Chapter 14
LEV
Inotice it a week later. Mari’s paler. She moves with careful precision, slower to meet my eyes. In the time she’s been staying with me, she hasn’t once hidden her moods or her displeasure.
Suddenly, she’s clammed up.
She keeps her door closed and answers with one-word replies. She dodges whichever elevator I’m in and takes the stairs. She used to fight every guard detail I assigned. Now she lets them hover. It’s the compliance that sets off alarms.
At the penthouse, she times her exits. If I walk into the kitchen, she remembers something in her room.
If I sit at the table, she eats at the counter with her back to me.
When I ask how she slept, she says “fine” then walks away.
She has tabs all over a ledger she’s re-auditing. She flips them like worry beads.
I’ve seen this pattern in others before. People go quiet when they’re planning to do something stupid. When they’re loud and boisterous, I know they’re full of shit. It’s when they go silent on me that I start to worry.
On Tuesday, Yuri sends me screenshots he’s pulled from her computer. She’s looking at job boards, remote roles out of state, apartment searches in Chicago and Austin. I tell him to widen coverage on her devices. He replies with the single dot that means it’s handled.
I try to be rational. She’s young. Living with me is pressure.
Maybe she wants options. Then Thom sends me a lobby video.
I watch as she leaves at lunch with Pavel, stops at a pharmacy, and comes out with a bag.
Pavel’s face is pink. He also takes a ten-minute detour on the way back.
I flag the route. The detour won’t happen again.
On Wednesday, she’s early to her desk and late to leave it. She’s distracted in the morning check-in, but her details are perfect when I press her, like she’s been practicing how to talk to me. At home that night, she stays in her room and doesn’t bother with dinner.
By Thursday, I’m done guessing. I step into her office without knocking. She’s clicking through wire transfers, a cold brew sweating on a coaster. She looks up, ready for a fight, but all the bravado leaves her when she sees it’s me.
“What’s going on with you?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she answers far too quickly, too defensively.
“Nothing,” I repeat slowly, making clear how little I buy her bullshit. “Is that why you’ve been looking for other jobs?”
She shrugs. “I’m just considering my options,” she says, trying for casual, though she looks even more nervous. “It’s suffocating working for you and living with you. Plus, this threat can’t last forever, right? At some point, I have to be able to move on with my life.”
She’s talking too fast, and the words sound rehearsed again. All the red flags in my head go up.
“That isn’t going to happen,” I tell her firmly. “You can’t leave Levcon until the threat is neutralized, and even then, we’re going to have to do a lot of vetting to make sure my enemies can’t use you against me again.”
“I figured,” she says with a shrug and turns back to the screen. She drops it too easily. It makes everything worse.
I green-light more coverage on her. Yuri posts a tail outside. I have her computer bugged so I can see everything she looks at. Elyan watches elevator arrivals. We rotate teams so nobody gets predictable.
Yuri tells me on Friday morning that she bought a new suitcase from a luggage store on Fifth. Two blocks later, she stopped at a bank and withdrew cash. He says what I’m already thinking.
“She’s acting like she’s going to run,” he confirms. “What do you want to do?”
“We have to stay on her,” I say. “Double the surveillance if we have to.”
He nods and leaves my office.
I replay what I know in my mind. First, she found $200,000 missing from the books. The fake agent showed up at her door. Then there was the attack on our Delancey club and the photograph at my gate. It all relates somehow.
The agent who showed up at her apartment was fake, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t contacted the actual Feds. Agent Halloran says we aren’t being investigated, but if she approached someone, they would do everything to make sure no one else in the organization knows what’s going on.
It’s the only explanation. She’s going to turn me over to the Feds, and then she’s going to run away. Maybe they’re already talking witness protection. As if that would be enough for her to get away from me.
At five-thirty, I text Mari to meet me in the small glass conference room. When she arrives, she doesn’t sit. She stands at the far end like she’ll bolt if I move. Her color’s off. Her hands are tight at her sides. It looks like anger. Reads like fear.
“Tell me what you’re hiding,” I demand coldly.
“I’m not hiding anything,” she answers nervously, her posture all wrong.
“You’re lying,” I say, as calmly as possible. “You’re avoiding me. You bought a suitcase. You pulled cash out of your account. You’re looking at jobs.”
“I’m allowed to buy things,” she says. “I’m allowed to have my own money.”
“You are,” I agree. “But you’re not allowed to disappear.”
Her chin tips. “You can’t stop me from existing, Lev. You can only make my life smaller.”
“If you want to leave this office for another office, say it plainly,” I say.
“If you want to move away when this is all over and fuck off to the farthest corner of the earth, you’re more than welcome to dream about that.
But what you’re not going to do is work with someone behind my back to destroy me. ”
“I’m not working with anyone,” she fires back, a little of her normal color returning. “I just want out. That’s it.”
“Why?”
She looks down. For a second I think I’ll get the truth. Then she shakes her head.
“Because I just do.”
“That’s not a good enough reason.” I let the silence stretch. “Look at me.”
She does. It costs her. Her eyes are glassy at the edges, but she blinks the tears away.
“You want to run,” I say. “Who’s waiting on the other end?”
“No one.”
“Who told you to buy a suitcase?”
“No one.”
“Why’s your color gone?”
“I’m tired,” she says. “You’re a lot of work.”
“Why are you scared?”
“I’m not.”
I stop a step short of crowding her.
“You want to know what I don’t tolerate?
” I ask quietly. “Betrayal. You can hate me, yell at me, throw a couch into my office, make my men miserable. Apply to twenty jobs and move across town if that keeps you breathing. But if you ever work against me, if you think you can trade what you know for safety, you’ll be wrong.
It won’t save you and it won’t save whoever thinks they’re helping you. ”
“So this is the part where you threaten me,” she says.
“No,” I say. “This is the part where I spell out the rules so you don’t mistake patience for weakness.
You don’t talk to the Feds. You don’t talk to a rival.
You don’t leave the building without my men.
You don’t do anything that looks like an exit without telling me first. You break any of that, I respond like the man I am. ”
“The mobster,” she says flatly.
“The pakhan,” I correct. “I’m not gentle about a line that simple. You step over it, I cut you off at the knees.”
“I have done everything you want,” she snaps. “I’ve accepted my role as a prisoner of your stupid rules. I’ve stopped arguing, I’ve stopped being a menace to your men. You have no reason to treat me like this.”
“You’ve gone quiet,” I say. “That’s worse.”
“Nothing I say matters,” she fires back. “You made the rules and pretended I agreed. If I scream, your guard blinks. If I run, your men chase. If I breathe wrong, I’m told to be grateful I’m alive because of you.”
“You are alive,” I say.
“I am,” she says. “And I want to choose what I do with being alive.”
“Choose it inside the lines.”
She laughs once. “Inside the lines you drew.”
“Tell me if you’re planning to run,” I say.
“I’m not,” she says. Smooth. Practiced. Useless.
“Then return the suitcase.”
“No.”
“You won’t get away.”
“You think you can control everything,” she says.
“I protect what’s mine,” I say, holding her gaze. “That includes you.”
“There you go, acting like you own me again,” she spits.
“If that’s how you look at it,” I say quietly. “I won’t debate it.”
We stare each other down. Fear and fury look the same until you learn to listen to breathing patterns. Hers is shallow. She’s scared. I know I did that. I should care. I don’t. Fear makes people honest.
“My men will keep following you,” I say, lifting my phone. “Every purchase you make, every route you have them drive, every person you talk to, I will know about it. If that makes you angry, good. If it keeps you safe, better.”
“Safe from what?” she asks bitterly. “For all I know, you took that picture yourself to trap me. I’m tired of it, Lev.”
“That’s fine with me.” I shrug. “It makes no difference what you think because I’m running this show. I know what’s best and that’s why I call the shots.”
She shakes her head like she’s trying to throw the moment off. “Are we done?”
“For now,” I say. “Go back to work.”
She turns.
“Mari,” I add.
She stops.
“If there’s something you need to tell me, say it now,” I say. “It’ll go easier if you do.”
“There’s nothing,” she says, and walks out.
Back in my office, I call my team leads.
Yuri gets exterior routes. Pavel loses her detail for a week, he’s too easy to read.
Thom takes building access. Elyan keeps cameras.
Marcus runs everything else and sends summaries at ten.
They’re to stay off her nerves unless they see exit behavior.
Then they have my permission to intervene at the highest level of force.
I map worst-case timelines. Thirty minutes to pack, ten to reach a car if she times an elevator and calls a ride early, twenty to vanish into a tunnel with traffic as a shield.
I close each gap in my head and then in the system.
I have Yuri install lock codes that change twice a day.
He puts a hold on her SIM so it pings me if it leaves Manhattan.
If she’s working with the Feds, she has a handler who’ll want proof and times and files. If she’s gathering evidence, she’ll probably be clumsy about it because she doesn’t know what she’s doing.
I open the drawer and look at the card again. Agent Graham Cole. Manhattan Field. Dead eagle. Wrong hyphens. No microline. We should’ve caught the fake sooner. Someone wanted her rattled and it worked. Someone wants me rattled, and that worked, too.
I get home at eight. She’s there before me, curled in the corner of the couch she brought over, laptop open, earbuds in. She looks up when the door clicks and goes back to the screen, ignoring me again.
In my room, I watch my phone until ten. Marcus’s summary of her day lands. There’s nothing of note. It won’t stay that way. I sleep fitfully, noticing every sound in the apartment, wondering if this is the night she chooses to run.
The hall cam shows her in the kitchen, drinking water in the dark. She stands a while, glass held at her chest, like she’s bracing against something no one else can see.
She wants out.
That can’t happen.