Chapter 23
Arkady
Valery Belov’s face on that screen is the kind of still that precedes earthquakes.
I’ve sat across from harder men than him.
Men who’ve had decades to perfect the art of looking at you like you’re already dead and they’re just waiting for your body to catch up.
But Belov has something most of them don’t.
He has the specific, weaponised calm of a father who loves his daughter and is about to make that everybody’s problem.
“Saranov,” he growls. “You married my daughter.”
“I did.”
“Without asking me.”
“You told me to do whatever it took to protect her. I did.”
The silence on the other end of the phone is surgical. Belov is a man who uses silence the way other men use knives—precisely, deliberately, with the specific intention of making you bleed out before you’ve noticed the cut.
I let it stretch. I’m not filling it for him.
“That is not the same thing,” he says finally.
“It’s exactly the same thing. She walked into a situation that was already burning. I made her fireproof.”
“By putting a Saranov ring on her finger.”
“By putting my ring on her finger.” I move down the hallway and into the office, closing the door behind me.
This conversation deserves walls. “Which means every man in our world knows she is untouchable. Which means she is safer today than she was when you told me to keep her here and told her to follow my lead.”
“I told her to follow your lead,” he says, and the emphasis is quiet and precise. “Not marry you.”
“The situation evolved.”
“The situation evolved.” He repeats it back at me with the particular flatness of a man wishing he were in front of me so he could remove my head with his fist.
“I can’t go into specifics. But you know about my dad. This was the only way to protect her from the backlash that would be headed her way otherwise. You know it. I know it, and she knows it.”
“She pretends to know, but you will hurt her. She wants to be loved, Arkady. She deserves it after everything she went through with her mother, what she goes through with me.” His use of my first name gives me pause. He is a father looking for reassurance that his daughter won’t get hurt.
The weight of that lands differently than I expected.
Not because I didn’t know it. I did. I’ve known since the first night that Alina Belova is a woman who learned early that love comes with an expiry date and a forwarding address that doesn’t include you.
You don’t grow up with Valery Belov as a father and come out of it without scar tissue.
You don’t watch your mother walk out of a door and not spend the next decade waiting for everyone else to do the same.
I know all of this.
What I didn’t expect was for him to say it to me.
“I’m aware of what she deserves,” I say.
“Are you?”
“I’m not going to pretend I’m a soft man, Belov. You know what I am. But I can tell you, and I mean it, that I won’t hurt her. I will protect her with everything that I have because losing her now after knowing her is a death sentence.”
“Oh, spare me the poetics,” he grits out.
“I mean every word of it.”
“Then prove it by keeping her out of whatever is coming. She has no business being involved in—”
“She’s already involved. I hate it, know that, but there are things at play here that I can’t tell you right now. Just know that this was not the only way, but it was the way I wanted it. I wanted her as my wife, she will stay as my wife, and when I’ve earned it, she will love me.”
The silence that follows is different from the earlier ones. Less surgical. More like a man sitting with something he already knows and doesn’t particularly want to admit.
“She is stubborn,” he says finally.
“I noticed.”
“She doesn’t listen.”
“Also noticed.”
“She will argue with you until you want to put your head through a wall, and then she will be right, and that will be worse.”
“I’m learning that.”
“When will you love her?”
“Already do.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit.”
“Call it bullshit, but I know how I feel. She is… everything.”
“And that is what is going to get her killed. She is your weakness.”
“No, she is my strength. I will take a bullet for her, I can promise you that.”
“If you don’t and she ends up dead because of you, I will hunt you down, skin you alive, rip your heart out to shove up your arse before I pluck your eyeballs out and burn you, starting with your dick.”
I let that settle between us and then say, “I will let you.”
He makes a noise that sounds like a lion about to rip someone to shreds. Then he hangs up.
“Fair,” I say and throw the phone on the desk.
I hear a noise in the hallway and frown.
Vik. Laughing. At something my wife just said.
Vik doesn’t laugh. In eleven years of knowing him, I have heard the man produce approximately three sounds of genuine amusement, and two of those were at funerals, which tells you everything you need to know about his sense of timing.
Snatching up the phone, I leave the office like lightning striking.
The hallway is already empty.
I find them in the kitchen, reaching for mugs to pour out coffee.
“Something funny?” I say, holding the phone out to Alina.
They both look at me. Alina’s expression is serene in the way that means she’s pleased with herself. Vik’s face closes back down to its default setting of professionally blank, but the damage is done. I saw it.
“I was just telling Vik that you were talking to my dad and probably getting your arse handed to you.”
Vik has the audacity to lift his mug and take a sip, hiding whatever is left of the expression I already saw.
“How’d that go?” she asks, all wide eyes and false innocence.
“That if you end up dead because of me, he’ll skin me alive, remove various organs, and burn me, starting with my dick.”
She considers this with the solemn gravity it deserves. “Honestly, that’s quite restrained for him.”
“I thought so too.”
Vik turns back to the coffee machine with the expression of a man who has decided that whatever is happening in this kitchen is above his pay grade.
I look at Alina. The ring catches the kitchen light. My ring. My wife. My weakness, according to her father.
“Briefing going according to plan?” I ask Vik but still looking at Alina.
“We are getting there,” Alina answers anyway. “But it’s a good thing you showed me that hierarchy last night. Vik is not good with details. I’m better with visual aids.”
“I present information efficiently,” Vik says.
“You listed twelve men in alphabetical order and expected me to build a mental map from that,” Alina says, turning to him with the patience of someone explaining something to a very large, very dangerous bear. “That’s not efficient. That’s a phone book.”
Vik looks at me.
I look at him.
“She’s not wrong,” I say.
He sets his mug down with precision that conveys exactly how he feels about it. “I’ll pull the photographs up on the screen in the dining room. We can go through them properly before the others arrive.”
“It’s the seconds I want eyes on. Do you have pictures of them?”
“Vik will find some, won’t you, Vik?” I say.
Vik looks at me with the expression of a man who has already decided he hates this assignment but will complete it with military precision because that’s all he knows how to do. “I’ll have them in ten minutes,” he says, and takes his coffee and his dignity out of the kitchen.
Alina watches him go with something close to satisfaction. “He’s growing on me.”
“Don’t tell him that. His head will explode.”
“So what else did Dad say?”
“He asked me when I’d love you,” I say.
She goes very still. Not the performative stillness she uses when she’s deciding what to say. The other kind. The kind that means something landed somewhere it wasn’t expected.
“And?” she says, her voice carefully neutral.
“I told him already.”
She looks down at her mug. A beat passes. Two. I watch the line of her throat move when she swallows, and I wait, because with Alina, rushing anything is how you lose the thing you were reaching for.
“You’re going to make this complicated,” she says finally.
“It already is.”
“He didn’t believe you.”
“No.”
“Do you blame him?”
“No.” I move to the coffee machine and fill a mug.
The coffee is hot and bitter, and I drink it standing at the counter with my back to her, giving her the space to process without an audience.
That’s the thing I’ve learned about Alina in the short time I’ve known her.
She doesn’t need witnesses to her vulnerability.
She needs room to absorb it, turn it over, decide what to do with it, and then present whatever conclusion she’s reached as though she arrived there calmly and on her own terms.
I can give her that.
“He said you deserve to be loved,” I say, not turning around.
The silence behind me changes texture. Becomes something with weight.
“He said that?” Her voice is quiet.
“He did.” I set the mug down and turn. She’s looking at the ring again, turning it slightly on her finger. The diamond catches the grey morning light and throws a small constellation across the ceiling. “He’s not wrong.”
“My dad says a lot of things,” she says, and the deflection is so practised it’s almost invisible. Almost.
“He meant it.”
“He also told you he’d start with your dick when he burned you,” she finishes, eyes flicking up with a flash of black humour.
“Blunt.”
“I’ve heard worse.”
I cross to her and hook a finger under her chin, tilting her face up. “He meant it. I told him I’d let him if I ever failed you.”
“Don’t,” she says, soft and sharp at once. “Don’t talk like that.”
“You want me to lie?”
Her mouth tightens. She glances past me to the doorway. “I should go through those seconds. If I miss a tell because I didn’t know whose face to match it to, I’ll be furious.”
“Don’t let me stop you.”
She nods and disappears quickly, eager to get away from this conversation.
I watch her go and give her a three-second lead before I follow, quietly, at a distance so she doesn’t know I’m there.
I see Vik sitting in the living room with a laptop open.
She goes to him and sits next to him. I clench my fist, but I wait.
He won’t make a move on her because he knows I’ll fucking kill him, and it won’t be a drawn-out process.
Quick, meaningful and a warning to everyone else.
I’m not watching him. I’m watching her.
She folds her arms and tucks them into her chest as she leans forward and studies the photos Vik has pulled up.
She asks questions. She doesn’t even look at him, let alone make him laugh.
She pulls her left arm out and leans her elbow on her knee, cupping her chin, the ring flashing as she drums her fingers on her cheek.
I allow myself a small smile and step back, returning to my office.