6. Razvan
RAZVAN
Twelve characters. I’ve tried twelve thousand combinations of twelve characters and the drive sits there like a locked jaw and gives me nothing.
I push back from the desk so hard the chair scrapes.
I stand up pacing the length of my office because if I sit still for one more minute I’m going to put my fist through the monitor and that won’t help anyone.
Three days.
The drive has been in my possession for three days and Dmitri, who can pull financial thread from organizations that don’t want to be found, who once reconstructed an entire shell company network from a single routing number, has tried everything short of physically destroying it and the file won’t open.
Password protected with the kind of encryption that suggests Pyotr Sokolova was significantly more careful than a man who moved numbers had any right to be.
She knows the code.
She has to know the code.
A man careful enough to build that kind of lock around those files would not leave the key with no one.
I’m already moving toward the door when Mike steps into the doorway.
“At least be decent to her,” he says.
I stop walking. “Move.”
“She’s grieving, Razvan. The girl has been in that cell for two days and she watched her father—”
“You should not have given her food.” I say it flatly, looking at him directly. “I didn’t authorize that.”
Mike looks back at me with the steady unbothered expression of a man who has known me long enough to not be moved by my flat voice. “No,” he says. “You didn’t. And I’d do it again.”
He straightens in the doorway. Something in his face shifts, drops the easy warmth for something older and more serious underneath it. “Do you remember what you promised me,” he says, “before I agreed to come on board? Before I said yes to any of this?”
I say nothing.
“We would not touch women,” Mike says. “We would not touch children. We would not put our hands on people who have no part in what we do.” He holds my gaze, steady and even.
“She’s a girl who lost her father, Razvan.
She didn’t choose this world. Her father chose it for her and now she’s in a cell in your compound and I need to know you remember what you promised me before I walked through your door. ”
The silence between us has weight.
“I remember,” I say.
Mike looks at me for one more beat. Then he nods, once, and steps aside.
From the corner of the office, Dmitri makes a sound.
He’s been there for the last hour in the armchair by the bookshelf, working through a glass of red wine with the leisurely energy of a man who considers other people’s crises excellent spectator sport. He swirls the glass now and doesn’t look up. “Maybe the issue isn’t the file.”
“Dmitri.” My voice carries a specific warning that functions on most people.
Dmitri is not most people. “I’m just observing,” he says pleasantly, “that a man who is purely professionally frustrated by an encrypted drive doesn’t pace like that. That’s a different kind of frustrated.” He lifts the glass. “She’s beautiful, from what I heard. Are you attracted to her?”
The temperature in the room drops several degrees.
“Say that again,” I say quietly, “and I’ll break the glass in your hand.”
Dmitri smiles into his wine.
Slow and unbothered, the smile of a man who has just proven his own point and knows it. “You didn’t need to be that heated about it…if it was rubbish.”
“Mike.” I don’t look away from Dmitri. “Take him somewhere before I do something that creates paperwork.”
Mike is already moving, reaching out and grabbing Dmitri by the back of the collar with the ease of someone who has performed this exact maneuver many times. Dmitri goes willingly, still smiling, lifting his wine glass carefully so it doesn’t spill as he’s steered toward the door.
“Don’t forget the oath,” Mike says, from the doorway.
Then he’s gone, steering Dmitri down the hallway, and I can hear Dmitri saying something and Mike’s low response then nothing.
I stand in the empty office.
She knows the code. I start walking.
The lower level is quiet the way it always is, that particular underground quiet that has nothing to do with peace.
I stop outside the cell, hand on the door, and for one second I stand there and breathe and try to locate the version of myself that can walk in and do what needs to be done with something like detachment.
I open the door.
She’s in the chair.
She’s always in the chair because there is nowhere else to be and she’s been there long enough now that the defiance she was wearing when I left has gone somewhere.
Not broken, not collapsed, just absent the way a fire goes absent when it runs out of fuel.
She looks up when the door opens and I watch her face do the thing it does when she sees me, the tightening, the jaw setting, but underneath it something I haven’t seen from her before.
She looks defeated.
She looked better with the fight in her. The thought arrives before I can stop it and I push it sideways and walk into the cell.
“The code,” I say.
She looks at me and says nothing.
“The drive is encrypted. You know the password. You’re going to tell me what it is or today is going to be significantly worse than the last two days.” I watch her face. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Lena?”
Her name in my mouth does something to her expression, a small flinch she covers quickly.
“I don’t know the code,” she says.
“Don’t fucking lie to me.”
“I’ve been trying to get into that drive since Moscow.” Her voice is flat and exhausted. “I don’t know the password. My father didn’t tell me. He just put it in my hand and told me to run and then he—” She stops. Swallows. “I don’t know what’s on it and I don’t know how to open it.”
“That’s a very convenient story.”
“Fuck you. It’s the truth.”
I look at her for a long moment, then I step forward and my hand closes around her throat and I squeeze.
I cut her air off completely and her hands fly up and claw at mine with everything she has, nails dragging across my knuckles hard enough to draw blood, and her face changes the way faces change when the body understands it is running out of time.
Her eyes go wide and wet at the corners and her mouth opens and works and I lean down to her level and hold on and speak very quietly into the space between us.
“Tell me the truth,” I say. “Or I will take my time with you until there is nothing left behind your eyes. Do you believe me?”
She can’t answer.
She can’t do anything except shake her head, tears breaking loose and running down her face while her hands keep working at mine, desperate and losing, and I watch her face for the thing that breaks, the specific thing that breaks when someone stops performing and starts surviving.
It doesn’t come.
What comes instead is more tears, real ones, uncontrolled and entirely without strategy, and I release her and jerk my hand back like her skin has burned me.
She gasps.
Drags in air in huge ragged pulls, shoulders heaving, and I stand over her and watch and something is happening in my chest that I do not have vocabulary for and do not want.
“If you don’t want to be hurt,” I say, and my voice has roughened somewhere I don’t intend, “then stop making me hurt you. Tell me the code. That’s all. One piece of information and this stops.”
“Go to hell.” She’s still coughing, still catching her breath, and I can tell she’s furious at herself for the tears and furious at me and her voice still has teeth in it even now, even like this, wet-faced and half-broken in a chair.
“I don’t know the code. I don’t know what’s on the drive.
You can do whatever you want to me and that won’t change because I cannot tell you something I don’t know.
” She drags the back of her wrist across her face hard, like she’s angry at the tears personally.
“Murderer. You killed him and now you’re here choking me and you still won’t have your answer because there is no answer I can give you. ”
She still doesn’t know.
That moves through me quietly.
She still believes the tattoo on my wrist is her father’s blood on my hands and I look at her across the cell and say nothing about it.
I grab her throat again.
This time my grip doesn’t crush.
My hand wraps around her and stays there and my thumb finds her pulse and rests against it, feeling the frantic tripping beat of her heart under that thin skin.
I lean in close and I let her feel the difference between this and the last time.
She goes very still.
Her hands come up but they don’t claw this time, they rest against my wrist with a confused, frightened pressure that is not quite pushing me away.
“I’ll ask one more time,” I say. Low. “And I want you to think carefully before you answer.”
She swallows against my hand. I feel it move under my palm. “And if my answer is still the same?”
“Then we’re going to have a problem.”
“We already have a problem.” Her voice has dropped without her meaning it to, gone low and unsteady. “You have your hand around my throat and I still want to kill you.”
“That mouth of yours,” I say, and I watch her, “would be better used for something other than death threats.”
She bares her teeth at me. “Well, fuck me if I care.”
I smile, my thumb caressing her lower lip and catching her small gasp. “Ah…Zayka, I’d fuck your pretty mouth first, let’s see if you can talk smart then.”
The words land in the cell and neither of us move.
Her breath stops. Not fear, or not only fear, because her eyes have gone dark and her lips have parted and the color climbing her face has nothing to do with crying.
She’s thinking about it.