3. Ruslan
RUSLAN
My knuckles are split, and the man on the floor is breathing hard through blood and broken pride. He’s still conscious, which means I haven’t gone far enough to kill him.
That isn’t mercy. I need him awake.
I stand over him in the basement room beneath Veles, my pulse steadying as I flex my right hand once.
Blood smears across my skin, not all of it mine.
The overhead light is harsh, yellow-white and unflattering, humming faintly above us.
It catches on the concrete floor, on the steel chair bolted to the ground, on the face of the man who thought he could skim from one of my shipments and lie to me twice in the same hour.
That part always offends me more than the theft.
The stupidity.
“You want to try again?” I ask.
He coughs, spits red onto the floor, and says nothing.
Stepan stands off to the side, arms folded, expression flat with the kind of patience that comes from seeing this too many times to be impressed by it. Two more men wait by the door. Quiet. Still. Smart enough not to speak.
I crouch in front of the bastard and take hold of his jaw, forcing his head up. “I am giving you,” I say softly, “one more chance to remember who you belong to.”
His eyes are glassy with pain. Fear is in there too now. Good. Fear clears the mind.
“I didn’t,” he rasps.
I hit him again. Short. Brutal. Precise.
His head snaps sideways with a wet sound, and he makes a broken noise deep in his throat before sagging against the chair. Blood runs from his nose, his mouth, the cut above his brow I gave him ten minutes ago.
I straighten and take a handkerchief from my pocket, wiping my knuckles while I look down at him. “Take two fingers,” I say to Stepan. “If he still can’t remember after that, dump him in the river.”
The man jerks against the restraints so hard the chair scrapes. “No, no, wait.”
There it is.
I say nothing.
He pants through his teeth, then blurts a name. Another one after that. Half a route. A warehouse. Not enough, but more than he was giving me before.
Stepan steps forward, already filing it away. He’ll verify it. He always does.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. In this room, at this moment, the sound is jarring.
I pull the phone out, more annoyed than curious at first. That number should not light up unless something matters. Business. Trouble. Movement.
I look down and see an unknown number and a message that says: Hi. My friend says I need practice talking to strangers, so… hello.
For a second, I just stare at it.
The man at my feet is still whimpering. There’s blood on my hand, blood on my cuff, blood drying under one of my nails. And on my phone, like it has arrived from another universe entirely, is this.
Stepan watches my face. “Problem?”
I keep looking at the screen.
Not a setup. Not my first instinct, anyway. Too awkward. Too plain. Too honest in its embarrassment. It reads like exactly what it says it is. A woman being pushed into something ridiculous by a friend she’ll probably end up blaming for it later.
I should ignore it.
This phone is not for random women and whatever impulsive little games they’re playing in wine bars or kitchens or shared apartments. This line belongs to a different part of my life, the part built on fear, caution, and loyalty earned the hard way.
And still I find myself reading it again. I think it’s the tone that gets me.
Nobody who texts this number ever sounds uncertain.
Nobody ever sounds soft.
Nobody sounds real.
I look at the message, at my bloodied hand, at the trembling man strapped to the chair, and I feel something I haven’t felt all night.
Curiosity.
Stepan tilts his head slightly. “That bad?”
“Not yet.”
He says nothing, but I can feel him waiting.
I wipe my thumb clean on the handkerchief, then type back: That depends. How are you with strangers? I send it before I can reconsider.
Stepan’s brows lift. “Am I allowed to ask?”
“No.”
“That usually means I’ll enjoy the answer.”
I slide the phone back into my pocket and look at the man in the chair again. “Take him upstairs. Don’t let him pass out before you get the rest.”
The men move immediately. One unlocks the chair. Another hauls the bastard up by the arms. He groans, feet dragging against the concrete, leaving a thin smear behind him.
I don’t watch them go. I’m already walking toward the sink at the back of the room, stripping off my cuff links one by one and setting them on the metal shelf beside it.
I turn on the tap and hold my hands under cold water.
Pink swirls down the drain. My knuckles sting. Good. Pain keeps things simple.
My phone vibrates again. I shut off the water and reach for it.
Not usually great. This is me being chaotic under peer pressure.
I laugh. It escapes me before I mean to let it. Short. Low. Real.
Stepan hears it from the doorway and just stares. “You’re joking.”
I ignore him, but my mouth is already curving.
Chaotic under peer pressure.
I can hear her now, or almost hear her. Young, probably. Dry little sense of humor. Mortified even while she does the thing anyway. The kind of woman who explains herself when she’s nervous because silence feels worse.
I shouldn’t be interested.
I am.
I type: Then I’m honored to be your bad decision for the evening.
Stepan actually groans. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
I glance at him. “Leave.”
He doesn’t. He leans one shoulder against the doorframe instead, folding his arms. “I leave you alone for ten minutes and you’re flirting with a stranger covered in someone else’s blood.”
I look back down at the phone. “I’m not flirting.”
“That would be a more convincing lie if I didn’t know how rarely you bother speaking to women at all.”
The phone buzzes before I answer him.
My friend is going to be unbearably smug about this.
There’s something warm in the message now. Less self-conscious. She’s relaxing. That pleases me more than it should.
I type back: She sounds unbearable.
Then I leave the basement and head upstairs.
The main floor of Veles is quieter now, the dinner crowd not yet thick enough to fill the room.
Low lights, velvet booths, dark liquor on polished tables, women in black silk, men pretending they’re more important than they are.
The kind of place where nobody asks the wrong questions if they’d like to keep coming back.
I move through it with two men behind me and eyes turning away as soon as they meet mine. The phone stays in my hand.
I step into the back office at Veles and close the door behind me. The noise of the club dulls at once, reduced to a low pulse through wood and concrete. I continue the texting conversation until Stepan comes in, shuts the door, and hands me a clean glass. I don’t take it.
“Well?” I ask.
He watches me wipe the last of the blood from my hand with a fresh towel. “Well, the idiot you just dismantled is exactly what he looks like. Greedy. Scared. Useful only when cornered.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he says, “it isn’t.”
I toss the towel onto the desk and sit. The leather groans under my weight. “Then give me one.”
Stepan doesn’t move right away. He stands with his hands clasped behind his back, expression flat in that way of his that usually means the news is disappointing.
“We’re no closer,” he says at last. “Not really.”
I lean back in the chair and look at him.
He goes on before I can tell him to.
“We know money is moving where it shouldn’t.
We know routes are being mentioned outside the circle they’re supposed to stay in.
We know someone keeps feeding scraps of information to the wrong people just enough to test what they can sell without getting caught.
” His mouth tightens. “But we still don’t know who. ”
I say nothing. That’s when men around me usually become uncomfortable. Silence forces them to listen to themselves.
Stepan, unfortunately, is used to me.
He keeps talking. “I feel like the best lead we still have is the library.”
I look up.
That, at least, is something.
A month ago one of our runners got stupid and picked up the wrong hardback from a dead-drop shelf we use for low-level paper exchanges.
Old system. Quiet. Rarely touched. The library made sense years ago because nobody notices men handling books, and nobody remembers who stood in the history aisle for twenty minutes if they leave with one under their arm.
Since then we’ve found two more signs that someone inside the organization knows the pattern.
Someone is using my drop system. Or watching it.
Either way, it narrows the leak to a smaller circle than I like.
“I’ll go tomorrow,” I say.
Stepan nods once. He expected that.
My phone vibrates against the desk.
Once. Then again.
I look down.
Unknown number.
My attention catches.
The first messages are still on the screen from earlier.
And beneath them, new: Are you ignoring me already, Mystery Number?
A slow smile pulls at my mouth before I can stop it.
Stepan sees it and grimaces. “No.”
I keep looking at the phone. No fear in that message now. No embarrassment either. She’s warmed up. Settled into it. Testing how far she can go.
That interests me more than it should.
“You’re smiling,” Stepan says, sounding personally offended by it.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
I type before he can keep going: That depends. Should I be?
The answer comes fast: Only if you’re boring.
A laugh slips out of me, low and brief.
Stepan stares as if I’ve grown another head. “That bad?”
“Leave,” I say.
“Gladly.” He heads for the door, then pauses with his hand on the knob. “For what it’s worth, if she turns out to be law enforcement, I’ll be insufferable about it.”
I don’t bother answering.
When the door shuts, I look back at the screen and type: Then you’re in danger of disappointing me already.
She answers almost at once: That sounds smug.
That’s because it is.
The dots appear, disappear, appear again.
Okay. Maybe you’re interesting.
Interesting. It’s a small word. Still, it settles low in me with a quiet kind of satisfaction.
By the time I leave Veles, I’m still texting her.