Chapter 14 Maksim #2
He merely shrugs.
I exhale slowly. I leave him with a clipped nod and a command to keep digging. Then I push off the desk and head upstairs. I need to know what she knows, what she’s hiding. Clearly, there’s more to her than what we’ve been able to find from our data pulls.
Some explanation as to why she’s been locked on as a target.
But I’m not going to get those answers by locking her in a silk-trimmed suite and sending in bruisers to question her. She’s not a woman who folds under pressure, that’s clear. If anything, she thrives on it.
If I want the truth, I need something else.
Neutral ground.
A battlefield disguised as a lunch invitation.
I find her on the balcony of her room, arms wrapped tightly around herself as a soft breeze cuts through the yard.
She’s wearing one of the sweaters we left for her, or rather, my staff picked out for her after I’d given them her measurements.
Perhaps that had been a step too deep into these strange feelings strangling me, but I push that aside for now.
“We’re going out,” I say.
She jumps and whips around to face me, leaning back just enough that her hip slams into the railing. She nearly pitches back and has to catch herself on it, fingers curling around the banister like a life line. “What?”
“To lunch. I’m taking you out.”
Her eyes narrow instantly. “Why?”
“To feed you. Is that a problem?”
She scoffs and looks away from me to train her eyes down at the frost covered lawn beneath the balcony. It takes her a long moment to think, but she finally mutters a quiet, “Fine. Whatever. I’m starving anyway.”
Well. That’s progress, at least.
The restaurant is one I frequent when I want to disappear in plain sight.
Upscale, quiet, designed with a kind of muted opulence that doesn’t demand attention.
Gray walls with frosted windows to keep lingering eyes out.
Soft lighting and tables spaced far enough apart to muffle important conversations.
I clock the exits on instinct. Two staff doors, one fire stair, a back corridor to an alley I have soldiers stationed at on the off-chance some idiot decides a drive-by here would be a good idea. Our people are present without being seen. The owner knows to keep a perimeter without hovering.
To anyone else, we simply look like two colleagues on a late lunch.
Ivy sits across from me and doesn’t speak until the waiter comes. Her fingers twitch around the linen napkin in her hands. Her expression is wary but she watches me with a fixed expression that tells me she’s refusing to show me she’s afraid.
Honestly, I truly admire her.
She’s a forced to be reckoned with.
I let her eat in peace when the food hits our table. Silence works better than any threat. Pressure makes people defensive. Quiet makes them reveal themselves.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her. The rigid line of her shoulders softens by degrees. Each sip of her soup brings a hint of color back to her cheeks. The atmosphere here wraps around her, easing her until I can see the fight in her muscles relax just enough for hunger to win.
She doesn’t speak. Neither do I, but that’s fine. It gives me the chance to study her without being obvious about it. She holds her spoon with the careful poise of someone raised to mind her manners, but she eats like she hasn’t had a proper meal in days.
From nerves or a punishment served to her by Sergei?
By the time she’s halfway through her risotto, I lean back in my chair and speak. “Why’d you take the job?”
Her fork stills. She blinks, eyes darting up from her plate to mine, caught off guard. “What?”
“With Sergei,” I clarify. “Was it the prestige? The travel?”
She sets her fork down with a soft clink and levels me with a look. “Is this another interrogation?”
I shake my head once. “This is merely lunch, Ivy. Nothing more.”
For a second, she just studies me. Her eyes narrow, searching mine, trying to pierce through the mask I show the world. Most people break under that kind of tension—they avert their gaze, shift in their seat, scramble to fill the silence because the attention is too much.
I let her look. I want her to. Let her see what she thinks she believes is there, let her draw her own conclusions to the kind of person she’s already decided I am. Let her imagine the shape of the monster sitting across the table and decide if she can outrun it even though we both know she can’t.
Finally, she exhales, the fight leaking out of her in increments. Her shoulders slump just a fraction. “You really want to know?”
“I wouldn’t be wasting my breath asking if I didn’t.” My tone is dry.
Her gaze drops back to the plate. She picks up her fork, stabs at a piece of mushroom with far more force than necessary. When she speaks again, it’s flat and unembellished. “Money. That’s it.”
The simplicity of it throws me more than I expect.
I expected… something else. Something shallow, a speech about adventure and wanderlust. About how she wanted to travel, to make a difference, to shape the lives of children in some noble white-savior way.
A dramatic story about cultural immersion and personal growth, the kind of fluff people fill up their resumes with when they’ve done nothing else worth mentioning.
That would have made sense. That would have been predictable. Enough to make sense of why a young woman would uproot her life to come here halfway through a college degree.
But not this.
Not something that tastes like this amount of desperation.
“You… came to Moscow for the paycheck?” I ask, my brows knitting together.
She doesn’t answer immediately.
When she finally moves her mouth to speak, a sigh leaves her first. “Yeah. I flunked out of college, okay? Three years in and I never finished. Student loans don’t just disappear once you stop showing up for class.
I needed a way to make money that my part-time wasn’t giving me.
I’m probably going to be kicked out of my apartment because it’s technically student housing, so that’s another expense I need to pay for.
This job… it pays well enough to get me on my feet for a while. ”
I absorb that, shifting my hands to rest on either side of my plate. “Why not get back into contact with your family? I’m sure they can help you out for the time being.”
That’s when the air changes. Her fingers curl around her fork. “How the fuck do you know about my family?”
My brow raises. “I told you, Maliya, I pulled your records the moment you left my estate. What did you think a background check consisted of?”
She sighs, suddenly slumping back in her chair. She’s quiet for a while, long enough that my lips part to pepper her with another question, but she cuts me off before I can.
“I don’t have any family. They’re dead to me.”
I recognize that tone. I’ve used it myself—more than once—on the battlefield, at funerals, behind locked doors after long nights where betrayal hit harder than bullets.
It’s the voice of someone who’s long since given up hoping things will ever be different.
The voice of someone who’s learned the hard way that some bonds are better cut clean.
I don’t ask her to elaborate. I don’t need to.
She pushes her plate away. “What are we doing here, Maksim? Seriously. I know you didn’t just take me out to feed me. What do you want?”
I watch her for a long moment, weighing my options.
I could lie, could offer some diluted explanation, some non-threatening reason as to why I took her from the gilded cage I locked her away in.
But she isn’t going anywhere, and we’re far past the point of polite deflection.
Besides, something inside me—something frustratingly human—doesn’t want to lie to her.
How ridiculous.
Still, I find myself telling her the truth, anyway.
“There are people after you, Ivy.”
Her lips part slightly, but no sound comes out.
I continue. “When I pulled your background check, I found a note on your file. A tag indicating someone else had already accessed your records. Weeks ago. Before you ever left the States. I don’t know who or why.
But my sovet is looking into it. We’re tracing the request, the IP trail.
Someone wanted access to your information badly enough to pull a full digital scrape. ”
She stares at me. I can see it sinking in—the dread. The fear that she’s actually in much more danger than she thought she was. “Who would do something like that? I’m nobody.”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. There’s a possibility that the reason your information was pulled has some connection to the drive-by at the cafe.”
I can see her trying to process it. See her instinct to deny it trying to kick in because why in the world would someone like her, as she said, a nobody, be tangled up in matters like this? Serious enough for it to be life and death.
“Are you…” She swallows. “Do you think someone is using me to get to Sergei? Or Yulia?”
Or me, my mind unhelpfully supplies.
“Perhaps.” I say aloud.
She closes her eyes for a beat, then opens them again slowly, her expression unreadable. She studies me for a long time, most likely searching for some sliver of humanity beneath the mask.
She lifts her glass of sparkling water, sipping it once, and sets it down with a soft clink against the table. “Well… That’s not terrifying at all.”
Despite everything, I smile.
It’s the first genuine emotion I’ve allowed myself in hours.
For all the chaos spinning around us, for all the questions we still don’t have answers to, despite it all, this girl still has her fire blazing inside her chest, still has her wit, and meets the darkness in front of her with her chin up and eyes open wide.
And maybe, just maybe, that makes her a survivor.
Or something far more dangerous.