Zoya
Mafia.
The word sits in my head like something heavy and poisonous.
Not mafia like movies. Not mafia like dramatic book covers and dangerous men who look beautiful under bad lighting. Real mafia. Guns in my library. People screaming. Ruslan’s hand around mine as he dragged me through the staff corridor while bullets hit the walls behind us.
I stare at him from the other side of the car.
He sits beside me like we weren’t getting shot at just half an hour ago.
His coat is open. One sleeve is torn near the cuff. There’s a thin line of blood across his knuckles that I don’t think belongs to him, and he keeps looking out the window, then at his phone, then at the side mirror, as if the city itself is full of things I’m too stupid to notice.
Maybe it is. Maybe I’ve been stupid for months.
My quiet library crush is not quiet. He’s not harmless. He’s not some mysterious rich man with strange reading habits and a nice voice.
He runs the Karelin organization.
I don’t know exactly what that means, but I know enough. I know it means guns. Men. Power. Blood. The kind of danger that doesn’t stop because you say you’re sorry or because you had nothing to do with it.
My stomach turns. “This is bad,” I whisper.
Ruslan looks at me.
I didn’t mean to say it out loud.
His face gives me nothing. “Yes.”
I almost laugh, but it comes out wrong, thin and shaky. “That’s it? Just yes?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that it’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“It is.”
My eyes burn. I look away because I refuse to cry in front of him. I refuse. Crying feels too intimate, and right now I don’t want to give him anything else.
We leave the city behind. The buildings thin. The traffic opens. Storefronts become gas stations, then warehouses, then long stretches of road bordered by dark trees and water I can’t fully see yet. I press my hands together in my lap to hide how badly they’re shaking.
My phone is in my cardigan pocket.
I’d forgotten.
I literally don’t have anything else on me.
Not my bag, not my keys, not the lunch container I washed this morning and left in the break room fridge like an idiot.
But my phone is here because Karina kept texting me during my shift about whether “Thursday Hot Man” had appeared, and I slipped it into my pocket instead of leaving it at the desk.
Thank God.
Or maybe not. Maybe texting someone is stupid. Maybe he’ll take it. Maybe there are rules in this car I don’t know about.
I glance at Ruslan.
He’s watching me now. Not openly. Not like a man trying to scare me. But I feel it. The weight of his attention.
He doesn’t trust me.
Of course he doesn’t. To him, I’m not just a librarian who got caught in the wrong place. I’m a witness. A liability. Maybe even a suspect. He asked me about security footage seconds before men started shooting at him. For all I know, he thinks I had something to do with it.
My throat tightens. “I didn’t know,” I say.
His eyes move to mine. “Know what?”
“Anything. About you. About those men. About whatever was happening with that book.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” My voice shakes, and I hate it. “You don’t know me. You don’t trust me. I can tell.”
He looks at me for a long moment, then says, “Trust is expensive.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say.”
“It’s true.”
I turn back to the window.
The road curves, and suddenly the sea appears beyond the trees, dark and restless under a gray sky. The sight should calm me. I love the sea. I love the sound of it, the smell of salt, the way it makes everything human feel smaller for a while.
Today it makes me feel farther from home.
The car turns through a high black gate.
My pulse jumps.
There’s a house beyond the gate, though house feels like the wrong word.
It’s low and wide, built in dark stone and glass, sitting back from the road with the sea behind it.
Not a mansion in the bright, ridiculous way rich people show off.
Something quieter. More guarded. The kind of place you don’t find unless someone wants you to.
The gate closes behind us. The sound makes my skin prickle.
I look at Ruslan. “Am I kidnapped?”
He doesn’t answer immediately, which is not comforting.
“No,” he says at last.
“That took too long.”
His mouth tightens slightly. “You are not kidnapped.”
“Then can I leave?”
“Not safely.”
I stare at him. “You hear how insane this sounds, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re still saying it.”
“Yes.”
I let out a breath that almost breaks. “I want to go home.”
“I know.”
“Then take me home.”
“I can’t.”
“You mean you won’t.”
This time he doesn’t answer.
There it is again. That wall. That silence. He decides what is necessary and then expects the world to adjust around it.
I close my eyes. For a second I’m back in the library, holding books to my chest, blushing because he noticed that I knew his usual day.
I want to shake that version of me. I want to grab her by the shoulders and tell her to walk away.
Let him find his own footage. Let him be handsome and mysterious from a distance.
Let some other woman be stupid about him.
But that isn’t fair, is it? I didn’t know.
I was shelving books. That was all.
What have I gotten myself into?
The car stops in front of the house. Ruslan gets out first. The driver opens my door before I can touch the handle, and I flinch so visibly that his expression changes. Not pity exactly. Something close.
I hate that too.
Ruslan says something to him in Russian. Low. Quick. The driver steps back.
I climb out on my own.
The air is cold by the water. Wind pulls at my hair and slips under my torn cardigan. I wrap my arms around myself, partly from the chill and partly because I don’t know what else to do with my hands.
Ruslan looks at the cardigan. “You’re cold.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I was shot at.”
A pause.
Then he says, “Fair.”
I look at him then, really look, and anger rises through the fear. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Act normal for half a second and then go back to being terrifying.”
Something shifts in his face, too small to read. “I’m not trying to terrify you.”
“Congratulations. Natural talent.”
For a moment, I think I see the edge of a smile. It vanishes before it becomes one.
He gestures toward the house. “Inside.”
I don’t move. “No.”
His eyes return to mine.
My heart is pounding, but I lift my chin anyway. It’s either that or collapse, and I have already done enough shaking for one afternoon. “I’m not walking into a strange house by the sea with a mafia boss because he says so.”
“Then stand outside and freeze.”
I blink.
He takes off his coat and holds it out. I stare at it like it might bite me.
He sighs, not loudly, but enough to annoy me. “Zoya.”
“Don’t say my name like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you own the next thing I do.”
His gaze holds mine. “Put on the coat.”
“No.”
The wind cuts hard across the driveway. I shiver despite myself.
Ruslan notices. Of course he does. He notices everything and says very little, which somehow makes it worse.
He doesn’t step closer. He just holds the coat out between us. “You can hate me inside,” he says. “You’ll be warmer.”
I hate that he’s right.
I take the coat from him without thanking him and pull it around my shoulders. It’s heavy, warm, and smells like him—cedar, smoke, cold air, expensive fabric. The familiarity of that scent is so sudden and intimate that my throat tightens again.
I hate my body for recognizing him as comfort when my brain knows better.
Inside, the house is quiet and dim, all stone floors, wide windows, dark furniture. Too neat. Too controlled. There are men near the entrance, but they don’t stare at me. They look at Ruslan, receive some silent instruction, and disappear like shadows.
Ruslan leads me into a room facing the sea. A living room, maybe, though it feels unused. He keeps enough distance between us that I can’t accuse him of crowding me, but not enough that I can pretend I’m alone.
“You’ll stay here until I know what happened,” he says.
My hands curl into the sleeves of his coat. “You mean until you decide I’m safe.”
“Yes.”
“And if you decide I’m not?”
His eyes settle on me. He doesn’t answer.
My stomach drops. I laugh once, hollow and disbelieving. “Wow.”
“You are not in danger from me.”
“You realize how little that means right now?”
“I do.”
“Then stop saying things like I should believe you.”
He looks away first, toward the windows and the dark line of water beyond them. For some reason, that makes my anger falter.
Then his phone rings.
He answers it without moving far from me, speaking in Russian. I catch nothing except Stepan’s name and my own, which makes my skin crawl. I don’t like hearing my name in a conversation I can’t understand.
I reach into the coat pocket for my phone, then remember it’s in my cardigan. My fingers fumble under the heavy fabric until I find it.
One bar of signal.
Enough.
Karina has already texted twelve times.
Karina: WHERE ARE YOU
Karina: You were supposed to call me after shift
Karina: Zoya don’t make me come to the library and embarrass both of us
Karina: Wait why is there news near Alderwood???
Karina: ZOYA
My hand flies to my mouth. She knows something happened. The library attack must be everywhere already.
Thankfully, she wasn’t working today. She switched shifts with Elise because she had a dentist appointment she spent all morning complaining about. If she had been there—
No. I can’t think about that.
I text with shaking thumbs.
Me: I’m okay.
The reply comes instantly.
Karina: WHAT THE FUCK
Karina: WHERE ARE YOU
Karina: I SAW POLICE OUTSIDE THE LIbrARY
Karina: ANSWER ME RIGHT NOW
I glance at Ruslan.
He’s still on the phone, standing near the window with his back half-turned. But I know he’s aware of me. I know if I ran, he’d stop me before I reached the hall.
Me: I’m safe. I think.
Karina: YOU THINK?
Me: Something happened at the library.
Karina: I KNOW SOMETHING HAPPENED AT THE LIbrARY ARE YOU HURT