Chapter 33
Arkady
Dmitri picks up on the second ring.
I’m standing in the office, knuckles white around the phone, my reflection a dark silhouette in the window glass. Grey afternoon light slashes across the desk like a warning. I don’t sit. This conversation will determine who lives and who doesn’t.
“Pakhan,” he says. The word lands carefully, the way he places everything. Deliberately. With full awareness of its weight.
“I need to see you,” I say. “Tonight. Alone.”
A pause. Not long. The kind a man takes when he’s been expecting a call and is deciding how to receive it rather than whether to. “Of course.”
“Come to the house.”
“Eight o’clock.”
“Seven,” I say, and hang up.
Alina is watching me from the doorway. She’s changed out of the raincoat, her hair loose now, damp from the rain. There’s a faint bruise forming at the base of her throat, and every time my eyes go to it, something cold and precise moves through me that I have to consciously redirect.
“He answered fast,” she says.
“He did.”
“That’s either very good or very bad,” she says.
“I know.”
“Which do you think it is?”
“I think Dmitri has been waiting for me to call since we found Nik,” I say. “I think he saw you watching him last night, and he saw me watching you watching him, and he went home and sat with the knowledge that the clock had started.”
She crosses her arms, one hand coming up to rest against her collarbone, just below the bruise. “He isn’t going to confess to anything.”
“No.”
“So what are you going to do?”
I move to the desk and sit down. The chair takes my weight with the particular solidity of something built to last, which is either comforting or ironic given the conversation I’m about to plan.
“I tell him what I know. All of it. The Cypriot company. Meridian Holdings. The twelve per cent dip. The timing.” I pause.
“And then I tell him what we think it means.”
She goes very still. “You’re going to tell him we think Nik is alive.”
“Yes.”
“And if we’re wrong?”
“Then I’ve shown my hand to a man who knows more than I do, and if we’re wrong, Dmitri knows I’m fishing, and I lose the only advantage I have.”
“And if we’re right?”
“Then he tells me what Nik wanted me to know. Eventually. Because that’s why Nik trusted him with it.”
She uncrosses her arms and moves to the chair across from the desk, the same one she sat in this morning with her coffee and her legs tucked up. She looks different in it now. Less comfortable. More like a woman running the same calculations I am and arriving at the same uncomfortable answers.
“He’ll deny it first,” she says.
“Of course.”
“So what breaks him?”
I lean back. “The phone call.”
She frowns. “Which one?”
“The one Nik made to me. Three seconds. The line opening, the silence, and then the shot.” I watch her face process this.
“Dmitri will know about that call. If Nik planned this down to the Cypriot shell company, the body double, and the timing, he planned the call. He told Dmitri about it. Which means that when I describe it to Dmitri in detail, he’ll know I’ve already done the routing of that money and the timing of everything.
He planned the phone call, too. He needed me to hear it.
He needed me to start moving immediately, not wait for a body to surface or a notification to come through official channels. ”
She’s quiet for a moment. “So you tell Dmitri you know about the call. That you’ve been sitting with it. That you know it wasn’t a goodbye, it was a starting gun.”
“And if he’s loyal to Nik the way I think he is, that’s the thing that cracks him. Not the money trail. Not the shell company. The fact that I know my father called me on purpose, and I’ve worked out why.”
She exhales through her nose and looks at the desk. Her fingers drum once against her knee, a slow, thinking rhythm. “What do you need me to do tonight?”
“Be there.”
She looks up.
“In the room,” I say. “Not hovering in the doorway. Not waiting in the kitchen. In the room.”
“Why?”
“Because Dmitri saw you last night, and he knows you saw something. If you’re sitting across from him when I lay this out, he’ll know there’s no version of this he can walk away from without it costing him something he doesn’t want to pay.”
She absorbs this. The slight narrowing of her eyes. The way she taps her fingers once against her knee—a habit I’ve noticed when she’s processing something complicated. Her mind works differently from mine, finding connections I sometimes miss.
“You want him to feel outnumbered,” she says finally.
“I want him to feel seen.”
Something shifts in her expression—surprise, maybe. As if she expected something colder from me. She doesn’t understand yet that this isn’t about cruelty. It’s about precision. About applying exactly the right pressure at exactly the right point.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll be there.”
I nod once and turn back to my laptop. There’s nothing more to say. From the corner of my eye, I see her unfold herself from the chair with that particular grace she has—economical, unaware of herself.
When she’s gone, I sit back, eyes closed.
Dmitri knows who is after me, and I’m willing to bet my last pound that whoever it is was in the room last night.
It’s why Orhan was watching Dmitri so closely.
He was ready to move the second he saw something he didn’t like.
Just in case whoever it is knows Dmitri knows.
“God,” I mutter, scrubbing my hand over my face.
The office is quiet. Outside, the rain has settled into the kind of grey, relentless drizzle that London does better than anywhere else on earth, the kind that doesn’t commit to being a proper downpour, just sits over the city like a wet blanket and dares you to complain about it.
Seven o’clock.
I’ve got hours yet to sit with the architecture of a conversation I’ve been building in my head since I hung up the phone, and I’ve already stress-tested every version of it and found the weak points.
The problem with Dmitri is that he isn’t a man who breaks under pressure.
He’s a man who absorbs it, redistributes it, waits until the person applying it has exhausted themselves and then speaks from a position of complete calm.
He’s been doing it for thirty years. He did it in that room last night while Ilya was standing up and throwing himself against the walls of his own grief, and Dmitri just sat there, still as stone, and let it all wash over him.
He’ll do the same thing tonight.
Which means I can’t apply pressure. I have to make him want to give it to me.
There’s a difference, and it matters.
I pull up the financial logs again and go back through the Meridian Holdings thread one more time, not because I expect to find anything new, but because repetition is how I make certain I haven’t missed something obvious.
The kind of obvious that hides in plain sight because you’re looking too hard at the complicated version.
The payment date. Eighteen months ago. The reference line. Completion.
Completion of a villa to give him a new life, as Alina suggested?
The plan was complete. The exit was purchased. The body double was in place. The timing was set. All that remained was the execution of it, which is a word I’m choosing to use loosely, given the circumstances.
I close the laptop and sit in the quiet for a while.
My father is alive. Someone tried to kill me, got Alina involved in this mess, used her as a scapegoat when they got pulled, and now we are all little pieces on this grand chessboard because Nik decided to stop being a Bratva pakhan the only way you can, knowing it would pass to me. By dying.
I let that sit there for a while until I sense Alina looking at me from the doorway. “What?” I ask, clearing my throat and sitting forward. staring at my laptop, so it looks like I’m doing something other than wallowing in self-pity.
“Okay,” she says.
I frown. “Okay, what?”
“Okay, we can have kids.”
I blink and try not to smile as something I never knew was inside me lights up like a fucking Christmas Tree.
She sees straight through it. “Don’t look so disgustingly happy. There is a condition.”
Of course there is. I lean back again and let her come to me in her own time.
She enters the room, fiddling with her ring. “You don’t ever do this to them.”
My eyes narrow. “Do what?”
“You know what, Arkady. This. What your dad did to you.”
“I already told you I might not have a choice.”
“We will find another way. Together. Because that’s what married couples are supposed to do, right? Work together?”
The question lands in the quiet office like something fragile being set down on a hard surface. She means it. Every word.
And she’s right.
I know she’s right. That’s the part that sits uncomfortably in my chest, because understanding something intellectually and accepting it as a condition of the life you’re building are two different animals entirely.
“Together,” I repeat.
“Don’t just say it back at me like it’s a foreign concept.”
“It is a foreign concept.”
She tips her chin up. “Then learn it.”
I stand. Her shoulders square as I cross the room, her feet planted shoulder-width apart, chin level.
Not a muscle twitches in her face. When I stop in front of her, she tilts her face upward, jaw set.
Our eyes lock. The air between us crackles with the electricity of two immovable objects refusing to yield.
“I can’t promise you something I can’t guarantee,” I say. “You know that.”
“I’m not asking for a guarantee. I’m asking for an intention.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Massive difference. A guarantee is a promise about the future. An intention is a promise about who you’re trying to be.”
I stare at her. This woman who I dragged into my life, and somehow found all the hairline fractures in my armour. Who sees things I’ve spent a lifetime hiding. Who asks for things no one has ever dared to ask.
“Then you have my intention,” I say, the words feeling strange in my mouth.
It’s not much. Not by normal standards. But she understands what I’m giving her—something I’ve never given anyone. I see it in the way she swallows, in the slight tremor she tries to hide. In how she nods once, jaw tight with control.
“Good,” she says, stepping back. “Elena is making something that smells incredible, and I’m going to go and eat it before Dmitri arrives and ruins my appetite.”
I feel the corner of my mouth twitch. “Go. I love you, wife.”
She freezes, her face going pale.
“You don’t have to say it back. Not yet, anyway. Maybe, at least, before we have a child would be good.”
“You’re rambling,” she mumbles.
“I know,” I say. “Alina. You don’t owe me anything. That’s not why I said it.”
A beat. Two. The rain taps against the window glass with the patience of something that has nowhere else to be.
“I know,” she says, and she leaves.
I stand in the office for a moment longer, listening to her footsteps move down the hall toward the kitchen, toward Elena and whatever smells incredible and the ordinary machinery of a household that has no idea I just said three words out loud that I have never said to another person in my life.
“Love you, husband,” she calls back, a smile in her voice that I can tell she is struggling to contain.
I snort. “That’ll do, krasotka. That’ll do.”