3. Inessa
THREE
INESSA
Forge sets me up in a rented house on a quiet street in the Garden District, not the expensive part, the working-class edge where the houses are small and the neighbors mind their business.
It's a shotgun-style cottage with a front porch, two bedrooms, and a kitchen so narrow I can touch both walls if I stretch my arms.
It's the first space that's been mine in twenty-eight years.
I tell Yuri I'm staying in Baton Rouge to continue negotiations. He calls my father and of course, my father calls me.
"How is the biker?" Viktor asks. His English is accented but precise. He learned it from American business partners, which means his vocabulary is heavy on leverage and light on warmth.
"Cautious," I say. "He didn't accept the terms straight away."
"Push harder."
"If I push, he'll shut down. He's not impulsive. He's a strategist. I need time to get close to him."
My father is quiet. I can hear him breathing, the heavy, deliberate breathing of a man who weighs two hundred and sixty pounds and considers his body a display of authority.
“Do what you need to do. You’ve got two weeks," he says. "Then I send Dmitri."
Dmitri is my father's enforcer. If Dmitri comes to Baton Rouge, people die. The timeline just became very real.
"Two weeks is enough," I say.
I hang up and sit on the porch of my rented house and watch the sun set over the live oaks.
Spanish moss hangs from the branches like gray lace, swaying in a breeze that smells like jasmine and something cooking, someone on the street is grilling.
Kids ride bikes on the sidewalk. A dog barks.
This is normal life. A life I've never had.
I’ve got two weeks to dismantle my father's operation before his enforcer arrives and turns this city into a graveyard.
Forge sends a prospect named Ghost to be my shadow.
Quiet, watchful, he sits on my porch in the mornings reading paperbacks and drives me wherever I need to go without asking questions.
I like him though. He doesn't try to make conversation.
A quiet man with secrets. I understand that more than most.
The neighborhood takes me in without trying.
Mrs. Landry next door brings me a casserole on day two, chicken and rice.
The kind of food Southern women make for newcomers and funerals.
The old man across the street nods at me when I check the mail.
A girl on a bicycle waves every afternoon on her way home from school.
The normalcy of it makes my chest ache for this in a way I wasn't prepared for.
But it's Forge I work with directly. Every evening, he comes to the house.
The sound of the Harley turning onto my street, that specific low growl of the Road King's engine, which I can now distinguish from every other motorcycle in Baton Rouge has become the sound my body responds to.
My shoulders loosen. My breathing changes.
I hear the engine and something in me opens, like a door I've been holding shut all day.
He parks in the driveway, the matte-black Road King that he wipes down after every ride, removing road dust with a chamois cloth, treating the machine with more tenderness than he treats most people and he sits at my kitchen table with the USB drive's contents spread across his laptop and we build the case against my father.
It's meticulous work. Wire transfers have to be cross-referenced with dates of known bratva operations.
Shell companies have to be traced through layers of corporate filings in Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, the states where secrecy is a feature, not a bug.
Political payments have to be matched to potential specific favors - like votes in my fathers favor, dropped charges, zoning decisions that magically went Viktor Volkov's way.
Forge is thorough and patient in a way that surprises me.
I expected a biker president to be all instinct and aggression, the way my father's men are, all blunt force and threats.
But Forge works through data like a forensic accountant.
Systematic, precise, and missing nothing.
He makes notes in a legal pad, his handwriting sharp and angular, left-handed, the pen held with the grip of a man whose hands were built for fists and retrained for precision.
"Where'd you learn to read financials?" I ask on the third night.
He doesn't look up from the laptop. "Taught myself. Running a club is running a business. If you can't follow the money, someone else is following it for you."
"My father would respect that."
"Your father can go fuck himself." He replies without even looking up.
I laugh. I don't mean to, it escapes before I can catch it. Forge looks up, and for the first time I see something besides calculation in his face. Something warmer.
"That's the first real expression I've seen from you," he says.
"I don't make a habit of it."
"Neither do I." He holds my gaze for a beat. "Guess we have that in common."
The kitchen is small. We're sitting across from each other at a table designed for two, and his knees are close enough to mine that I can feel the heat from his body through the space between us.
His forearms are braced on the table, sleeves pushed to his elbows, and I can see the tendons shift under his skin when he types.
The hammer-and-anvil tattoo on his left wrist I noticed when we first met.
Then a second tattoo I haven't noticed before, a line of text on the inside of his right forearm, too small to read from across the table.
I want to read it. I want to lean across and trace the words with my fingertip.
Don't. The voice in my head is my mother's, dead since I was fourteen, but still the loudest voice in my internal committee. Don't confuse need with want. He's useful. That's all.
But my mother was wrong about a lot of things. Staying with my father, for one. Believing his promises. Dying of something the doctors called pneumonia and I called surrender.
Forge is looking at the screen again. His jaw is set, he's found something.
"Your father paid a customs official $45,000 in March," he says. "Three days later, a container cleared the Port of Houston with no inspection."
"What was in the container?"
"The manifest says auto parts. Based on the weight and the shipper, I'd say weapons."
I feel sick. Not surprised, I've known what my father does my entire life. But seeing it laid out in numbers makes it different. Real in a way that overhearing phone calls and watching men come and go from the house never was.
"Hey." Forge's voice. I look up. He's watching me with an expression I can't read. "You don't have to look at this tonight."
"Yes I do."
"Inessa—"
"If I stop looking at it, I'll start pretending it's not real. And I've spent twenty-eight years pretending my father's crimes weren't real. I'm done pretending."
He studies me for a long moment. Then he nods. Turns the laptop so we can both see it.
We work for another two hours. Our coffee goes cold. Sometime around midnight, I reach for the laptop to scroll down a spreadsheet and my hand lands on his.
We both freeze.
His hand is warm. Rough. The knuckles are scarred, old fights, old damage. My fingers are resting on top of his and neither of us pulls away.
Five seconds. Ten. The kitchen clock ticks.
He pulls his hand back first. Slowly. Like it costs him something.
"I should go," he says.
"Okay."
He closes the laptop. Stands up. At the front door, he pauses, but doesn’t turn around.
"For what it's worth," he says, "you're the bravest person I've ever met. And I don't say that sort of thing very often."
Then he's gone. The Harley fires up in the driveway, and I listen to it fade down the street until the night is quiet again.
I sit at the kitchen table with my hand still warm where he touched me and I listen to the Harley fade, and then gone, and until the only sound is the kitchen clock and the distant hum of someone's window unit air conditioner.
I press my right hand flat on the table where his was.
The wood is cool now. Whatever heat he left behind has already dissipated, which is how physics works, which is what I should be thinking about instead of the topography of his knuckles under my fingertips.
The ridge of scar tissue across the second knuckle.
The surprising smoothness of his skin between the scars.
The way ten seconds of accidental contact taught me more about Sullivan Moran than ten hours of conversation, that he is warm where I expected cold, that he is gentle where I expected rough, that when his body responds without his permission, his first instinct is retreat.
Not because he doesn't want, it’s because he does.
I think about what my mother would say. She'd say I'm being foolish. She'd say men like Forge, men who run clubs, men who hold power are the same as men like my father.
But she's wrong.
My father's touch would be a transaction. Forge pulled his hand away so he didn’t take what wasn’t his.
That's the difference and that's everything.