Chapter 24 Lev
Lev
I’m three days into proving my value to the Kozlov organization when Boris opens the conference room door and tells me I have a visitor.
He practically snarls it, which tells me this is not good news.
The holding area is in the basement. Two guards stand outside the door.
A camera is mounted above the frame. No windows.
I’ve spent time in enough rooms like this to know exactly what they’re built for, and the thought of who might be waiting inside puts too much speed in my step for Boris not to notice.
I stop cold the second I see Ruslan zip-tied to a metal chair.
A bruise is spreading across his jaw, already purple at the edges, and there’s mud streaked down the left sleeve of his coat. He sits straight-backed, wearing the look of a man who expected worse and is quietly recalculating the distance between that expectation and reality.
“You drove four hours to get yourself roughed up,” I comment.
“Four and a half.” He rolls his neck once. “There was construction outside Tula.”
I turn my attention to Boris. “Where did you pick him up?”
“Outer perimeter. The idiot just came in alone and asked to be taken to whoever was in charge. Identified himself as one of yours before we had a chance to ask.”
I turn back to Ruslan. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Where you go, I go,” he answers with a shrug, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Like it’s a straightforward accounting of fact rather than the most reckless thing a man in his position could have done.
“You crossed into Kozlov territory.”
“Correct.”
“Alone and unarmed.”
“I’m aware of how I arrived, yes.”
I drag a hand over my face and buy myself two seconds. Ruslan has been my right hand for years. He’s the kind of man who works out the risk the way other people breathe—constantly, without needing to think about it.
“He’s mine,” I tell Boris. “I’ll vouch for him.”
Boris considers this long enough to make clear that the decision belongs to him and not to me. “We’ll run verification. He stays tied until it clears.”
“Understood.”
Tony’s verification takes almost an hour. Ruslan waits through all of it without complaining even once. When the ties finally come off, he rolls his wrists, accepts a cup of water someone slides across the table, and asks where the bathroom is.
He comes back looking exactly the same. Totally unbothered.
“Your father sent men to your apartment two days ago,” he says, settling back into the chair.
“Frol is telling the organization you defected to the Kozlovs for a woman, which I guess is technically true, though I don’t know how he found out.
There’s a price on you now. Nothing serious.
More standing order than contracted work, but still, it exists. ”
“How much?”
“Fourty-million rubles.”
Less than I would have set, which means my father is either managing his ego or genuinely underestimating what I’d cost to replace. I’m not sure which one I find more insulting.
He picks up a pen from the table and turns it over once in his fingers. “I know every security rotation in every Morozov facility in three districts, and I suspected that would be of interest to whoever is currently running the operation against them. Thought that might help your cause.”
Tony, who has been standing against the wall with his arms folded this entire time, looks from Ruslan to me and back again. Then he uncrosses his arms and pulls out a chair.
“Put him at the table,” he says.
We work until nearly one in the morning.
Ruslan fills in gaps that have been slowing us down. He lays out the rotation schedules at the Kazan facility, the actual access points versus the decoys, and the name of the logistics coordinator who has been funneling the financial transfers through three shell companies registered in Georgia.
“You’re very willing to give this up,” Tony says at one point.
“Lev is going to turn whether I want him to or not,” he replies without looking in my direction. “He’s like a brother to me. Not saying I like it, but I’ve had time to get comfortable with it.”
Tony writes something on the legal pad in front of him and doesn’t circle back.
The work gives me something to do with my hands and, more importantly, something to do with my head. I’ve been carrying the guilt since the moment I walked into Dmitri’s compound. I’ve done a damn good job keeping it at arm’s length, but I know that won’t last.
Guilt like mine is patient. It waits. And when it comes due, I’ll have to answer for all of it—what I knew, how long I knew it, what I said, what I didn’t, and now Ruslan sitting two chairs away with a bruised jaw because he followed me into somebody else’s territory. One more thing on the pile.
He walked in here on his own. That part is true. He’d be furious if I tried to take that choice away from him. But he walked in here because of me, and I’m here because of choices I made. That doesn’t leave me much room to feel clean about any of it.
Late in the session, Tony closes a folder, sets it flat on the table, and looks up at me.
“I have a question,” he begins. “Nothing operational. Why did you betray your family?”
I look at him for a moment. He’s not hostile about it; it’s the same tone he seems to use when he’s working through a logistics problem and needs to identify the variable he’s missing.
“I didn’t,” I answer simply.
He raises an eyebrow.
The real answer is sitting right there, the same one I handed Dmitri in that room a few days ago. My mother. The coffin. Fourteen years of being useful to a man who ordered her death over a suspicion he never confirmed. I could give Tony the same answer, and something tells me he’d get it.
But my eyes go to Ruslan without meaning to. He’s bent over the legal pad in front of him, annotating something. He’s never once asked why I don’t talk about her. He’s never pushed. He saw me break when it happened, and I’ve spent years being the version of myself who is supposed to be over it.
I’m not giving that up tonight. Not in front of Ruslan.
I close the folder in front of me and push it to the side.
“I didn’t betray my family, because I was part of that family.
My father kept me close because I was useful.
Frol is his heir. I’ve always been the blade he points at jobs too ugly for the firstborn to be associated with.
Do that to a person long enough and you’ll find that their loyalty has a ceiling. I found mine.”
Ruslan looks up now, but I can’t get myself to look back at him.
“Polina is the first person who ever looked at me like I was the whole point,” I confess.
“Not the instrument. Not the contingency. She’s never needed anything from me, which means everything she’s ever given me, she gave because she chose to.
So I chose her. I don’t experience what I did as a betrayal of my family.
I experience it as the first choice I’ve made for my own good in my thirty years on this earth. ”
Tony draws in a long breath and nods before he says, “Yeah,” and opens the next folder like the conversation has concluded. He doesn’t look at me again, but something in the set of his shoulders changes, like the skepticism that has been sitting there for three days drops by a fraction.
It’s not forgiveness and it’s not trust. It’s something, and right now, something is what I’ve got.
Ruslan is still providing details when I head back to my quarters. My room sits at the end of the corridor, second floor, west wing, which puts it as far from Polina’s room as the building’s layout allows. Something tells me that was by design.
But once I get close enough, I notice that there’s a plate outside my door.
Someone covered it with a cloth napkin, folded over neatly at the edges. I crouch down and lift the corner. Rice, chicken, and the cucumber salad Dmitri seems to favor. Still warm.
There are only a handful of people in this building, and most of them would rather let me starve on principle.
I’ve been on my own for food since I got here.
Found the kitchen myself. Grabbed a snack here and there, but nothing real.
The list of people who’d bother making sure I ate is short.
The more I think about it, the shorter it gets. Until it’s one name.
I take the plate inside, sit on the edge of the bed, and stare at it. It’s a small thing. Polina probably passed by, acted on instinct, and didn’t think much of it. Reading too much into a plate of chicken is stupid, and I know better.
But she thought of me.
She walked past my door and thought of me. That’s enough to let everything I’ve been holding at a distance all day come rushing back in.
After I eat, I lie back on the bed with my arm over my face and let my mind wander to the way she stood in my doorway the other night with her chin up and her arms crossed, telling me she was not prepared to forgive me.
I know what every inch of her body feels like. I know the sound she makes when she’s trying to stay quiet and failing at it. I know exactly where to put my hands to make her stop trying altogether.
It’s been days since I’ve been able to lay a hand on her, and my body is aching.
I stretch out on the bed, wrap my hand around my cock, and think about the last time she let me take my time with her. The way she watched me. That look she gets when she wants me.
I work myself slow at first, thinking about the way she makes me drag it out when I’d rather take what I want. The sound of her voice telling me to fuck her builds pressure just under my sternum and leaves it there.
I think about the wet heat of her wrapped around me. The way she arches when I hit the right angle. The helpless sound she makes when I push all the way in and hold there, dragging her climax out of her. The look on her face when she’s close.
Within minutes, my body locks up and I come with her name on my lips. It doesn’t fix a damn thing. This time, she isn’t here for me to hold after. What’s left is the ceiling, the quiet, and the misery of wanting a woman who’s close enough to touch and has every reason not to want me back.