24. Artem #2
Enough that she goes still.
Enough that she understands.
Her back hits the car door and she stares at me, eyes wide, and the space between us is nothing, just my hand and her pulse and the darkness of the car and Pyotr's eyes cutting to the rearview mirror and then away.
"I said drop it." My voice comes out low. Controlled. I am keeping myself together, reminding myself that this is to scare her, not harm her. "Do you understand me?"
She doesn't speak. Her throat moves against my palm, and I apply a little pressure. She gasps.
"Katya, answer me."
"Yes." It comes out softly, just a breath. Her skin is pale and her hazel eyes are wide with fear. It's one of the first times I've seen her this scared, and it unsettles me.
What the fuck am I doing?
Immediately, I drop her, flexing my hand, ignoring how she shakes next to me.
I sit back, inhaling sharply as I gather my control. I've never touched a woman like that before. It's against my code. It always has been. Even when I helped Sera's brother kidnap her, I made it clear I wouldn't be helping him physically harm her.
And yet, I just choked my wife.
I feel ill.
I don't look at Katya, and we don't speak. I sit with my hands loose in my lap and I don't look at the place on her throat where my hand was, and I think about nothing at all.
If I do, I'll have to admit some uncomfortable truths to myself, which I'm not ready to do.
I see the marks in the morning.
Not bad. A shadow more than anything, the ghost of fingers on her pale skin. She's in the kitchen again, same as yesterday, same mug, same loose hair. She doesn't flinch when I walk in. She doesn't look at me either.
Not that I blame her.
I pour my coffee. I stand at the counter. My eyes go to her throat. I can't stop.
I am not a good man. She knows that. But bruising her…
There are lines I swore to myself I wouldn't cross, which I never have before, and yet Irina's name coming out of Katya's mouth made me see red. I don't know how to explain what happened, not even to myself.
"Katya."
"Don't." Her voice is flat, and her eyes are on a patch of the wall. "Whatever you're about to say, don't."
"I shouldn't have?—"
"No." She sets her mug down. Turns to face me, and her eyes are clear and very steady and something in them is worse than anger.
Something that has already finished being angry and moved on to something colder.
"You shouldn't have. But you did. Because that's who you are.
" A pause. "You think you're better than the other men in that room last night.
Better than Viktor. Better than the rest of them.
" She tilts her chin up, just slightly. "You're not.
I hope you know that you are just as much of a piece of shit.
I hope Irina knows too, and that she runs far away from you while she can. "
Her words hit their mark, doing more damage than a knife ever could because she's right.
My sister would fucking hate this.
The call comes two days later because apparently I don't have enough fucking problems.
Pyotr is terse. "We have a problem."
The problem has a name. Damian Volkov, mid-level, handles logistics on the south corridor. Been with the organization four years. Clean record, good instincts, never gave me a reason to watch him closely.
That was my mistake.
We meet in the parking structure on 44th, me, Pyotr, and Volkov, who arrives on time and stands in the fluorescent half-dark with his hands at his sides and his face doing the thing faces do when a man has already decided to be brave about what's coming. I almost respect it.
"How long?"
"Six weeks."
"What did you give them?"
He lists it. Shipment routes, three of them. A name, low-level, nobody critical. Meeting times for the east side operation. I listen without interrupting. He's thorough. Professional, even now. I file each item, calculating the damage, mapping the exposure.
When he finishes, I'm quiet for a moment.
"They approached you. You didn't go to them." It's a statement. If he went to them, I would have known.
"Yes."
"They had something on you."
He doesn't answer, which is its own answer. A family, probably. Something they found and held. The FBI is good at that, finding the soft thing and pressing on it until a man makes a choice he can't take back.
"You should have come to me."
"I wasn't sure you wouldn't execute me."
"I would have handled it."
His jaw is tight.
I look at him for a long moment. He looks back. He doesn't beg, which I appreciate. Begging changes nothing and we both know it, and there's a specific dignity in a man who understands that.
"Pyotr," I step back, allowing him to do his job.
It's quick. Professional. I'm already turning away before it's finished.
I walk back to the car and sit in the driver's seat and think. Six weeks. The FBI has been building for six weeks from this one source alone, which means the operation is organized and patient and more developed than I'd estimated.
Still doesn't explain how they also managed to get to Adrian and Saint, which means what I had expected is true.
I pull out the file I threw in the glovebox.
Nadia, federal agent, organized crime unit, been circling the edges of my operation for months. I've seen her name twice in intercepted communications, and it triggered something. Then I started going through surveillance. She's good, but she got sloppy, and the one time she did, I clocked her.
Nadia Petrova. Her parents worked for mine. I hadn't seen her in a decade, and now she's hunting me.
She's good. Young and hungry. A decorated agent with several takedowns under her belt.
She's a threat, and I need to figure out who else she might have turned.
My men, my operations, my —
Katya.
The thought arrives without invitation and settles there, and I sit with it and I don't like what it does to me. Not the exposure. Not the tactical liability of a civilian wife with access to my home and my routines. That's real, but that's not what makes my chest tighten.
What makes my chest tighten is simpler and more inconvenient than that.
She's not a liability. She's a target. If someone who wants to get to me figures out that she's, that I?—
I stop that thought before it finishes forming.
I pick up my phone. Call Dmitri, her detail. "Double it," I order. "All hours. I want two men on her, not one. If she loses her detail again, you answer to me personally."
"Yes, sir."
I end the call. Start the car. Pyotr is cleaning up the body, and I have places to be.
I'm protecting her now. I know that. I'm not pretending otherwise, not even to myself, alone in a parking structure with the fluorescent lights humming overhead.
I just haven't named what that means yet.
I'm not sure I want to.