30. Katya
Katya
I stand in the shower until the water goes cold. This is after I scrub my body as hard as I can. Not that it will do anything. Artem lives inside my body now.
Again.
Because I am an idiot.
I want to slam my hands into the tile or fill the large clawfoot tub and slip under the water until I forget what has happened to my life. The absolute control I've lost. And now it's not just over my temper, or my career, it's over my body.
Shivering, I press my hands against the tile, replaying the moments from last night as though I haven't been thinking about them constantly.
He came inside me.
Despite what I said last night, I actually don't know if it was deliberate.
Because he's right. I told him I was on the shot our first time.
And I was, until I forgot my appointment.
I didn't think it mattered. I had no intention of allowing him inside me again, especially without a condom.
After all, until a day ago, I thought he had a mistress.
So honestly, there was no way for Artem to really know.
And yet — I'm angry. Because I know that he would love to trap me.
But I also can't ignore the part of me that remembers his face. The way his eyes widened slightly as he realized what he did, especially after I told him about my lapsed birth control.
It really doesn't matter. Because either way, the outcome could be the same. I could be pregnant.
The reality of that is one I can't ignore.
A child would bind me to Artem so deeply that there would be no escape. Ever.
It would make every exit I've been quietly mapping impossible and give him exactly what he said he wanted — an heir, a legacy, a continuation of the thing he's building from the wreckage of my grandfather's empire.
I'm shaking so hard my teeth slam together, and the pain makes me realize I need to get out before I get hypothermia.
What I do know is that if I am pregnant, there's absolutely no way I will allow my child to grow up in this life. And if I'm not, well, I'm not giving Artem a second chance to trap me.
I turn the water off and dress in the most practical things I own — dark jeans, a sweater, flat boots.
I sit on the edge of the bed, and I think about the tunnel.
My grandmother showed it to me when I was nine years old. It was my first visit to the U.S., and I'd been so excited by everything.
Our house here was smaller than the one in Moscow, but it was equipped with everything the family of the Pakhan would need.
My grandmother made sure I understood what that meant, even as a child. She was a practical woman who lost three children, one to illness and two to violence, and she always made sure that I understood what to do when powerful men become violent.
One Sunday afternoon, she walked me down one of the long hallways and slipped me into an old elevator shaft. As she lowered us down, I saw it: a set of tunnels.
For emergencies only, she told me.
Years later, I researched the house. It was notorious during Prohibition, and likely these tunnels were a throwback to that era. Over the years, I wondered if my grandfather had sealed them off. After all, an escape route can just as easily be used as a way to infiltrate.
And yet, as I walk through the long hallway, get into the elevator shaft, and lower myself down, I realize he never sealed them.
And now, as the wife of a Pakhan, I wonder if my grandmother held this secret to herself.
The tunnel is exactly as I remember: narrow, low-ceilinged, smelling of cold earth and old stone, lit by a string of small bulbs that someone has been maintaining for decades.
It runs beneath the garden and comes up in the groundskeeper's cottage at the far edge of the property, outside the gate, outside the cameras, outside the careful perimeter Artem installed the week we moved in.
I use it to escape.
I come up into the cottage, which is empty, unlock the side door, and step out into the cold morning air. From here, it doesn't take long to make it out onto the street through a gap in the hedges — a place you wouldn't know about unless someone told you.
I make it two blocks, realize no one is following me, and use the burner phone I procured to call Nadia.
She answers on the second ring.
"I need to meet," I tell her. "Now." I don't wait for her response. She'll come. "There's a café in the Meatpacking District. It's a hole in the wall. I'll send you a pin."
I pause, waiting.
"Alright."
I hang up and walk, trying not to think about what I'm doing, because if I think about it too carefully I'll talk myself out of it, and I have run out of alternatives.
Nadia is there when I arrive, hands wrapped around a coffee cup. Despite her beauty, it takes me two scans of the room to find her. She has a natural ability to blend into her surroundings, which I assume comes in handy in her line of work.
I sit down across from her without taking off my coat.
"Coffee?"
"No." I'm jittery enough. "Tell me about Irina. All of it. From the beginning."
Something shifts in her expression, just slightly, the professional composure adjusting to accommodate something underneath it. She sets down her cup. "How much do you already know?"
"She was his sister. She was married to Alexei. She died." I hold her gaze. "I want the rest. You said you knew her?"
Nadia is quiet, and I can see the wheels turning behind her eyes.
"I was embedded in Alexei's organization for fourteen months," she tells me.
"I was there when Irina was. She was—" she pauses, clearing her throat, "—she loved him.
In the beginning. Or she wanted to. She was young and she'd been handed to a man with money and power, and she made the best of it the way young women do.
She had stars in her eyes, and she convinced herself it was a real marriage. "
I am very still.
"Alexei didn't feel the same way." Nadia's voice is even but something moves underneath it, something she's pressing down.
"He resented her. Resented the obligation of her.
He was cruel in the specific way men are cruel when they've decided a person is beneath their attention.
At first he wasn't violent or cruel — he saved that for others — but over time, it changed. "
I think about what Artem said last night, and I shiver.
"When he made it clear she wasn't anything to him, she unraveled," Nadia says.
"Slowly, and then quickly. She wanted his attention the way people want oxygen when there isn't any — desperately, irrationally, in ways that made things worse.
She made scenes. She called people. She—" Nadia stops.
Looks down at her cup. "She tried before. It didn't work. The last time it did."
Nadia shivers slightly. "She just walked right out of the window. Didn't even hesitate."
The café noise continues around us. Someone laughs at the counter. The espresso machine hisses. I feel frozen, like my breath is locked in my lungs.
"I was there," Nadia says quietly. "In the room. There was no warning. She just opened the window and went down."
I don't say anything. I can't imagine what marriage to Alexei would have been like.
"After she died, Artem came to New York.
" She looks back up at me, her eyes clear now, the grief folded back down below the professional surface.
"I'd already been watching him for years.
Before Irina. Before Alexei." She pauses.
"He's not just Bratva, Katya. He was Russian intelligence.
Well-trained and dangerous. The things he's done go far beyond your grandfather. "
"You've been following him for years?" She can't be more than thirty, at the oldest, but then again, so is Artem, and he clearly hasn't let age stop him.
"Yes."
"So why infiltrate Alexei?"
"Irina," Nadia tells me. "She was a softer target."
Bile rises in my throat, but I tamp it down. That's all any of us are to these people — targets.
"Why would the FBI be interested in Artem?"
The question lands and I watch her decide whether to answer. Something moves across her face, the crack, the thing underneath the composure, the grief she's been carrying the way everyone in this story carries grief, quietly and for a long time.
"My family." She swallows. "They were political refugees.
High up…" Her voice doesn't waver but her jaw tightens.
"He was following orders. That's what they always say.
He was following orders, and my family was in the way, and—" She stops.
Exhales slowly through her nose. "I was sixteen.
I came home from school, and the apartment was empty.
I put things together, and so did the FBI. Artem is a threat."
I shiver. "Are you telling me that Artem killed your family?"
She nods. "You know how things work in the old country."
I do. It was one of the reasons my mother sent me away.
And yet I can't imagine Artem killing a whole family.
I think about the Artem I knew before — the one who spoke to me in beautiful Russian, who touched me with soft hands and talked with me about literature.
I think about a sixteen-year-old girl coming home to an empty apartment.
I think about myself at seven years old watching my mother pack a single bag.
Everyone in this room is someone's wreckage.
"You got involved with Alexei's organization to get to Artem through his sister," I say slowly. "And you were there when Irina died. And now you're here, trying to get to him through me." I look at her across the table. "You've built your entire career around this."
She doesn't deny it. "Yes."
I snort, shaking my head. "You two have a lot in common."
She doesn't flinch, even though I meant it as an insult.
"So when you tell me you want to help me, what you mean is that you want to use me to get to him."
A beat. The honest beat, the one that tells me she respects me enough not to perform sincerity.
"Yes," she says. "But the byproduct is real. You would be free."
"Free," I repeat.
"A clean exit from the marriage. Protection from whatever's left of the Bratva network. The FBI could do it. They want the Bratva badly, and Artem worse." She leans forward slightly. "You wouldn't owe anyone anything. You could go back to dancing. You could have your life back."
My life. The apartment I don't live in anymore. The role Jonathan took from me. The girl who borrowed dresses from Lacey and thought the most dangerous thing in her world was a difficult audition.
That girl is gone. I don't know when exactly she left, but she's gone, and the woman sitting in this café is someone I don't recognize either.
I place a hand on my stomach.
"What do you want from me?"
Nadia sets a small device on the table between us and slides it toward me.
"One conversation," she tells me. "Wear this. Get him talking about his operations, his network, his history with Russian intelligence. Give us enough to move, to get a warrant." She holds my gaze. "One conversation, and it's over. I just need an in."
I look at it.
I think about Artem's hands on my face last night, his thumbs against my cheekbones, the rough way he said I know what today was like he meant it.
I think about you're my wife until you die and the way it landed wrong, like a thing that was true in a way he didn't mean as a comfort and couldn't take back.
I think about Nadia's family. About Irina. About every person in this story who has been used as currency by someone with a larger plan.
I think about the fact that I am sitting here because Nadia found me, cultivated me, showed up at every crucial moment with exactly the right information at exactly the right time.
I think about the fact that Artem did the same thing, eight months ago, with fifty-one white roses and Russian poetry and a music box that played Swan Lake.
I shake those thoughts away. That wasn't who he was. He'd crafted that persona to trap me.
And it's a reminder.
Everyone has an angle.
Everyone has a plan.
I am the only person in this entire story without one.
I look at the wire on the table. I look at Nadia's face, open and waiting and carefully, professionally hopeful.
I don't say anything.
The espresso machine hisses. Cold air rushes in around us and I shiver.
Nadia waits.
"Thank you," I tell her, as I stand.
Her eyes go wide. "Katya, please?—"
I look at her one more time, at the grief she carries, at the agenda underneath the grief, at the woman who has been pointing herself at this moment for years.
I walk out into the cold.
I don't go back to the house.
Not yet.