Chapter 10 Jana
Chapter ten
Jana
He wants to come with me.
He doesn't say it. Won't ask it. But he's standing in the entry hall when I come downstairs, jacket on, phone in hand, and gives me a hard stare when I appear with my coat and bag.
He's positioned himself in the space between the door and the stairs.
Not blocking. Just present, completely and without apology.
"Daniil will drive you," he says.
"I know." I pull on my coat. "You told me last night."
"And he stays with you."
"Rafail, it's a care facility in Brookline. The average age of the other visitors is sixty-five."
His jaw shifts. One degree. "Daniil stays with you."
I look at him for a moment — this man who has spent two weeks purchasing, negotiating, threatening, and carrying me down hallways, who slept with his hand in my hair last night, and whose first act this morning was to give me a hug and squeeze that almost broke my ribs.
This is a fight I won't win and probably shouldn't try.
"Fine," I say. "He can wait outside."
"Inside."
"Rafail." I stop in front of him, close enough to make the point.
"My grandmother is seventy-three years old and she raised me in a two-bedroom apartment in Dorchester on a school counselor's salary and she has never, in her entire life, been in the same room as a man like Daniil.
I am not walking into her room with your enforcer.
" I hold his gaze. "She won't understand any of this. "
His expression doesn't change. But something in it does — underneath the controlled surface, the barest shift, the way a wall shifts when pressure is applied to the wrong side of it. His jaw tightens, and his brows lower, but I don't budge. This, this thing we have, does not touch my grandmother.
"Lobby," he says finally.
"Lobby," I agree.
He steps aside. When I pass him, his hand comes up and catches my wrist — not gripping, just contact, brief and deliberate — and then releases. I don't look back. But my hand throbs all the way to the car.
Grandma Dorothy is sitting up when I get there, her reading glasses pushed up on her head, a word puzzle book open on the tray table, looking like herself in a way that loosens something in my chest I didn't know was still clenched.
The facility is warm and clean and smells like lemon and starched linens, and her room has the afternoon light coming through the window exactly the way she likes it, and when she sees me she puts down her pen and opens her arms and I fold into them the way I've folded into them since I was old enough to understand what safety felt like.
"There she is." Her voice, low and firm and certain. Her hands on my back, patting. "Let me look at you."
I pull back and let her look, and she does — the full inventory of a woman who knows my face in every version it has ever worn, who can read two weeks of living in a different world on me the way other people read print.
"You look different," she says.
"I'm fine, Grandma."
"I didn't say you weren't." She tilts her head. "I said different." Her eyes, sharp and patient behind those glasses she won't admit she needs all the time. "Are you eating?"
"Yes."
"Sleeping?"
I think of the guest room. The carrying. His arm over my waist in the dark. "Yes."
She studies me for another moment and then releases me with the small nod of a woman who has decided to accept an answer she doesn't entirely believe. "Sit down, baby. Tell me about school."
I sit. I tell her about my classes, about the financial accounting professor who moves through material like he's allergic to daylight, about the finals I'm dreading.
She listens the way she has always listened — all the way in, her whole attention on me — and asks questions that prove she heard everything.
An hour passes without me tracking it, the way hours only pass when you're somewhere you actually belong, and by the time the afternoon light shifts across the floor her hand is over mine on the tray table, and she's telling me about the physical therapist who has her walking the hallway twice a day now.
"He's bossy," she says, with the tone of a woman who respects this.
"Good." My throat tightens around the word. "Good, Grandma."
She squeezes my hand. "Whatever you did," she says quietly, not looking at me, "to make this happen — I hope it was worth it."
My ribs contract. I look at the side of her face, the familiar lines of it, the gray at her temples, and I think about The Onyx Room and the two weeks that feel like a lifetime ago. "It was," I say. "It was worth it."
She nods, satisfied, and changes the subject to the food, which has improved since they hired a new chef, and I let her take me there and I stay for another thirty minutes, and when I finally say goodbye and kiss her cheek she holds my face in both hands for a moment and says nothing, just looks at me with those sharp quiet eyes, and whatever she sees there she keeps to herself.
Daniil is in the lobby where I left him, arms crossed, watching the entrance with the relaxed attention of a man who has been trained to look unoccupied while missing nothing.
He straightens when I come through the inner door and falls into step beside me without a word, and we push out through the main entrance into the cool gray of late afternoon.
I'm reaching for my phone when the man steps out from the side of the building.
He's not large. That's the first thing — I've spent two weeks recalibrating my sense of what dangerous looks like, learning that it doesn't announce itself, and this man is medium height and wearing a jacket too light for the weather and looking at me with an expression that has nothing to do with coincidence.
"Jana." He says my name like he's used it before, like he's been carrying it around waiting to put it down somewhere. "Volodymyr sends his regards."
Daniil moves in front of me in the same instant, but the man already has something in his hand — not a gun, a phone, and he holds it up so we can both see the screen, some kind of live feed I can't make sense of in the half-second I get before Daniil's body blocks my view.
"Tell Ismailov," the man says, his voice flat and conversational, the voice of someone delivering a message rather than having a conversation, "that Oleg Asyniy says hello. And that Volodymyr's operation doesn't close just because Kutuzov decides it does."
"Back up," Daniil says. His voice has gone to a register I haven't heard from him before. Low and without inflection, the way a temperature drops before a storm.
Oleg doesn't back up. He smiles. "The girl knows where the auction records are. The inventory lists, the client names. She was there for the close of the last event. Volodymyr told me—"
"He didn't tell you anything." My voice surprises me — steady and flat, cutting across his. "Because I don't have any records. I was a purchase, not staff. Whatever Volodymyr told you about me, he lied to you to make me sound useful." I hold his gaze. "I was never anything other than livestock."
Shadows cross Oleg's expression — not quite doubt, but the beginning of a recalculation. He opens his mouth.
The black SUV comes around the corner at a speed that belongs on a different street, and it hasn't fully stopped before the rear door opens and Rafail steps out.
The change in Oleg is immediate and involuntary — his whole body reorganizes itself, the false ease evaporating, the recalculation accelerating into something that looks very close to the understanding that he has made a serious error.
Rafail covers the distance between the curb and where we're standing in about four steps, his eyes going to me first — a single sweep, top to bottom, checking — and then moving to Oleg.
"Inside," he says to me, without looking away from Oleg.
"Rafail—"
"Jana." The word carries nothing I can name and everything I understand. "Inside. Now."
I go inside. Through the glass door I watch what happens, and I watch it the same way I watched in that restaurant bathroom two weeks ago — not flinching, not looking away — because I have already crossed the line where I get to pretend I don't know who this man is and what his hands can do, and looking away doesn't change what happens, it just means I'm lying to myself about it.
It's not long. It's not clean. When it's over, Daniil says something to Rafail, and they exchange four words I can't hear through the glass, and then Rafail turns toward the entrance, and I step back from the door.
He comes through and stops in front of me, and he is breathing harder than usual, his knuckles split and dark, his jacket intact because he never wears anything he can't afford to ruin, and his face — his face is doing something I have not seen it do before.
The control is there, barely, stretched over something that is not anger exactly but runs deeper and hotter than anger, and his eyes when they find mine are the eyes of a man who has just spent forty-five seconds understanding how close something came to going differently.
"The car," he says.
"Rafail—"
"The car, Jana." His voice cracks on the word — barely, just at the edge, a mere fracture, and that crack is more frightening than the controlled fury would have been, because I have never heard it before and I understand instinctively that he hasn't either.
He doesn't speak in the car. He sits beside me with his hands open on his knees, and I watch his chest expand and contract and expand again, the deliberate rhythm of a man reminding himself how to be contained, and I don't fill the silence because there is nothing to fill it with yet.
We're through the estate gates when he finally speaks.
"This." The word comes out stripped of everything. "This is exactly why you're not leaving. You understand that?"
"I'm fine—"