15. Thea
THEA
Day four of captivity. I’ve read everything in the library, reorganized my closet twice—which doesn’t take long since all I brought is a beach bag—and taught Potato to high-five. Well, it’s not quite a high five. Maybe a high claw.
I’m not built for this. I’ve spent my adult life doing eleven things before lunch, not prison. Even if it’s a beautiful prison, every door I can open just reminds me of the ones I can’t.
So, I keep searching for doors I can’t open, hoping the next time I try it, it’ll be unlocked. I know it’s dangerous. Maxim’s world is no joke. But I do it anyway, because snooping feels like my old job. I’m not spying. I’m onboarding.
Which is how I find Maxim’s office door standing ajar.
Not open. Ajar. Amber lamplight and book smell. When I press against the door and there are no objections, I walk in.
It’s the most him room in the house, dark shelves, a large desk, a fireplace that gets used. The only room I’ve seen with personal things in it, which is what pulls me past the point of claiming I’m looking for a stapler. I don’t care—curiosity has me in its claws.
Photographs on the back shelf. A stern couple before a Brooklyn storefront, forty years ago by the clothes. Lev, younger, laughing, holding a fish outside. A dark-haired woman on a windy beach, mid-shout at the camera, beautiful.
And then the last frame, and the floor drops the way it dropped in the auditorium.
It’s Maxim, maybe five years younger, sitting comfortably at a low table in a room with paper screens, cross-legged and without his jacket.
He looks more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him.
Four older Japanese men in dark suits sit around the table.
The nearest man’s sleeve has shifted back, revealing a dense, patterned tattoo that stretches from his hand to his wrist, and I imagine it goes way beyond that.
I recognize these tattoos from a documentary Mandy showed me about organized crime in Japan. Yakuza.
I stand very still and take in the room again. A lacquered black box on the shelf below. Inside, on silk, a short knife in a plain wooden sheath, a card in Japanese brushwork. A gift.
The think-tank PDF scrolls up behind my eyes, page forty-one. Links to European and East Asian syndicates. I skimmed right past “East Asian” because the Russian stuff had already filled my brain to capacity. But here it is on a shelf.
Building the European and Pacific operations, he had told the auditorium.
Pacific operations.
What do I know about the Yakuza? Serious. Scary. They take fingers, and the documentary had a lot of ominous drums. I’d mostly tuned out because Mandy and I were watching it drunk, and I was distracted by something on my phone.
It’s one thing to accept that your boss-slash-whatever runs a Russian criminal family. It’s another to learn that the man is notorious internationally. This isn’t just a family. It’s a network.
And I’m not a witness anymore. I’m inside it.
I put everything back, aligned to the dust, and walk out on weak knees. I can’t stay here. What am I even doing here?
My boss is Bratva, who is involved with the Yakuza. I’m a decent EA from Pennsylvania, who some other boss guy thinks is important.
I’m not important. I’m a normal woman who fell into an important man’s bed. And now, I’m screwed in a completely different way.
No. Fuck all of this.
The day is gray and low. There’s a gap after the afternoon handoff, when the guards take the golf cart to the greenhouse and swap out. If they wanted to be stealthy, they shouldn’t drive past my window.
Sneakers. Coat. Potato goes in his carrier, and this time, he doesn’t fight me. He must know something’s wrong.
The wall has a gardener’s gate behind the orchard. It isn’t even locked. Looks like it hasn’t been used in years. Must have been forgotten about. Then I’m through and into the woods.
Cold air. Wet leaves. My legs moving in a straight line. Freedom smells like rain and mulch.
By minute five, the trees are identical. But trees were never my thing, so maybe my photographic memory is just making them look alike.
No sun means no direction. Can’t read the shadows to figure out anything.
I know the thing about moss growing on the north side of trees is a myth—it’s only true of some mosses on some trees, not a blanket rule.
A woods without direction is a rotating hallway.
Dead leaves on the dirty ground tell me nothing.
Left foot, right foot. Keep marching forward. That’s the only way.
But then I realize I haven’t crossed the stream that we crossed on the bridge near the estate. And going this direction, I should’ve gotten to the road by now.
The estate phone reaches four people I’m running from.
No luck there. No map apps on it, either.
Just the programmed numbers in a dumb phone and the time, ebbing away.
My sneakers are not hiking boots, and unfortunately, I haven’t done a lot of hiking in my life, so my ankles aren’t great. And my feet ache.
Potato has remained silent in his carrier, which he’s never done, and the silence scares me worse than the trees.
I set him down and kneel. “You good, little bastard?”
He looks at me through the bars of his carrier. No malice there—just confusion.
“Yeah, you and me both.” I don’t cry. I stand in the rotating hallway with a cat and no plan and say, out loud, “Okay, Thea—”
Footsteps.
Shit.
I take off, trying to run. But I’m less of a runner than I am a hiker, so I’m not great at it.
“Miss Thea!”
My killer is not going to call me that. I turn to find it’s Pasha moving through the woods the way I move through a ballroom I organized. It’s like the trees part out of his way as he races toward me.
The relief hits so hard it comes out as anger. But I don’t want to be relieved by the sight of him. I’m pissed. “No. Nope. Not going back.”
“Miss Thea.” He isn’t even winded. “Dark in one hour. Forty degrees in two. You are not prepared for either—”
“Then I’ll walk fast.” I turn, pick a direction, and get four steps before his hand closes around my upper arm. I pull, hard, twisting, but he doesn’t yank me back. He just doesn’t move.
It’s humiliating. “Let me go!”
“Miss Thea, you know I cannot.” His other hand takes the carrier’s handle, gentle as a bellhop, and we stand there in the leaves acknowledging the physics.
“Come on—”
“Please don’t fight me,” Pasha says, miserable. This large, armed man adjusts his fingers so they won’t leave marks. “I won’t hurt you. But I can’t let you be out here alone, miss. Kirill is out here somewhere.”
“Then come with me so you can keep me safe.”
He echoes my internal frustration. “It doesn’t work that way. You know this. Please, I don’t want to have to carry you back—I believe you might hate me for that.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
He raises a brow. “It’s my job to return you to the estate. Whatever that entails. You can return on your feet or over my shoulder. But you’ll return, Miss Thea. It’s what Mr. Vernigora requires. It’s what your safety requires.”
And the fight goes out of me. I stop pulling. “At least I got some fresh air and exercise.”
He winces a smile. “Does that mean you will come willingly?”
“Willingly? No. It’s not willing when the choices are to go back to the estate or risk losing my face.”
“Your face?”
“Kirill—I hear he…” My stomach turns.
“Ah. You heard about Miss Wood.”
“Didn’t know her name.” I have to lengthen my stride to keep up with Pasha, but he’s good at keeping Potato’s carrier level, and now I don’t have to cart him back, so I’m happy to struggle to keep up. “What was the story there?”
“It’s not for a woman’s ears, Miss Thea.”
“And when he was done with her, neither was her skull.”
He stops in his tracks to stare in shock at me.
“Okay, that was a little gruesome, but I think I’m entitled to my gallows humor, considering everything. I just… Pasha, I want to know what I’m up against. What happened with Miss Wood?”
He takes a deep breath, then continues the hike. “I don’t have all the details. But from what I know, she spurned Mr. Sokolov.”
“So, it was personal. That’s good. I’ve never even met Sokolov, so he has no reason to treat me like a banana.”
Pasha says nothing, but his face tells me everything.
“She’s not the only one, is she?”
“I’m afraid not. Peeling is an effective encouragement for cooperation, so he tends to employee it more often than anyone should.”
I rub my arms for warmth, and I’m not sure if it’s the weather, or if it’s what he just said. Maybe both. “Super.”
“I hope that means you’ll remain in the estate, going forward.”
Slowly, I nod. “I’m not much to look at, but I’ve grown used to my face, and I’d like it to stay exactly where it is. So, yeah, I’ll stay in the estate.”
“That’s not true.”
“But I just said I’d stay—”
“No, not that.” He smiles down at me. “You’re very much to look at. That’s a face worth saving.”
My face worth saving heats up. “Um, I… thanks.” We continue until it dawns on me, “You said the peeling’s an effective encouragement for cooperation. So, how do I know you’re being honest about it, or if you’re using it as effective encouragement?”
“Unless required by Mr. Vernigora, I’ll never lie to you, Miss Thea.”
I don’t want to believe him, but I do. Pasha has this innocent thing about himself. I suspect that even if he was ordered to lie to me, he wouldn’t be good at it.
“Okay. And stop calling me Miss Thea. You’re older than me. It’s weird.”
“As you wish.” We round a copse of trees, and when a cold breeze hits, he adds, “I’m not that much older than you.”
“It’s okay. I’ve always been more comfortable with people who are older than me. People my age… they’re usually kind of boring. Older people have lived. They have stories and scars and experience.”
His lips curve shyly. “Perhaps one day I will share my stories with you.”
“I’d like that.”
The gate swallows us back inside, and he locks it behind us with a big key from his pocket. A black car sits in the courtyard. The west wing is lit end to end.
Maxim is home.