor and down the back stairwell without stopping, because if I stop I’ll think about what Mike said and I’ve already decided I’m done thinking about what Mike said.
The lower level is quiet, stone-walled, and temperature controlled.
I’ve brought men down here.
I’ve left men down here until they were ready to answer questions they’d come in swearing they’d never answer.
I stop outside the cell door.
I still remember the way she didn’t look scared of me at all when we nabbed her.
When she saw me, she looked shocked for a moment.
That was fucking all.
She looked at my wrist and her face went through something I couldn’t fully read.
The shock first, then a stillness, and then it cracked open into something that wasn’t fear.
She was not what I was expecting at all.
Not like I know what I was expecting.
Zayka.
She’d been frozen solid then she went feral.
The contradiction had been more interesting than anything that happened in the six hours before it.
I open the door.
She’s in the chair where I had her placed, wrists zip-tied to the arms, ankles secured.
She’s been there for hours and she looks it.
Hair loose and tangled, dark circles under her eyes deep enough to be bruises, a red mark across her left cheekbone from the struggle in Vienna that I find I don’t like looking at.
Her jacket is torn at the shoulder.
She was asleep when the door opened.
She isn’t now.
The second she sees me her entire face changes.
Her chin comes up. Her teeth show, not a smile, nothing close to a smile, the expression of something that has decided it would rather bite than flinch.
She strains forward against the zip-ties so hard the chair legs lift slightly off the floor.
“You.” The word is pure venom. “Untie me. Untie me right now and face me like—”
“Good morning,” I say.
“I will kill you.” She’s pulling at the ties, the chair scraping. “I will kill you, I will find a way, I swear to God, you murdered him, you stood there and you—”
She thinks I did it personally. It has to be the tattoo. She saw the tattoo and she drew the line straight to me.
She doesn’t know that every male born to direct Volkov blood carries the same mark.
My father had it.
His father before him.
Viktor carries it on his left wrist, slightly faded with age.
If I ever have a son, he’ll carry it too.
The thought arrives and with it comes something I don’t invite.
An image of this girl, this furious sharp-edged girl across from me, and she’s softer somehow in the picture my mind constructs without my permission.
Rounded with child, one hand resting low on her stomach, and she’s smiling, actually smiling, at something I’ve said or done, and the expression on her face is so different from the hatred she’s wearing right now that I stand there for one unguarded second just wondering what that would look like.
What she would look like. If she ever smiled at me like that.
I shut it down so fast it almost has a sound.
That is what fucking happens when you let Mike talk to you. Same boat.
Same despair.
I look at her eyes now, past the rage she’s holding up like a shield, and I can see it.
The same thing that’s been living in my chest since Viktor walked through my door.
The thing underneath the anger that is so much worse than the anger.
She is hurting. I am hurting.
But she still needs to tell me where the file is. Then she still needs to die.
“The drive,” I say.
She stops mid-sentence.
A freeze so small most people would miss it.
Her eyes flicker.
Her hands, which had been pulling at the restraints, go still for one betraying beat before she starts up again.
There it is.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You went still.”
“I didn’t—”
“Your hands stopped.” I walk toward her slowly, watching her track me. “For exactly one second when I said the word drive, every single thing you were doing stopped. Then you remembered to keep moving.” I stop in front of her. “You’re not a good liar.”
“I’m not lying, I don’t have any—”
“You’re also fidgeting.” I crouch down to her eye level. “Your left thumb. You’ve been rubbing it against your palm since I mentioned it.”
She looks down at her hand then looks back up at me. The fury on her face sharpens into something that wants to be contempt.
“So you’re observant,” she says. “Wonderful. You can watch me not tell you anything.”
I straighten. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you a chance. Because I’m feeling generous this morning.”
She stares at me.
I reach down and cut the zip-ties. First her wrists. Then her ankles. I step back.
She doesn’t move. She stares at her freed hands, then at me, then at the door behind me. The calculation happening behind her eyes is almost visible.
I raise an eyebrow. “Well?”
Nothing. She looks shocked.
“You’ve been telling me you’ll kill me since Vienna,” I say. “Here you are. Here I am. No restraints. Is your father’s death not enough motivation, or—”
She launches out of the chair.
She’s faster than I expect and angrier than is tactically sound.
She goes for my throat first, which is actually the correct instinct, and I let her get close enough that her hands make contact before I move.
I catch both wrists, step into her momentum and turn, and she slams into my chest.
I wrap one arm around her from behind, pinning both her arms to her sides, and her back hits the wall with me pressed flush against her from behind and there is no space between us. None. Not anywhere.
She explodes.
Writhing, twisting, head snapping back trying to connect with my face, feet scrambling for purchase against the wall.
Her whole body is working against mine and she’s not weak.
She’s driven by something without an off switch, and I tighten my hold until I can feel every single breath she takes, her ribs expanding and contracting against the locked bar of my arm, the full length of her back against my chest, her hips pressed back into mine with nowhere to go.
Her hair is against my jaw.
She smells like fear and cold air and something underneath it that is just her.
The air leaves my chest.
Not all at once. Slowly, like something deflating that I didn’t know was full. She shifts against me trying, to break my grip.
The movement does something I refuse to examine, and I press her harder into the wall to stop it.
That is categorically worse because now she’s completely still and I can feel everything.
Every place we’re touching.
The sharp intake of her breath.
The way her body, despite every furious signal her mind is sending, has gone from fighting to something more complicated than fighting.
She makes a small sound.
I should have let Lyosha do this.
I reach around her, one-handed, and start searching.
Outside jacket pockets first.
Her breathing is fast and shallow against my forearm.
I move to the inside pocket and she twists hard, but I pin her flat again, my chest to her back, my hand continuing its search with a focus I am working extremely hard to maintain because she is pressed against every inch of me and the clinical part of this is losing ground by the second.
“Let me go,” she grits out. “Let me go or kill me. Those are the only two options I’ll accept from you.”
“Patience,” I say, close to her ear. “Zayka.”
She shudders. “Don’t call me that.”
My hand finds the inside pocket. Phone. And beneath it, small and hard with a crack along one corner, the drive.
I pull both and step back immediately, putting the length of the cell between us.
She spins with her back to the wall, her chest heaving and something in her eyes that I stop myself from cataloguing.
She looks at the drive in my hand and her face does something terrible for just one second.
Something young and stripped bare.
It lasts less than a breath then the fury is back, but I saw it and I can’t unsee it.
He gave it to her.
Right before they killed him.
I walk to the chair.
Pick up the cut zip-ties and the spare ones on the floor.
She doesn’t fight me this time when I secure her back into the chair. She’s looking past my shoulder with her jaw tight, doing exactly what I’m doing.
Refusing to feel it in front of someone watching.
I straighten, pocketing the drive and the phone.
“You have one more day,” I tell her. “I’d think carefully about how you spend it.”
I walk to the door.
“I’ll kill you,” she says behind me. Quiet this time. No screaming. Just a woman making a promise she intends to keep.
I stop at the door and stand there for one beat longer than I need to.
Then I walk out.
The lock clicks behind me and I stand in the corridor staring at the wall, the drive burning my pocket.
She is on the other side of that door and I have absolutely no idea why she isn’t already dead.