Chapter 34
Alina
Dmitri walks into the office precisely at seven o’clock.
I’ve been sitting here since six-thirty, nervously tapping my foot, probably driving Arkady crazy.
Not that he said anything. I glance at my husband before I give Dmitri a short nod.
He returns it with the economy of a man who has been greeted in boardrooms and back rooms and places considerably less comfortable than this, and who treats all of them with the same measured deference.
He’s dressed simply. Dark jacket, no tie.
He takes in the room in a single sweep that pauses for exactly one second on me before moving to Arkady.
“Pakhan,” he says.
“Dmitri.” Arkady gestures to the chair across the desk. “Sit.”
Dmitri sits. He doesn’t look at me again, which is interesting. He simply settles into the chair with the composed peacefulness of a man who has already decided what this meeting is and what he is going to say.
Arkady doesn’t sit. He stands at the window, hands in his pockets. It’s deliberate. Everything he does is deliberate.
I keep my hands loose in my lap, and my gaze settles on the space above Dmitri’s shoulder, that particular nowhere-point I’ve gotten good at finding over the last twenty-four hours. Let the men talk. Let them circle each other. I’m here to observe, not chat.
The silence runs long enough to have texture.
Arkady lets it. He’s good at that. Standing at the window with his back three-quarters turned, looking like a man with nothing urgent on his mind, which means the opposite.
“How was the drive?” Arkady asks.
“Fine.” Dmitri folds his hands in his lap. “The rain has eased.”
“It has.”
Another silence. Shorter this time. Dmitri doesn’t fill it. He absorbs it. He waits. He lets other people exhaust themselves against the wall of his patience and then speaks from the rubble.
Arkady moves forward and perches on the edge of his desk. It’s the first time Dmitri has moved since he sat down. His head tilts ever so slightly to the left. I draw my gaze to him, and this time I don’t pretend I’m not looking.
“I want to talk to you about a Cypriot shell company,” Arkady says. “Meridian Holdings. Incorporated fourteen months before a payment of eight hundred thousand pounds was routed through it from my father’s second set of books.”
Dmitri’s hands stay folded in his lap, still as carved stone.
I search his face.
Nothing moves again. Not his jaw, not his eyes, not the particular set of his mouth that has been the same since he walked through the door. He waits.
“The same quarter,” Arkady continues, his voice completely level, “you went dark for three weeks. Your revenue dipped twelve per cent and corrected itself overnight when you resurfaced.”
“Supply chain disruption,” Dmitri says. “It’s documented.”
“It is. Very neatly. Too neatly, for something that was supposedly unplanned.”
Dmitri says nothing.
I shift my gaze fractionally. His hands are still folded. His breathing is even. But something has changed in the room, a density to the air that wasn’t there thirty seconds ago. Like a door closing somewhere very far away.
“Then you went dark again, right around the time my father died,” Arkady finishes.
The word died lands in the room like a stone dropped into still water, and I watch the ripples move across Dmitri’s face. They’re small. Almost imperceptible. But they’re there.
His left thumb moves against his right knuckle. Once.
I file it without blinking.
Arkady lets the silence run again. He’s doing it on purpose, leaving space for Dmitri to step into, knowing that a man like this won’t be crowded into anything. He has to choose to move forward. That’s the only way this works.
Dmitri looks at his hands. Then he looks at Arkady. Then, for the first time since he sat down, he looks at me. Properly. Not the single sweep from the doorway. He looks at me the way a man looks at something he’s been trying to avoid accounting for, and has just realised he can’t anymore.
I hold his gaze and say nothing.
He looks back at Arkady. “What is it you think you know?”
“I think,” Arkady says, “that Nik is the one who pulled the trigger.”
Dmitri’s eyes widen sharply. The double meaning behind Arkady’s words is a beautiful thing. He has cornered the older man in a move so graceful that it makes me inhale deeply and plaster a smile on my face.
“You think he killed himself? With a bullet directly between his eyes?” Dmitri asks.
“How did you know the bullet was between his eyes?” Arkady asks, still sitting on the edge of the desk, hands in pockets like he has no care in the world.
“It was…” Dmitri snorts slightly and smiles. “I see.”
“What do you see?”
“You are trying to put me in check. Not going to happen.”
“Actually, that wasn’t my intention at all,” Arkady says, and I exhale again, feeling a little lightheaded.
This is getting ridiculous. My palms are starting to itch.
Silence descends. The kind that makes me want to scream.
Without giving it a second thought, I stand up.
“We know Nik killed his body double and is living out his fake afterlife in Cyprus, probably in a very nice villa somewhere. We know he did it to retire from the Bratva and to give Arkady the protection of being pakhan because someone is after him. We know you know all of this, facilitated it, even. So who is after my husband, Mr Baskov?”
I can sense rather than see Arkady’s incandescent fury over my being so blunt. But fuck this. I am not Bratva. Not really. I don’t sit around in simmering silences and innuendoes. I deal with facts, and beating about the bush is a waste of everyone’s time.
“Sit down,” Arkady clips out.
“Too late for that,” Dmitri says. He leans forward in his chair, elbows finding his knees, and for the first time since he walked through that door, something shifts in his face.
Not a crack, exactly. More like a seam becoming visible under pressure.
The composed peacefulness he wore coming in has developed an edge.
I stay standing, because sitting back down now would look like a retreat, and I’ve already committed to this.
Arkady says nothing. I can feel his fury radiating at me from the left, steady and hot, but he doesn’t speak, which means part of him is curious enough to let this run.
Dmitri looks at me for a long moment. Then he looks at Arkady. Then back at me.
“Your wife has her father’s mouth,” he says.
“You know who I am?” I ask, and then purse my lips. My time for talking is done. I think my arse is going to be sore for a week after Arkady is done spanking me.
“Valery Belov’s daughter. You didn’t think the new pakhan’s wife would go uninvestigated, did you?”
Guess not. I don’t reply.
Dmitri unfolds his hands and sets them flat on his thighs.
“Nik trusted very few people in his life,” Dmitri says.
“Arkady, you know this. You grew up watching him operate. Watching him test every man who came near him, every woman, every business associate. He trusted fewer people as the years went on, not more.” He pauses.
“That is the nature of power. It narrows the circle until the circle is very small indeed.”
Arkady says nothing. He’s let me have my moment, and now he’s reclaimed the silence, and I’m grateful enough for the reprieve that I lower myself back into the chair without making it look like a defeat.
Dmitri’s eyes move to me briefly, then back to Arkady.
“Your wife is right about the broad strokes. I won’t insult your intelligence by denying what you’ve clearly already worked out.
Nik is alive. He is well. He is somewhere I won’t tell you, because that was the arrangement, and I keep arrangements. ”
Arkady doesn’t move. Not a muscle. But something shifts in him, in the particular way a man goes quiet when he receives confirmation of something he knew but hadn’t let himself fully believe until this moment, someone said it out loud.
I watch it happen. The almost invisible exhale. The jaw that doesn’t clench so much as settle. The hands that stay in his pockets but go fractionally more still.
He believed it before. Now he knows it.
Dmitri lets the confirmation sit for a moment, giving it the room it deserves, and then he continues.
“The threat to you did not come from outside the family,” he says.
“Nik had been planning this for some time. Not because you were under threat, but because he wanted out. He is tired.” He shakes his head as it’s irrelevant.
“The threat came onto his desk several days before he put his plan into motion. He accelerated it to protect you.”
“Who?” Arkady says. One word. Flat as concrete.
Dmitri’s eyes move to the window, and for the first time, I see something in his face that isn’t composure. It’s the particular quality of a man about to say something that costs him, not because he doesn’t want to say it, but because saying it makes it real in a way that keeping it hasn’t.
“Pavel Markov,” he says.
The name drops into the room and sits there.
I run it back. Pavel. The banker’s smile. The shot glass rotating between his fingers. It wasn’t nervous fidgeting, but the controlled movement of a man managing his tells. The way he stopped rotating it entirely when Ilya stood up and accused someone in the room of knowing about Nik’s death.
I think back to his voice when he brought up the Southwark arrangement, the particular flatness of his delivery. Not a man raising a concern, but a man testing whether the new pakhan knew about loose ends that needed tying up. Probing for weaknesses.
My stomach turns as I remember the way he looked at me. Not the calculating assessment most of the men gave me, but something colder. More clinical. Like he was already planning how to use me against Arkady if the opportunity arose.
“He launders for half the city,” Dmitri continues. “Has contacts in places that would make removing a pakhan look like an unfortunate accident rather than a family coup. Banking scandals. Regulatory investigations. The kind of warfare that destroys a man’s legitimacy before it kills him.”
I feel Arkady’s stillness beside me, the particular quality of quiet that precedes something explosive. But his voice, when he speaks, is level.
“How long?” he asks.
“Nik suspected for a few weeks that something was going down. Had proof for a day before he pulled the trigger on his exit strategy.”
“The day you took me from the club,” I say to Arkady, but I don’t think he is listening.