Chapter 7 Arkady
Arkady
“What is it?” I ask Dima irritably. I test the lock twice. Once would be enough. Twice is compulsion.
I tell myself it’s security. I don’t like the part of me that doesn’t care if that’s true.
I was about to get my dick wet, and now I’m walking away from the woman who has crawled under my skin with her attitude, which stinks, but is a challenge no one ever gives me.
It’s refreshing. It’s amusing. It’s so fucking hot, I can’t keep thinking about how it will feel to sink into her wet cunt and ride her until she knows nothing except me.
“Met contact is at the door,” Dima says.
I stop walking and slide my gaze to him. He is pissed off. “That is unfortunate timing.”
“No shit.” He knows that plausible deniability is very real in this world. If our contact doesn’t see it, it didn’t happen. “Side entrance.”
I cut through the service corridor, past stainless steel and the hum of cold air, and out to the discreet door that opens onto an even more discreet path, hidden by a hedge in need of a cut.
Vik is already there with a man in a navy suit that tries and fails to make him look less like a copper.
Carter. Our tame one in the Met. He keeps his head down and stuffs his hands into his pockets.
“Three minutes,” he mutters as I step out. “I shouldn’t be here.”
“Talk.”
“Your old man’s scene is locked up. Morrison’s leading, and he’s eager. Ballistics from a clean nine, subsonic. Single in, no exit. Entry suggests a face-to-face at close range. Prints on the desk are wiped. CCTV in and out is dead. Cut around six thirty this morning.”
I frown but keep the time of the phone call to myself. Whoever this was, they left it two hours between cutting the cams and shooting Nik. “Inside help or someone who could ghost a door without tripping anything?”
“Front and rear alarms show a manual disarm at six thirty-two. Correct code. No duress flag.”
“Staff?”
“Accounted for. An early cleaner corroborates the arrival time well after that. Morrison will still squeeze them.”
“He squeezed you yet?”
Carter snorts. “He’d like to.”
“Anything else?”
“Round hole, tidy entry, gas left no residue. Shooter brought his own can. And—call trace shows your number on Nik’s screen at TOD.” He meets my stare without flinching. “He’ll make a meal of that.”
“Let him choke on it.” I hold out a slim envelope. He hesitates, then slides it into his inside pocket.
“Three minutes are up,” he mutters, turning away.
Vik waits until the hedge swallows him. “You want shadow on Morrison?”
“No. I want eyes on Carter. If Morrison twitches him, I want to know.”
“Done.”
I cut back through the service door. “Kosta?”
“In the box with our friend,” Vik says.
I head for the basement. The air down here tastes like bleach and iron. The idiot in the chair sags against the restraints, breath hitching. Sweat slicks his face. Kosta stands off to the side, arms folded, expression a flat line.
“Get rid of him. Quietly and quickly. If we don’t already, we’ll have eyes on this house very soon.”
Kosta nods and gets to work. The single shot to the head is suppressed, and I walk away knowing that this day is going to get worse before it gets better.
I take the back stairs two at a time, phone buzzing with noise. I don’t answer. Vik falls in beside me without being told.
“Perimeter?”
“Tight. Two static, two roaming. I put one on the rooftops.”
I nod. “Get some cash together. We might need to move out fast.”
“On it. I’ll get the go-bag ready, just in case.”
“I need to get stuff from Alina’s. Things she might need.”
“Alina?” he says with a small smile that implies everything and nothing.
I give him a withering glare that would make most men back off. He is most men. “Get me her address. I’m going alone.”
Vik texts me the address, and I slip out of the house and into the Porsche, placing the phone on the holder with directions to her address.
South Kensington isn’t too far from here, but I don’t take the straight route.
I cut through mews and side streets, use a bus lane, run a yellow that’s been amber so long it’s blushing.
Twice around the block before I park two streets over from her house.
Stucco, ironwork, and window boxes that look like they could be on the front page of a magazine.
The spoiled little Bratva girl has layers, and tending flowers is one of them.
The front door has a camera. I check the angles. Two blind spots. Easy.
Valery gave me the location of the key and the code to the alarm in case I needed to get in. He clearly knows his daughter well. She needs things of hers to make her feel less like a prisoner and more like my obsession. This should be interesting.
I slip the key from under the third terracotta pot and punch in the code Valery gave me. I enter her home with the casual confidence of a man who’s already claimed it.
White walls. Plants everywhere. The faint scent of jasmine and perfume.
Shoes kicked by the mat in a way that says she hates order but does it anyway because someone once shouted enough that it stuck.
A row of postcards on the fridge with scribbles in her hand.
Lisbon. Naples. A terrible pun from Brighton.
She pretends she isn’t sentimental, yet here are the lies she tells herself, pinned with tiny gold clips.
The bedroom is large and lived in. A wrought-iron bed with white linen. There is a stack of books on the bedside cabinet on the left side—which I make a note of—that runs from a battered thriller to something in Russian she’s working through with a sticky note as a bookmark.
I open the wardrobe. It’s exactly what I expected.
Half the rail is casual—jeans, oversized shirts, soft things she pulls on without thinking.
The other half is the armour. Designer dresses, silk and sequins and things cut to make men stupid.
She keeps them separate from each other, a physical border between who she is and who she performs.
I pull out two pairs of jeans. A handful of the soft shirts.
Trainers from the rack on the floor—white, clean, barely worn.
A hoodie from the back of the door that says nothing on it but has been washed so many times that the fabric has faded.
I lift it once, just to check the weight—then my hand tightens and I bring it to my face like a fucking idiot. Jasmine. Vanilla. Her.
I drop it into the bag I find at the top of the wardrobe hard, like I can punish myself out of wanting it.
Next, her underwear. With a slow smile, I pull open the top drawer and stare down into a haphazard pile of silk and lace.
Agent Provocateur, Fleur of England, La Perla.
Scraps of fabric designed to make her feel good and the man she is with to beg for her pussy.
My fist closes around a pair of red lace knickers with a growl.
The thought of another man ploughing his dick into her makes me crazy with jealousy.
I want her. I will have her. I want to lick that tattoo again when her skin is salty with sweat from riding my cock.
I want to suck her clit until she screams my name.
I want to own her completely before this is over.
She is mine, she just doesn’t know it yet.
I carefully select some items, almost with a reverence of knowing where these will sit against her skin.
Toiletries next. I move to the bathroom, which smells overwhelmingly of her.
Expensive products lined up along the shelf above the sink with a precision that contradicts every other room in her house.
This is a ritual. I grab what looks essential—cleanser, moisturiser, the perfume that has been sitting in my nostrils since the club.
A toothbrush. Her shampoo and conditioner.
Tampons. I shove it all in and zip the holdall before I do a final sweep.
Something on the bedside table catches my eye.
A photograph, small, in a plain silver frame.
Alina, maybe nineteen or twenty, sitting on a wall somewhere coastal, laughing at whoever is behind the camera.
Her hair is loose, catching the wind. She looks completely unguarded. No armour. No performance. Just her.
I stare at it longer than I should.
Then I put it in the holdall.
She’ll be furious about that. Good.
I reset the alarm, lock the door, replace the key under the third pot exactly as I found it. Then I walk back to the Porsche without looking back.
The drive back is quieter than the drive over.
The city has settled into its late afternoon rhythm, all taxis and delivery bikes and people who have no idea that a pakhan was shot in Belgravia this morning, that a man is being disposed of in my basement, that a woman is locked in my bedroom and has been since before noon.
London doesn’t care. It never does. That’s what I love about it.
The gates open, and I park the car, killing the engine. I grab my phone and carry the holdall through the front door. Dima materialises from somewhere to my left.
“Any noise from upstairs?” I ask.
“Quiet for the last hour,” he says, which tells me she either wore herself out or she’s planning something. With Alina Belova, it’s probably the latter.
“Good.” I take the stairs slowly. Outside my bedroom door, I pause. No sound. I unlock it and push it open.
She is sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, apparently meditating.
“I asked you not to lock the door,” she says quietly.
“I know. I did.”
“I will ask you again. Please don’t lock the door.” Her eyes open, filled with unshed tears.
Walking up to her, I drop the holdall next to her and crouch down, taking her chin in my hand. “What are you scared of, krasotka?”
Her chin trembles in my grip, and I watch her fight it. She is too proud to let it spill, too Bratva-bred to admit that the locked door cracked something open in her. She doesn’t answer straight away. She pulls her chin free and looks down at the holdall instead.
“What is that?”
“Your things.”
Her eyes snap up. “You went to my house?”
“You needed clothes.”
“You went to my house without asking me.” The tears have retreated. Good. Anger suits her better. It suits both of us. Tears are emotional blackmail, and I have no time for them. Except this time, I felt something I don’t want to poke at. “You went through my things.”
“Yes.”
“You had a key.” It isn’t a question. She has already worked it out. The calculation runs across her face in real time, and then lands somewhere that makes her jaw tighten. “My dad told you where the spare was.”
“He did, and he gave me your alarm code.”
She breathes through her nose. “Was anything amiss?”
I frown at that question. “Did you expect it to be?”
“Well, I don’t fucking know,” she spits. “I didn’t expect to be targeted at a club or abducted by a Saranov. I want to know if someone broke into my house who might have something to do with this.”
“No,” I say. “Nothing looked out of place.”
She exhales slowly. Some of the tension bleeds out of her shoulders, but not all of it. “Okay.” She reaches out and unzips the holdall, pulling it open and looking inside. A beat of silence. Then she sits back on her heels. “You packed my tampons.”
“Yes.”
“That’s...” She seems genuinely thrown by it. More thrown than by anything else that has happened today, which tells me something about her. The violence she can process. The practical kindness she cannot.
“Blood doesn’t scare me, Alina.”
She hisses at my smile, but what can she say?
She starts pulling things out, shaking the jeans loose, checking what shirts I grabbed.
Her expression stays carefully neutral, but I catch the flicker when she pulls out the hoodie.
She presses it briefly against her face, just for a second, like she doesn’t realise she’s doing it, and then sets it down on the carpet beside her.
“Put these things away now, Alina. You will find space in the drawers and wardrobe.”
She glances over to the side of the room. “Next to your stuff?”
“Yes.”
“That’s making a statement.”
“Is it?” I rise and leave the room, locking it behind me because that vulnerability she admitted to me without words is something precious.
It’s mine, and I will hold it close, knowing it is a bargaining chip for that day that will come very soon, when I need her to do something urgently, and she refuses.
Her freedom will be laid out, and she will comply because this means something to her.