Chapter 16 #2
His eyes are darting around the room, looking for exits, calculating odds, doing the math of a man who knows he's in trouble but hasn't figured out how deep.
Cassius walks me to the door.
His hand brushes the small of my back—brief, barely there, the kind of touch that could be accidental if it came from anyone else.
From him, nothing is accidental.
"You don't have to do this," he says. Low enough that only I hear it. "Lionel can handle an interrogation."
"Lionel would use pliers and a blowtorch. I'm going to use his sister."
Cassius looks at me.
Something moves behind his eyes, and I'd give a lot to know whether it's pride or concern or the particular vertigo of watching someone become the thing you designed them to be and realizing you can't control it anymore.
"His sister?" he asks.
"Anya. Nineteen. Still in Odessa. I found her on Alexei's social media before they confiscated his phone.
" I hold up a printout of an Instagram profile.
A dark-haired girl in a university sweatshirt, smiling at the camera with the kind of unguarded warmth that people only have when they don't know someone's watching.
"She's studying to be a nurse. Posts about her cat.
Comments on Alexei's photos with heart emojis. "
"And?"
"And Zhukov's organization has a documented pattern of retaliating against the families of anyone who cooperates with rivals.
If Alexei talks and Zhukov finds out, Anya doesn't finish nursing school.
She disappears." I fold the printout and slip it into my back pocket.
"I'm not going to threaten her. I'm going to make Alexei believe that talking to us is the only way to keep her safe. "
Cassius stares at me for a beat too long, then he steps aside and holds the door open. "I'll be watching."
"I know you will."
I walk into the room, close the door behind me, and pull out the metal chair across from Alexei and sit down.
He looks at me and some of the fear in his face shifts to confusion.
He was expecting Lionel. He was expecting pain.
He wasn't expecting a woman in a silk blouse with a diamond collar at her throat and a manila folder in her hands.
"Alexei," I say. His name, spoken calmly, in a voice that carries no threat. "Twenty-three. Born in Odessa, Ukraine. Came to the States at nineteen. No criminal record in the US, which tells me you've been careful, or lucky, or maybe a bit of both."
He says nothing.
His jaw is set and his wrists are flexing against the zip ties, testing them the way a trapped animal tests the bars of a cage.
"I'm not here to hurt you." I open the folder. Inside is the printout of Anya's profile, face down. "I'm here to talk about your options."
"I have no options." His accent is thick but his English is functional. "You are Wolfe's people. I am Zhukov's. This ends one way."
"It ends several ways, actually. That's what I want to discuss.
" I lean back in my chair. Cross my legs.
Project the kind of calm that takes effort to maintain when all I can think about is Emilia in that basement, counting the hours, wondering if anyone is coming for her.
"Option one: you don't talk. Lionel comes in after me.
Lionel is not a talker. Lionel is a very large man with very little patience and a toolbox that I'd rather not describe while we're being civil.
You hold out for a while, because you're young and proud and you think silence makes you loyal.
Eventually, you break. Everyone breaks. And then Zhukov finds out you talked, and your sister—"
I flip the printout over. Anya's face, bright and smiling, stares up from the table between us.
Alexei goes white.
"How did you—"
"Anya Volkova. Nineteen. First year of nursing at Odessa National Medical University. Lives in a flat on Deribasovskaya Street with a tabby cat named Misha." I recite the details without inflection. Facts. Just facts. "She posted a photo of her dinner last night. Pasta. Looked homemade."
"You don't touch her." His voice has changed. The bravado is gone. What's underneath is young and scared and exactly what I need him to be. "She has nothing to do with this. She doesn't even know what I—"
"I know she doesn't. And I have no interest in hurting your sister.
None." I lean forward. Let him see my eyes, let him read whatever's in them.
"But Zhukov does. You know how he operates.
You've seen what happens to the families of people who betray him.
If he finds out you're sitting in this chair, Anya doesn't matter to him. She's a message."
Silence.
His breathing has changed. Faster. Shallow.
The math he's doing behind those brown eyes is the math of a boy who left home to make money and send it back and keep his little sister safe, and every equation he runs ends in the same place.
"Option two," I say. Softer now. "You talk to me.
You tell me what I need to know about the factory in Sunset Park.
The layout of the basement. How many men are with the woman you're holding.
What weapons they have. The security setup.
" I pause. "And in exchange, Anya gets a scholarship to a nursing program in Canada.
New name. New documents. Far away from anyone who could use her against you. "
"You can do that?"
"The man on the other side of that door can do anything.
" I nod toward the wall where Cassius is watching through the see-through glass.
Club members use it for other purposes… but it works for this as well.
"He's very motivated right now. The woman in that basement is important to someone he cares about.
He'll move mountains to get her back, and he'll move your sister to Toronto with a phone call. "
Alexei looks at the photo of Anya, looks at me and then looks at the door.
The struggle on his face is visible and brief, the way it always is when people realize that the choice isn't between loyalty and betrayal, but between one person's safety and another's.
"The basement has two rooms," he says quietly.
"The woman is in the east room. Two guards at all times.
They rotate every four hours, not eight.
The building has motion sensors on the ground floor, but nothing in the basement because the pipes interfere with the signal.
There's a service tunnel that connects to the sewer system on the south side.
It's been sealed, but the welding is shit. A crowbar would open it."
I pull a blank sheet of paper from the folder and slide it across the table with a pen.
"Draw it," I say. "Everything you remember."
He draws.
His hands are shaking, but the lines are clear.
Two rooms. A corridor. The service tunnel. Guard positions marked with X's. Weapon storage in a closet near the east entrance.
When he's finished, I take the paper and stand.
"Anya's going to be fine," I say. "You have my word."
"Your word." He almost laughs. "I’ve heard rumors about you. Wolfe’s dog, wearing his collar."
I stop at the door and turn back.
"This collar is the most expensive piece of jewelry you'll ever see up close, and Cassius would burn this city to the ground if I asked him to." I hold his eyes until he looks away. "My word is good. Don't worry about your sister."
I walk out, close the door and stand in the corridor with the paper in my hand and my heart slamming against my ribs so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
I did that.
I sat across from a frightened man and took him apart with photographs and promises.
I used every skill my parents taught me, every instinct my education sharpened, and I turned them into instruments of something my mother would weep to see.
My reflection stares back at me from the dark glass of the corridor wall.
Silk blouse. Diamond collar.
A face that looks calm and composed and nothing like the girl who used to cry in Emilia's guest room.
I stare at that woman in the glass.
She doesn't flinch and neither do I.
Cassius is leaning against the opposite wall, arms crossed.
He's been there the whole time, not behind the glass but right here, close enough to hear every word through the door.
His expression is something I haven't seen before.
Not pride, exactly. Not surprise. Something quieter than both.
The look of a man watching something he thought he understood reveal a dimension he didn't account for.
He doesn't say great job. Doesn't say I'm impressed. Doesn't say anything for a long moment. "The sister. You meant that? You want her relocated?"
"I gave him my word."
"Then it's done." He pushes off the wall and holds my gaze for a beat that lasts longer than it should. "Anya Volkova will be in Toronto by Friday."
That's it. That's all he says.
But the way he says her name tells me more than a compliment ever could.
The staging area is a storage room off the east corridor.
Someone has cleared the shelves and laid out the tactical gear in neat rows: vests, comms equipment, holsters, blades.
It looks like a very organized person's idea of going to war.
I pick up the vest.
It's heavier than I expected, the ballistic panels stiff against my fingers, and for a moment the reality of what we're about to do lands on me with a weight that makes my arms weak.
We're going to a building full of armed men to extract my best friend, and people are going to get hurt, and some of them might die, and I'm strapping a knife to my thigh like that's something a person just does on a Tuesday afternoon.
I put on the vest, tighten the straps and the weight settles on my shoulders and after a moment it stops feeling heavy and starts feeling like armor.
I strap the knife to my right thigh, the sheath snug against the muscle, and the blade sits there with a familiarity that should alarm me but instead feels like the last piece of something clicking into place.
The door opens behind me.
I don't turn around.
I know who it is by the footsteps, by the weight of the silence he carries, by the way the air in the room changes when he enters it.
"The service tunnel is our way in," I say, still adjusting the vest straps.
"Alexei confirmed the welding on the seal is weak.
Lionel can breach it quietly. We come up through the basement, bypassing the ground floor sensors.
Two guards on Emilia. If we time it right, we catch them at the four-hour rotation gap. "
"Vincent's already briefing the team." He's closer now. I can feel him behind me, not touching, just present, the way a fire is present even when you're not looking at it. "We move in two hours."
I turn around.
He's in black. Tactical pants, fitted shirt, holster already strapped to his ribs.
No suit, no tie, no cufflinks.
This is the version of Cassius that exists beneath the boardroom, the version that was raised in bloodshed.
He looks dangerous in a way that his suits only hint at, and my body responds to it with a directness that I don't have time for and can't afford to acknowledge.
But I acknowledge it anyway.
Silently. In the space between one breath and the next, I let myself feel it.
The pull. The gravity. The insane, inexcusable fact that I am about to walk into a firefight beside the man who killed my parents, and the thing I feel when I look at him isn't hatred.
It's something bigger than hatred, bigger than love, bigger than any word I've learned in twenty-five years of trying to make language do what feelings won't.
I love him. I hate that I love him. I hate that hating it doesn't change it.
He reaches out and adjusts the strap on my left shoulder. His fingers brush my collarbone, just above the collar, and the touch is so brief and so careful that it carries more weight than anything we did on his desk the other night.
"When we get in there," he says, "you stay behind me."
"No."
"Selene—"
"No. I'm not walking in behind you like cargo. Emilia is there because of me. I go in beside you or I go in alone, but I don't go in behind."
His jaw works.
I watch the muscles flex beneath the skin and I know he's weighing my safety against my autonomy, trying to find the angle that protects me without insulting me.
It's a calculation he's been doing since the day we met, and he's never once gotten the balance right.
"Beside me," he says finally. "But if I tell you to get down, you get down."
"If someone is shooting at me, I don't need you to tell me to get down."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. Something closer to surrender.
"Emilia is going to be okay," he says. Quiet.
Not a promise, because he doesn't make promises he can't guarantee, and we both know this could go sideways in a hundred ways.
But the way he says it, looking at me with those gray eyes that have lied to me a thousand times and aren’t lying now, makes me believe it anyway.
"She has to be," I whisper. And something in my voice breaks the surface of the composure I've been maintaining all day, just for a second, just enough for him to see the terrified girl underneath the tactical gear and the diamond collar and the woman who just psychologically dismantled a Russian operative without raising her voice. "She's all I have left. From before."
He doesn't say anything.
He steps forward and presses his lips to my forehead, and the gesture is so gentle and so out of place in this room full of weapons that my eyes sting and I have to close them to keep the tears from falling.
Three seconds.
That's how long he holds his mouth against my forehead.
Three seconds of warmth and steadiness and the smell of him, sandalwood and gunmetal and the faint sharp edge of adrenaline.
Then he steps back. The softness vanishes.
The man in front of me is the one who runs an empire and ends lives and has never once lost a war.
"Let's go get your girl," he says.
I look at myself in the reflection of the glass cabinet by the door.
Black gear. Blade on my thigh.
Diamond collar at my throat, peeking above the neckline of the vest because I didn't tuck it in and I'm not going to.
I look like exactly what I am.
A woman going to war with the man she loves. The man she hates. The man who ruined her so thoroughly that the wreckage became a foundation, and whatever's being built on it is something neither of us has a name for yet.