Chapter 32
Alina
“It’s nothing concrete,” I say. “I don’t know fuck all about illegal arms deals. But Gregor had a tell. A tick.”
“What was it?” Arkady asks.
“His right eye. Every time he looked at the cases, it twitched. Just once, just a flicker, but it was there. The first time, I thought I’d imagined it. The second time, I filed it. Third time, I knew.”
Arkady stares at me. “A twitch.”
“Don’t give me that face. You brought me here for exactly this. Right?”
He gives me a grim nod. “So something is off with the deal or the product.”
“Either way, not buying them was a good idea. Did you know I had the gun?”
“I hoped you did. I didn’t want to scare you by telling you to bring it, and then you were skittish and obvious.”
“So you risked my life instead?” I bristle intensely at that.
“Your life wasn’t at risk.”
“I was grabbed from behind and choked!”
“And you were prepared like a good pakhan’s wife, and you rescued yourself before I could put a bullet in his brain. Speaking of which…” He looks around.
“Dima already took care of him,” I mumble.
Arkady looks at me for a long moment, and I can see him deciding whether to be annoyed or grateful.
Dima reappears from the back of the warehouse. Kosta is already at the truck, the engine turning over with a low diesel grumble that fills the space where the gunfire used to be.
“We need to move,” Dima says.
Arkady nods and puts his hand on the small of my back, steering me toward the side door. His touch is firm and brief, the kind that says I see you, and we’ll talk about it later in the same gesture. I go with it, stepping over a puddle of something I don’t look at closely, and out into the drizzle.
The rain has picked up. It hits the back of my neck and soaks through my hair before I get my hood up.
I get in the back of the Range Rover. The door closes, and the sound of the rain shifts from loud to muffled. Arkady slides in beside me a second later, and we pull out with Dima behind the wheel.
Nobody speaks for a few minutes.
I watch the industrial estate dissolve into wet suburban streets and try to work out what I’m feeling.
Not scared. That particular window has already closed.
Not angry, exactly. Mostly, I feel like a woman who just shot someone through the foot and is now sitting in a luxury car in the drizzle, wondering what the protocol is for that.
“You’re quiet,” Arkady says.
“I’m processing.”
“Process faster. I need to know if you’re all right.”
“I’m fine.” I pause. “You should’ve told me.”
“Would you have been as calm as you were if you’d known what we were walking into?”
“No, but that’s not the point.”
“It’s exactly the point.”
I turn my head and look at him properly. “The point,” I say, keeping my voice level, “is that I’m your wife. Not your asset. Not a tool you deploy, and hope performs correctly under pressure.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I hear Dima stifle a snort.
“I know what you are,” Arkady grits out.
“Then act like it.” I hold his gaze. “I’m not asking to be protected from the reality of your world. I’m in it. I’ve been in it since the second you walked out of that club with me in your grip. But you don’t get to use me and then tell me it was for my own good. That’s not how this works.”
He’s quiet for a moment. The muscle in his jaw ticks once.
“You’re right,” he says.
I blink. “Sorry?”
“You heard me.”
“I did. I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t imagined it.”
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The thing that happens before one, when he’s fighting it and losing.
“Don’t strain something,” I say.
He does smile then. Brief, controlled, but real. “Next time, I’ll brief you fully.”
“Next time,” I repeat. “You expect there to be a next time?”
“You have a gift.”
“I could be wrong about Gregor.”
“You aren’t.”
“You’re confident. Too confident.”
“I trust you.”
I stare at him, unblinking, for a few seconds and then turn my head again. That is big. Huge. Monumental. I can see Dima’s shocked expression in the rearview mirror.
The car moves through south London, the streets turning familiar as we head back north.
I watch a bus pull away from a stop, ordinary people with ordinary mornings, and the distance between their world and the one I just left feels both enormous and completely irrelevant.
I shot a man through the foot, and I’m thinking about whether Elena will have lunch ready.
This is my life now.
I test the shape of that thought the way you test ice before you put your weight on it. It holds. More than holds. It feels, if I’m being completely honest with myself, like the first thing in years that actually fits.
“The shipment,” I say, eventually. “What do you think was wrong with it?”
“Several possibilities.” He stretches his arm along the back of the seat, not touching me, but close.
“The weapons could be compromised. Mechanically sound on inspection but fitted with tracking devices. Or the ammunition is wrong for the weapons. Wrong calibre, wrong spec, deliberately mislabelled so whoever buys them finds out too late, mid-operation, when it costs lives instead of money.” He pauses.
“Or the routing was compromised, and we were buying a consignment that was already flagged by someone we don’t want knowing our inventory. ”
“Any of those would be bad.”
“All of them are bad. The twitch tells me Gregor knew which one. We will find out.”
“Where is Kosta taking them?”
He gives me a searching look and shakes his head. “Plausible deniability. You don’t need to know.”
Well, that’s true. I close my eyes and sit back, my hand unconsciously going to my throat to rub it.
“Did he hurt you?”
“A little,” I say, dropping my hand. “He had a good grip.”
Arkady reaches over and pulls my collar down, exposing the base of my throat.
His eyes move over it with the flat, clinical focus of a man assessing damage rather than feeling it.
Then his thumb drags, very gently, across the skin there, and the clinical quality of it dissolves into something else entirely.
“Bruising,” he says.
“I’ve had worse from a night out.”
“That isn’t the reassurance you think it is.”
I pull my collar back up. “I’m fine. Truly. Stop looking at me like I’m broken.”
He removes his hand and sits back, but his jaw has tightened in the way that means he’s filed something away under things he intends to deal with. I don’t know what that means practically. Everyone involved is dead already.
I lean my head back and stare at the car ceiling. “How are we going to find out who is after you? We haven’t talked about it for a while in light of… everything else.”
“Knowing what I know now, I have a pretty good guess,” he says darkly.
I purse my lips. That presumably means a Saranov family member. “We need a meeting with Dmitri,” I murmur.
“My thoughts exactly,” he growls.
I nod but say nothing else. I don’t think Dmitri had anything to do with it, but he knows who it is because Nik knew. It’s a baptism by fire, and my husband is about to walk through the flames and come out the other side unscathed. Because that’s what he does.