Chapter 26 #2
Arkady sits back and drinks the shot, which is when I take mine, all eyes on me. I gulp it back, feeling the burn, but this girl didn’t earn her stripes on the club scene by being a pussy. I lower the empty glass to my lap and wait, resisting the urge to hold it out for more.
Miroslav grunts something unintelligible in Russian and sits down. He fixes me with a fierce glare that I then feel obligated to return. I give him a bored stare, taking in every inch of his face. “Who were you before you became a Saranova, Miss?”
Miss. That’s one of the tests.
“She doesn’t matter,” Arkady says before I can respond. “We are here to address the fact that the Saranov family is in mourning for its pakhan, while the new one has been chosen by blood.”
Most of the men look away from me and now focus on Arkady.
That means I get to do some snooping on their facial expressions, their twitches and tells.
I tune out the words and get to work, focusing on Dmitri first. He was MIA, and now he waltzes in with no explanation like he didn’t go dark right around the time the old pakhan was killed.
Dmitri Baskov is a compact man. Not short, not tall, just contained, the kind of man who takes up exactly the space he intends to and not an inch more.
His photograph didn’t capture that. Photographs rarely capture the way a man holds himself when he thinks no one is paying attention to him specifically.
Everyone is paying attention to Arkady, which means no one is paying attention to Dmitri.
Except me.
Little old me, who has been dismissed for the time being. I have no doubt the attention will come back to me when a lull in proceedings occurs, but until then, I need to start looking for the cracks.
He’s sitting in the second row, slightly to the left, behind Lev, whose bulk provides a natural screen. I wouldn’t have noticed the positioning if Vik hadn’t told me Dmitri preferred to operate from the periphery. He calls it tactical. I’d call it what it is.
He’s hiding in plain sight.
His face is neutral, which isn’t interesting.
His hands are neutral, which isn’t interesting either.
What’s interesting is his stillness. Most of the men in this room are performing stillness.
Miroslav is performing authority. Pavel is performing indifference.
Ilya isn’t performing anything because he’s too wired to manage it, his knee bouncing a rhythm against the chair leg that makes the man beside him shift fractionally away.
Dmitri isn’t performing stillness.
He simply is still.
There’s a difference, and it matters. Performed stillness has edges.
You can see the effort at the corners of the eyes, in the set of the jaw, in the deliberate placement of hands that would otherwise move.
Real stillness is something else. It’s the stillness of a man who has made peace with whatever he is carrying, who has sat with it long enough that it no longer requires management.
Dmitri Baskov has sat with something long enough that it has become part of him.
I let my gaze drift away before it can register as attention.
Over his shoulder, past Orhan Petrosyan, who is present and accounted for behind his principal with his chin up at precisely the bored angle Vik described.
Except it isn’t bored. It’s careful. The difference is in the eyes, which aren’t tracking Arkady the way everyone else’s are. They’re tracking Dmitri.
A second watching his principal instead of the pakhan.
I file it without moving a muscle.
Arkady is talking about structure. About continuity. About the machine Nik built and the fact that it runs on loyalty and nothing else, and every man in the room is nodding at the right moments, performing agreement like they rehearsed it on the drive over.
I let the words wash past me and keep working.
Pavel Markov is the one I come back to. He’s been doing something subtle with his hands since Arkady started talking about continuity, a slow rotation of the shot glass between his fingers, turning it one way and then back, one way and then back.
It could be nerves. It could be habit. But Pavel doesn’t strike me as a man who has habits he hasn’t examined and chosen to keep.
Everything about him is deliberate, from the banker’s smile to the precise knot of his tie.
A man like that doesn’t fidget without reason.
I let my eyes drift to Grisha, who is watching Arkady with the focused attention of a man running arithmetic on everything being said.
His expression is neutral, but his tells are in his breathing.
Short, controlled inhales at the moments he disagrees, a fraction longer when something lands in a way he can use.
He’s building a ledger in his head right now.
Debits and credits of power. Calculating whether the new pakhan’s position is worth the cost of loyalty, or whether he can leverage me against him.
He shoots me a subtle stare. I meet it and move on.
Anton is easier to read than the rest of them, which is both a relief and a disappointment.
He’s been watching me since he sat down with the particular focus of a man who has decided that the new pakhan’s wife is the most interesting thing in the room and doesn’t care who knows it.
It isn’t threatening. It’s almost playful, the way a cat watches something it hasn’t decided to kill yet.
He catches my eye when I drift past him and gives me a smile that’s designed to be charming and is, marginally, which I suspect he knows.
I give him nothing and move on.
Ilya is a problem. Not because he’s done anything specific, but because the energy coming off him is the kind that makes the air feel unstable.
His knee has stopped bouncing, which should be an improvement, but isn’t, because the stillness that replaced it is the worse kind.
Coiled. The kind of stillness that precedes something loud and irreversible.
His eyes are too bright, the pupils slightly too wide for the amber light in the room, and I think about what Vik said. Don’t meet his stare.
He leaps up suddenly, and every man in the room goes on high alert. “Who killed him?” he demands. “Which one of you fuckers killed Nik?”
Arkady rises, buttoning his jacket slowly before he moves his hands out. “Ilya,” he says. “That isn’t appropriate right now. Sit down.”
Ilya doesn’t sit down.
He stands there with his hands open at his sides and his chest heaving.
His eyes are moving too fast, scanning faces, looking for a reaction that matches the one burning through him.
“Someone in this room,” he says, and his voice has dropped from the shout to something worse, the low, ragged register of a man who is genuinely grieving and has no idea what to do with it, “knew this was coming. Someone knew, and they said nothing, and Nik is dead.”
“Ilya.” Arkady’s voice is flat and even. Not loud. Not cold. Just immovable. “Sit down.”
“I won’t—”
“Sit. Down.”
The two words land like the closing of a vault door.
Dima looms over him, and Ilya’s face moves through three things in rapid succession—fury, grief, and then the particular deflation of a man who recognises an authority he can’t override.
His knee finds the chair before the rest of him does.
He drops into it heavily, and the room bristles, the men insulted by this outburst.
I don’t move. I don’t look at Ilya either. I look at the men who didn’t move when he stood up.
That’s the tell. Not the ones who flinched or shifted or reached instinctively for weapons. The ones who stayed completely, utterly still.
Dmitri didn’t move.
Orhan Petrosyan didn’t move.
Pavel Markov stopped rotating the shot glass.
I file all three without blinking and keep my hands loose in my lap, the empty shot glass balanced between my fingers like I’m bored by the whole performance.
Arkady sits back down with the unhurried deliberateness of a man who has just demonstrated something without explaining it, and the room settles around him like sediment finding the bottom of a glass.
Ilya stares at the floor. His second, the one Vik called unstable by association, has gone very still behind him.
Miroslav speaks next. “Where are we in finding out who did this?”
My gaze shoots straight to Dmitri. For the first time since he entered the room, he looks at me. Then he dismisses me. Orhan doesn’t, though. He keeps his eyes on me, even when I flick my gaze back to Miroslav, who is now arguing with Arkady in Russian because he thinks I won’t understand him.
“The girl who you have placed in our midst is suspicious, plemyannik.”
“She is irrelevant, Miro,” Arkady replies, not rising to the bait. “But my wife doesn’t leave my side. You understand how it is?” He smirks, and I bristle inwardly at the insinuation, but I know he doesn’t mean it. Much.
“A wife is a precious possession, is she not?” Arkady adds. “Not to be left on her own to have thoughts that might get her into trouble.”
Miroslav makes a sound in his throat that isn’t quite a laugh. “Wise man,” he says, and the Russian drops away, replaced by English that carries the particular weight of a man who has decided to stop testing the perimeter and move on to something more useful.
I keep my face neutral and my hands loose and let the word possession dissolve into the amber air without touching it.
Arkady doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t need to.
The message landed exactly where he aimed it.
Every man in this room now understands that I am here because he wants me here, that my presence is an extension of his authority rather than a crack in it, and that questioning one is questioning the other.
It’s elegant, in the brutal, functional way that everything Arkady does is elegant.
I dismiss Miro, as I do Ilya and Seva, as ones to watch.
My first instinct was incorrect, as Arkady said.
Miroslav had nothing to do with his brother’s murder.
Intentionally or otherwise. Now, I feel my entire theory slipping through my fingers like water.
Arkady knows something he isn’t telling me, but I’d bet my life on it being something to do with Dmitri.
And not just because he went missing. Something else is at play here.
As if reading my thoughts about him, Dmitri speaks for the first time.
His voice is low. Unhurried. The voice of a man who has learned that silence earns you more attention than noise. “The northern operations will continue as normal through the transition,” he says. “Nik’s arrangements hold.”
Nik’s arrangements.
Not the family’s arrangements. Not the Bratva’s arrangements. Nik’s. The word hangs in the air like smoke from a gun.
I keep my face absolutely blank and my hands loose in my lap as I let the observation settle into the back of my skull, where I’ll take it out and turn it over later, when I’m not sitting in a room full of men who are watching for exactly this kind of reaction.
But something cold moves through me, a slow drip of certainty finding its level.
Dmitri Baskov went dark when Nik died. He arrived late with no explanation.
He sat behind Lev’s bulk like a man who understands the value of a natural screen.
His second watches him instead of the pakhan.
And now, in a room full of men performing loyalty to the new order, he has just referred to the dead man’s arrangements as though they are still active.
As though the chain of command runs through a ghost.
I sense Arkady’s gaze skate past me, but he was looking for my reaction to that.
I wonder what he thinks he saw, because I don’t know what I heard.
But I know I heard something. It’s relevant, and it’s going to piss me off until I can yell it at Arkady and we can figure out what the fuck is actually going on here.