Chapter 11
ROLAN
I can’t stop thinking about the fucking pajamas.
It’s been fourteen hours. I’ve conducted two conference calls, reviewed the Albanian counterintelligence report, authorized a shipment through the northern corridor, and signed off on three construction bids that will launder approximately four million dollars through the city’s permitting system.
But under everything, a current running beneath ice, is the image of Elizabeth Calloway standing in front of my refrigerator door in shorts that barely covered the tops of her thighs, clutching a bottle of milk, eyes wide like she’d been caught committing a federal crime.
The shorts had cartoon cats on them.
I’ve killed men, ordered executions, sat across from federal prosecutors and stared them down until they blinked. And I am currently being undone by the memory of a kindergarten teacher in kitten pajamas.
I close the laptop and open the security feed. Camera six. Empty. Camera two, the hallway outside Anya’s room. Empty. Camera nine. Empty. She’s either in her room, which has no camera because I’m not that far gone, or she’s? —
I close the feed, only to open it again.
I’m not doing this. I’m not going to sit in my office cycling through security cameras searching for that woman.
I have an empire to run and Albanian dealers trying to dismantle my construction contracts.
I have a soldier who’s been spending beyond his means and needs to be addressed.
I have a mole somewhere in my operation that I still haven’t identified. I have things that matter.
I close the feed and step out of the office.
My mind keeps wandering back to the kitchen.
The way she was stretching for the chocolate, both arms raised. That little shirt riding up to reveal a strip of smooth, pale skin at her lower back, the shadows of her spine visible.
Her body was pulled taut, every line elongated by the reach, and the shorts — those ridiculous, criminal shorts — shifted upward with the motion, climbing her thighs to the point where the curve of her ass was no longer a suggestion but a fact. Round. Full.
I should have walked away. The moment she said she was making hot chocolate, I should have left the kitchen, gone to my office, and poured the drink there.
That was the correct course of action. The rational one.
The course that a man in my position — a man who employs this woman, who controls her environment, who holds the power in every conceivable dimension of this dynamic — should have taken.
Instead, I stayed.
I watched her stir, the spoon moving in slow circles, her wrist rotating with a practiced rhythm when her body bent to check the heat, and the shorts shifted again, and the full curve of her was there — offered, unconscious, devastating — and my blood went south.
She was trembling, all because of me. Because I was standing there in the dark, and my presence did what it always does: it fills a room until there’s no air left for anyone else. It makes people smaller. Quieter. Afraid.
I liked that she trembled. The admission is ugly, but I can at least acknowledge it in my own mind.
The way her body registered my proximity. The quickened breathing and flush of her cheeks, trying to keep her eyes on the pot because looking at me cost her peace.
I liked knowing that I could affect her, that my presence altered her chemistry the way it alters everyone’s, but differently. The guards go rigid. The staff go silent. She went liquid.
She didn’t leave or shut down. She didn’t lose her voice the way the last governess did, the way most people do when they register what I am.
Elizabeth Calloway stood in my kitchen, talking about her father’s recipe and promising the hot chocolate was good.
She was afraid of me but stayed anyway. The combination of fear and defiance, vulnerability and backbone, is more arousing than anything any woman has ever done to me deliberately.
And that’s dismantling me.
The women at galas and fundraisers wear dresses cut to provoke.
They approach me knowing what I am, or at least the version of it they find exciting.
The power, the danger, the money. They perform desire.
Arching their backs, lowering their voices, and angling their bodies.
It works, in the purely mechanical sense, the way any competent transaction works.
Katarina did it best.
The thought surfaces before I can block it.
Katarina. My dead wife. She wore the right dresses, said the right things, performing desire so convincingly that I believed it for almost a year before I realized that everything, every moan, every whisper, every touch was engineered, merely a strategy.
A long-term investment in a position she wanted to secure .
And she did, by getting pregnant. In doing so, she got the ring, the name, the protection. And then she died, and I was left with a daughter and a conviction that desire is either a weapon or a trap and never anything as simple as what it pretends to be.
But Elizabeth Calloway was standing in my kitchen in pajamas with cartoon cats on them, making hot chocolate for my daughter who’d had a nightmare.
There was nothing calculated about it. Her body wasn’t arranged for my benefit, and the clothes weren’t chosen to provoke.
The strip of skin at her lower back wasn’t revealed as a strategy.
Yet it hit me harder than every designer dress and every moan of every woman who’s ever stood in front of me performing want. Because this was a woman being herself, and that was enough to make my body respond with a violence I haven’t felt in years. Maybe ever.
I left before I did the unforgivable.
Once I was in the shower, I stopped pretending.
The water was too hot, and my hand was wrapped around myself before I’d consciously decided to put it there. My body demanding what my mind refused to authorize.
The curve of her ass in that light. The way she’d said thank you , quiet, sincere, with no idea what it did to me.
But in this version she was thanking me for something else entirely.
She was beneath me, breathless, begging me for more, and I gave her everything she was asking for and then more?—
I came hard. With her name locked behind my teeth. With my hand braced against the tile, the water running down my back, my breathing ragged in a way it hadn’t been since… I couldn’t remember when.
I stood under the spray and stared at the drain, letting the long-forgotten feeling course through me. Not guilt. Hunger. She was sleeping in my house. She was, by every measure of power and ethics and basic human decency, off-limits.
I don’t do off-limits well. I don’t hold back naturally. My entire life is an exercise in taking what I want and managing the consequences.
I turned off the water, got dressed, and went back to my office, even though it was 3:00 a.m.
And now, hours later, I’m still thinking about it. But that’s the only place where this can live — in my head.
I will maintain the distance required by her position and mine.
She is my daughter’s tutor. She lives under my roof.
She has no power, no resources, no alternatives.
Any advance from me would be coercion dressed as choice, and I am many things — violent, manipulative, morally compromised in ways that would fill a prosecutor’s career — but I am not a man who takes from someone who can’t say no.
No matter how much I want to.
That’s the line I’ve drawn, and I will hold it.
The soldier who’s been spending beyond his means has a name: Grigori Laskin.
Twenty-eight. Outer circle. Runs collections on the South Side.
Low-level enforcement. Work that puts you close to cash and far from oversight.
He bought a new car three weeks ago. A BMW.
Paid cash. Then a new two-bedroom apartment on the fifteenth floor of a building that charges rent his salary can’t cover.
“He’s skimming from the collections,” Alexei says during the briefing later that day. “The numbers don’t match. He’s taking between eight and twelve percent off the top of every run.”
“How long?”
“Two weeks. Maybe longer. He’s not smart enough to hide it well. The spending is the problem. If he’d stayed quiet, kept the lifestyle the same, we might not have caught it for another month.”
“Greed makes men stupid,” I say. “What’s the total?”
“Approximately four hundred thousand.”
Not a significant sum in the context of our operation — a rounding error, a decimal point. But the principle is absolute. Stealing from the Bratva is not a financial offense. It’s structural. It undermines trust, which undermines hierarchy, which undermines everything.
If Laskin steals four hundred and breathes, the next man steals eight, and the man after him steals a million, and within a year the organization hemorrhages not money but authority.
“Bring him to the warehouse,” I say. “Tonight.”
Alexei looks at me, raising a brow. “You want to handle this personally?”
He’s right to be surprised. I haven’t handled an interrogation personally in over a year. I delegate. Alexei is for the physical work, the hands-on enforcement that I’ve strategically distanced myself from as the organization has grown.
The Pakhan gives orders. Others execute them. That’s the structure. Power is maintained through distance, through delegation, through the careful cultivation of a reputation that makes the actual violence unnecessary.
But today I want to be in the room.
“Personally,” I confirm.
He doesn’t ask why. He knows better. But I see the question form behind his eyes and dissolve — the professional’s instinct to understand his boss’s motivation overridden by the soldier’s instinct to obey his commander.
I know why. I don’t say it, but I know.
I need to keep my hands busy.