Chapter 16
Lev
I’ve only been back in Moscow for a few hours, and I already feel the city closing in.
We spent the weekend play-fighting, fucking, and drinking wine like we had nowhere to be, which we didn’t.
The rain came down hard enough to turn the road to mud by morning, and part of me wanted to use it as an excuse to stay another day.
But my father is pissed enough at me, and all the wishing in the world doesn’t change what’s waiting on the other side of this drive.
I’ve dropped Polina at her place, and Ruslan is leaning against my car in the garage when I pull in. He has the look of a man who rehearsed what he’s going to say on the way over.
“You could have called ahead,” I tell him.
“You would have let it go to voicemail.”
He’s not wrong. “What happened?”
He falls into step beside me as we move toward the elevator. “Frol went to your father two days ago. He’s had someone following you. Says you’ve been distracted by a woman, and he thought the old man should know.”
I skid to a halt and glare at the pavement in front of me.
“Your father wants to see you tonight,” Ruslan continues.
The elevator ride takes thirty seconds, and I use all of them to run the angles. My father doesn’t request meetings out of concern. He calls them when he’s already formed a conclusion and wants to observe whether the person across from him confirms it or tries to outmaneuver him.
“Does he have a name?” I ask without looking at him.
“Not yet.”
I nod curtly and continue walking. “Then it stays that way.”
Ruslan’s silence is not agreement; I learned that long ago.
It’s the patience of a man who has already seen where this goes and is waiting for me to catch up.
Frol knew what he was doing when he ratted me out.
He’s been watching for a gap to step into since before either of us could articulate what we were competing over, and he just found one.
I arrive at my father’s estate by 9 p.m. The drive takes forty minutes, and I spend them building a version of events I can sell. My father is standing by the window in his study with his hands clasped behind his back, and he doesn’t bother turning when I walk in.
Gennady and Aleksandr are seated in red leather chairs near the wall. He lets me enter the room and sit before he speaks, something he has always done on purpose. Making you settle in before he says anything establishes that he controls the pace. I learned that at twelve. I still feel it at thirty.
“Tell me about the woman,” he prompts without greeting.
“Doesn’t matter.” I keep my voice flat and uninterested, the way you talk about something that costs you nothing. “It was brief. It’s run its course.”
He turns from the window, moving his pale, measuring eyes over my face the way they always do, looking for the seam.
He has never looked at me the way he looks at Frol.
With Frol, he looks for confirmation. For me, he looks for problems. I stare back and keep my face as neutral as the wall behind him.
“A dancer, then? Or maybe just a dirty prostitute?”
“Didn’t bother to find out what she does for a living. It’s already over.”
Framing it in the past tense is a gamble. It might close the conversation, or it might pull at his attention. My father has built an organization on finding the difference between what people say and what they mean, and he is very good at his job. I give him nothing to anchor to and wait.
He crosses to his desk and sits. “Gennady tells me your reports are current. The Karamazov situation is resolved.”
“As I said it would be.”
“Then we’re finished with this subject.” He opens the folder on his desk. “However, I’m assigning two men to your detail for the next week. A precaution to make sure your head is where it needs to be.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“It isn’t a discussion.” He doesn’t look up from the folder. “You’ll work alongside them, or you’ll explain why you can’t.”
I nod once. “Fine.”
“That’s all.”
Ruslan has the car running when I get to the street. He reads my face before I reach the door and pulls out without waiting for direction. We drive two blocks before he speaks.
I watch the street through the window. “He bought it for now, but he’s got men tailing me now.”
“That will make things difficult for the two of you,” he comments, and all I can muster in reply is a hard swallow.
My father accepted the story tonight because I gave him nothing to contradict, but two men logging my movements means two men watching every location I visit, face I meet, and address I park outside.
My father operates with a thoroughness that other people mistake for patience.
At some point, he will pull the staff records from Moscow General.
It is the natural next step for a man who closes every loop, and when he does, he will find a name.
Polina Ilyinichna Kozlov.
That name connects to a family, and that family connects to everything my father has spent the past decade trying to dismantle. The story I just fed him won’t survive that scrutiny. It is only a matter of time, and the window between now and that moment is the only thing I have to work with.
I need to warn her. Not tonight, because I need to think through what I can say and what saying it will cost. Every word in that conversation must be chosen, because she listens the way surgeons operate, and anything I leave open will be examined.
I’ve been precise about information my entire career, keeping what’s useful and releasing nothing I can’t take back.
With Polina, that instinct runs headlong into something I don’t have a name for yet, which is the part that’s been keeping me up since long before our weekend getaway.
I call her the next morning, and she picks up on the third ring.
“I have to scrub up for a surgery in fifteen minutes,” she rushes out. “Is something wrong?”
There is no version of this conversation that doesn’t cost something. I’ve been aware of that since I parked outside my building last night. “I need us to pull back for a while. Where we’re seen, how often we’re in contact. Nothing permanent. Just a few weeks.”
The line goes silent for a beat before she asks, “What changed?”
“Nothing I can detail right now.”
The second pause that follows has weight to it. I know her pauses well enough now to tell the difference between the ones where she’s deciding what to say and the ones where she’s deciding how much she’s willing to tolerate. This is the second kind.
“Lev, what changed? What happened?”
“It’s being handled. I need you to trust me.”
“I do trust you. I’m asking what happened that makes you want to go quiet without telling me why.”
“I’m just asking for caution.”
“Without a reason.”
“Without one I can give you right now.”
She goes quiet long enough that I check the screen to make sure the call is still live. When she speaks again, something underneath her voice has gone cold.
“I told you I won’t do this on half-truths, and I meant it,” she snaps.
“That isn’t what this is. It’s a timing problem.”
“It’s you deciding what I’m allowed to know and when I’m allowed to know it!”
“Polina—”
“No.” Her voice never climbs when she’s furious.
“I have lied to my colleagues every day for months. I’ve ignored my sister’s calls because I couldn’t face telling her I was falling for a man with ties to our enemies.
I did that knowing what it could cost me, because I decided this was worth it.
But I made that call with the information I had.
The moment you start controlling what I know, you take away my ability to decide for myself. I will not be managed.”
There’s no argument to be made against any of what she’s saying, and I don’t attempt one.
“Two weeks,” I plead. “Maybe less.”
“I’m not built for whatever this looks like from where you’re standing,” she breathes. “A relationship where you filter out the pieces that might scare me and hand me what’s left. I don’t want to be built for it. I left the Bratva world behind so I would never have to learn how.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? Because you sound remarkably calm for a man who is describing the end of something.”
“I don’t want it to end.” I rub the back of my neck.
“I’m a Kozlov. I’m not naive about what this world costs people. I’ve accepted the risk. The part I haven’t accepted is being kept in the dark by someone I’m supposed to trust.”
I close my eyes.
The whole truth is right there, but none of it is sayable right now.
Not the parts that are merely dangerous, and especially not the unforgivable part.
Telling her what I know about her parents’ deaths and my father’s mission to discover who she is, when she has a surgery waiting and no way to catch her when it lands, would be cruel.
I know that, and I also know I’m using it as cover.
So, I say nothing.
“Okay,” she says with a huff. One word, quiet and final, nothing like the way she usually ends a call.
Then the line goes dead, and I’m almost certain I’ve lost her.
I sit with the phone on the table and look at the wall.
My penthouse is silent. Outside, Moscow is doing what it always does, indifferent and continuous, full of people who have no idea what just happened.
I’ve sat in rooms after far worse and felt nothing; walked away from situations that should have carved something from me, and drove home with steady hands.
Right now, I can’t get off the couch.