Chapter 15
ROLAN
Mikhail arrives in the afternoon with the monthly report.
He sits across from me and places the folder on the desk. I don’t open it. I already know what’s inside.
“Just give me the numbers,” I demand.
“Fourteen. Six dead. Three hospitalized, critical but stable. Two relocated to the safe house in Milwaukee. Three pulled from field assignments due to injuries that compromise operational capacity.”
Fourteen men in thirty days.
“Replacements?”
“I’ve contacted our people in Detroit. They can send eight within the week, but they’re not our guys, Rolan. They don’t know the streets, the protocols, the chain of command. There’s a learning curve.”
“Then they learn fast or they go home.”
Mikhail nods. He opens the folder himself, spreading three pages across the desk. Maps, incident reports, timelines marked in his precise handwriting.
“Walk me through the targets,” I say.
He points to the first mark on the map. “The port warehouse. Hit two days after the dinner. Coordinated breach, twelve men, heavy firepower. They came in through the loading dock and the service entrance simultaneously.”
“Casualties?”
“Two of ours. Four of theirs. We held the position.”
His finger moves to the second mark. “Construction site on Randolph. Smaller team, different approach. They tried sabotage first, then force when the sabotage failed. We’d already reinforced the perimeter based on your repositioning orders. They didn’t breach the inner fence.”
“And Halsted?”
Mikhail’s jaw tightens. A micro-movement, barely perceptible, but I’ve known him long enough to read the alphabet of his tension.
“The bar,” he says. “Dushku’s men hit a civilian target, Rolan. The outer circle uses that location for meetings, but it’s a public establishment. Families go there. He knew that.”
“I know he knew that.”
“It tells us how he intends to fight this war. No boundaries. No distinction between operational and civilian. He’s sending a message that nothing connected to you is safe. It won’t take much more before the governor starts messing with our business.”
I lean back in my chair. The leather creaks. Outside the window, the perimeter guards walk their routes with weapons visible, shadows moving in practiced patterns beneath the floodlights.
“How should we respond?” Mikhail asks.
Rage bubbles beneath my icy veneer.
“Dushku runs a network of hotels across the city,” I point out, leaning forward over the map.
“Twelve properties, maybe fifteen. They’re his primary laundering pipeline, and he rotates them as operational bases.
Strategy meetings, personnel staging, cash processing. It all flows through those buildings. ”
A sneer twists my lips.
“I want them gone. All of them. Every single one. Hit simultaneously. We take out his revenue stream and his command infrastructure in one night.”
Mikhail stares at me. The silence that follows stretches just long enough for me to register the expression on his face, then he nods.
I pour two glasses of vodka and push one across the desk. He takes it. We drink without ceremony.
“He moved too fast,” I tell him. “His first move was two days after that night. That’s not enough time to consolidate personnel. He had this planned before the dinner. He was waiting for an excuse.”
“Agreed. The partnership had a shelf life. A year, maybe two. His ambition wouldn’t have tolerated coexistence much longer.”
“The war was always coming.”
“Yes.” Mikhail pauses. He’s choosing his next words carefully. “You just accelerated the timeline.”
I set the glass down and stare at the maps. The red marks where we lost men. The blue marks where we held ground. The geometry of a conflict I set into motion because a man at my dinner table said the wrong thing about?—
About what? About whom?
My daughter’s tutor. The woman who has stolen sleep from me every night for a month. The person whose presence in my house has rearranged what I believed was permanent.
Every word I reach for — employee, tutor, woman, her — is either too small or too dangerous.
“What about Dushku himself?” I ask, trying to temporarily rid her from my head.
“Gone underground. He’s rotating between safe houses. We’ve identified three, possibly a fourth. He’s not staying anywhere longer than forty-eight hours. ”
“Keep tracking. I want patterns. Schedules. The name of every person who enters and exits those locations.”
“Already in progress.” Mikhail drains his glass and stands, collecting the folder. At the door, he pauses. “Rolan.”
“What.”
“The fourteen men. They knew the risks. Every one of them. This is what they signed up for.”
My heart tightens into a fist. Does he think I’ve become weak enough to care?
“I know. Find more.”
“Yes, Pakhan.”
He leaves. The door closes.
Elizabeth’s contract was intentional; every single word built only for her.
I did this because I need her to stay. And I need her to stay because Anya needs her.
I’ve watched what she’s been able to accomplish over the past few weeks.
I can’t risk that. The contract ensures I don’t have to.
As a bonus, the contract also ensures that Elizabeth Calloway remains within my walls. My cameras. My corridors. My proximity.
I could have her. The thought is not new. It’s been circling since the kitchen, growing teeth and gaining mass. I could cross the hallway, knock on her door, and she would open it. I could step inside, close it behind me, and she wouldn’t stop me.
The knowledge that I can is what prevents me from doing it.
And Anya. If I touch Elizabeth and the touching goes wrong, if it becomes tension, awkwardness. And the damage won’t land on me. It’ll land on a six-year-old girl who drew us at the bottom of a picture and meant it.
So, I don’t. I hold the line and watch through cameras. I stand in hallways and keep distant.
But God, the distance is getting harder every fucking day.
I round the corner on the second floor and she’s there.
Three feet away, coming from Anya’s room with a stack of books balanced against her hip and her hair pulled back in that careless knot. She registers my presence half a second before collision, adjusts her trajectory without breaking stride, and offers me a nod.
Small. Controlled. The kind of nod you give a superior you have to respect but don’t particularly enjoy being near.
“Mr. Belov.”
“Elizabeth.”
And she’s past me. The scent of her shampoo, vanilla, trails behind her.
I stop walking but don’t turn around. I stand in the corridor, and I let the encounter settle, the way I’ve been letting every encounter with her settle for weeks now, each one brief, each one insufficient, each one adding another line to a tally I refuse to examine.
Since the day she walked into my office, she hasn’t smiled at me. Not once.
I notice everything about her. Obsessively.
She smiles at everyone else. Angelina gets the wide, unguarded version, the one that uses her whole face and raises the temperature of the kitchen by several degrees.
Mikhail receives a respectful warmth, measured but genuine.
Even Dmitri gets one — the one that lives somewhere between a smile and a challenge .
Anya gets all of them. Every variation in her repertoire. The proud smile when Anya solves a problem. The tender one when Anya drifts off to sleep. The startled, delighted version when Anya delivers a deadpan joke with the comedic timing she inherited from me.
She gives me none of them. And even without a single smile directed my way, she is stunning. The absence of warmth doesn’t diminish her.
If anything, the composure she maintains in my presence only sharpens the effect.
She’s punishing me. She won’t argue, won’t confront, won’t give me the satisfaction of a fight I could win. She has simply removed the warmth and left me sitting in the cold, and the strategy is so effective it borders on elegant.
More effective than she knows. More effective than I’d ever admit.
The words I said to her that night still circle, but they haunt me differently than I expected.
She should be grateful. The consequence could have been termination.
Eviction. Instead, she retains her position, her salary, her room, her relationship with Anya.
Restricted movement is a mild sentence. Merciful, even.
But the way I delivered it. Standing too close. Voice dropped to a register I usually reserve for threats. Watching her body respond. The flush climbing her neck, the tremor in her fingers, the sheen of sweat forming at her temples.
I wanted to mark her. I wanted to put my hands on her and leave evidence. Punish her for walking into that dining room. For making Dushku see her. For giving Marcus a reason to speak about her. For being the fault line along which my control fractured.
I wanted to punish her for making me want her. The thoughts knot together, violence and desire, fury and need.
The arousal that has become my unwelcome companion over the past month reasserts itself with familiar, maddening persistence. I disregard it.
I am not going to be made vulnerable by a woman who wears cartoon pajamas and refuses to smile at me.
I resume walking toward my office.
Her vanilla scent follows me.
The phone rings at 4:17 p.m.
I’m behind the desk, reviewing the territorial maps Alexei updated this morning, when the screen lights up with his name.
I answer. “Talk.”
Two seconds of silence.
“Sergei is gone.”
The phone stays pressed to my ear, and I stare at the maps spread across the desk, and the lines and borders blur into meaningless ink.
Fuck .
Sergei. One of the few men who ever taught me anything worth learning.
“How?”
“He was shot during the warehouse operation this morning. The body was found two hours ago. We confirmed through?—”
I hang up.
The maps are still in front of me. The pen is still in my hand.
Sergei was fifty-four years old with hands the size of dinner plates.
He had a laugh that could travel through concrete.
He served as my father’s third-in-command, just below Mikhail, before I inherited the position.
The man who taught me at sixteen how to hold a weapon properly, how to read a room before speaking, how to stand behind a man giving orders and make the orders unnecessary through presence alone.
Bile rises in my throat.
He showed me where to strike so the pain instructs without destroying, and where to strike so the lesson becomes permanent.
My hand closes around the pen until the plastic cracks.
These things happen , I forcefully remind myself.
They are the cost of the life I chose — or the life that chose me, depending on how generous I’m feeling with the narrative.
Men die. Good men, sometimes. The organization absorbs the loss and continues.
Sentiment is not a resource. Grief is not a strategy.
I believe this. I’ve built my entire operational philosophy on it.
Tonight, I don’t feel it.
It’s past ten, the staff has retired for the night, and Anya is asleep. The corridors belong to ghosts and insomniacs and men who should be pouring vodka in their offices instead of opening security feeds.
I open the feed on camera twelve.
Elizabeth’s door is open.
I scan. She’s not in the hallway, not in the sunroom. Not in the living room. Camera fourteen, the private kitchen.
There she is.
Standing at the counter in the light, barefoot on the marble — of course barefoot, as if shoes are an inconvenience she refuses to participate in after dark.
She’s wearing an oversized gray sweatshirt and those shorts that do nothing to cover her body. Her hair is down, the dark waves moving when she walks. She’s breaking chocolate into a pot of milk.
I should keep my distance, keep the safety of a screen between me and the thing I keep walking toward.
I go to the kitchen .
The corridor is dark. The kitchen light spills into the hallway, amber and warm, and I hear her before I see her, the clink of the spoon against the pot.
She spots me as soon as I step into the doorway. The spoon jerks. She’s gotten better at not spilling, but the startle is the same. The widened eyes, the sharp breath, the hand that moves to her chest before she catches it and forces it back to the counter.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” I say.
The words come out before I’ve vetted them. The closest thing to humor I’ve produced in weeks, and it surprises me as much as it surprises her.
She stares at me, processing. I watch her cycle through the options, choosing how to react.
Then, seemingly on purpose, she exhales. A short, sharp breath that might just be the ghost of a laugh.
“You could try making noise when you walk,” she says. “Like a normal person.”
“Where would be the fun in that?”