6. Sergey
SERGEY
Safehouses always smell like insulation rot and old sweat, and this one’s no exception.
It’s not the worst place we’ve been holed up in, but it’s still a shithole.
Low ceiling, windows crosshatched with plywood, a warped table listing sideways against the far wall. One buzzing light overhead. I pace the floor because sitting down feels like quitting. My jaw is locked so tight I taste blood from the last time I bit through my cheek.
Our last surviving driver, the kid who made it through the ambush, is passed out on a cot with his shoes on and his gun under his flat pillow.
Mikhail stands at the boarded-up window, back to the room, pistol resting against his thigh. I don’t think anyone’s going to follow us—but you can never be too sure.
We still haven’t called it in.
I can’t stop thinking about the men who hit us. No colors, no insignia, no tattoos I could identify.
There were no faces I recognized, and that eats at me more than the bodies we left behind.
I need to know who sent them.
I need to know who wants us dead bad enough to throw a crew at us in daylight, on a public stretch of road. You don’t do that unless you’re desperate. Or very, very sure.
I pick through the pile of shit we salvaged from the wreck. An ammo box, empty except for a handful of bent brass and a strip of electrical tape. A burner phone, screen cracked in two places. I want a clue, a sign, a logo, anything.
There’s nothing. Nothing except the knowledge that we’re not safe.
I set the ammo box down. Then I pick it up and set it down harder, the edge of it makes a hollow bang on the warped tabletop. I want it to crack. I want it to break something.
Mikhail doesn’t look at me. He’s got that old wolf posture, still but not resting. He could stand there for an hour, or a day, or until the wood under his feet disintegrates.
I watch him for a while, just to see if he’ll move. He doesn’t. Eventually I snap.
“You going to say anything? Or are we just going to sit here until they decide to track us down and finish the job?”
He doesn’t bother to answer at first. Instead, he holsters his sidearm slow and deliberate before he turns to face me. He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed.
His voice is low. “The other men are dead. We’re alive. She’s alive. We call it in.”
I round on him, both fists balled so tight my fingers ache. “That’s it? That’s all you have to say? They killed seven of our guys like they were nothing, and we just ‘call it in’?”
His gaze flicks over me, not cold, not angry—just dead calm. It’s always been this way with him. Every time I try to shake him, he comes back twice as steady.
“We lost,” he says. “We don’t know to who. We can’t fix it from here. So we call it in. We secure the asset. We follow orders. That’s what we do, Sergey.”
The asset.
I push the ammo box off the table, watch it skid and fall, a couple shell casings scattering like teeth on the floor. “You think I give a fuck about those orders? Someone tried to hit us. I want names.”
He shrugs. “Names come later.”
This is how it always goes. I want to break things, he wants to finish the mission. It used to make sense, back when he was the only one keeping us from catching bullets in back alleys. Now, though, I don’t know. Maybe I’m too far gone, or maybe he is. Maybe both.
“You didn’t even look at the bodies,” I say. “You didn’t check their ink. You didn’t check their wallets. You didn’t?—”
He cuts me off. “I know who sent them.”
This stops me cold. “Who?”
He waits so long that I almost think he’s going to pretend he never said it. Then: “Orlov.”
I laugh, a raw sound. “Orlov? Then why the fuck are we delivering his future wife to him with half a crew and no backup?”
“Because if we don’t,” Mikhail says, “he’ll send someone else. He wants to see what happens when we fail. And because the job is the job.”
I step in closer, close enough that he can’t look away. I want to hit him, and I want him to hit me back, because that would mean at least one of us still feels something. “You think Orlov would waste his own men just to rattle us?”
His voice drops. “I think Orlov doesn’t care who gets killed.”
“That doesn’t make any sense! What would that do— What would it prove?”
Mikhail doesn’t move. “Think about it. If those men had been able to take her— If we’d been killed? What do you think that means for Tolya?”
Shit.
He’s seen the shift in my expression. “Exactly. It’s not about us. Orlov wants to destabilize Novarra. Her father is some politician, right?”
I shrug. I guess. I hadn’t asked.
“If he starts a war and uses her as the catalyst?—”
Shit.
I want to argue, but he’s right. Of course he’s right. I take a step back and catch my knuckles against the edge of the table, pain flares through the joints. I shake it off.
I look down at the burner phone. The screen’s lit up with an unread text, blinking every ten seconds like a time bomb. I don’t touch it. I don’t want to know yet.
“What do you think she’s doing?” I say.
He doesn’t answer right away. “You want to check on her?” he says.
I don’t answer. I’m already moving toward the back room.
The safehouse bedroom isn’t really a room, more of a box nailed onto the back of the main structure. The plaster’s stained the color of old teeth, and every time the wind picks up, the wall flexes enough to make the roof squeak.
She’s sitting on the bed, knees up, ankles crossed, her dress clinging in a way that shouldn’t make my stomach feel tight, but it does. The cut on her face is a line of dried blood along her jaw, sharp and perfect like someone painted it on.
She doesn’t notice me at first, or pretends not to.
It’s musty as fuck in here, but the sheets are clean. I see the care Mikhail took with her, or maybe she did it herself, stripping the old sheets and laying down fresh ones from the safehouse supply.
I clear my throat. She doesn’t startle.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
She blinks, once, like I woke her up. “Not much,” she says.
I step in, keep my hands in my pockets, try to look less threatening than I am. “Just wanted to check you weren’t bleeding anywhere else.”
She lifts her chin and lets me look. The cut is clean, shallow, but red-rimmed and angry. Her skin’s paler than before. “A cut on my elbow and my knee, but they’ve stopped bleeding now.”
“You got lucky,” I say. “It won’t scar.”
She doesn’t smile. “Is that why you’re here? Checking to see if the package is damaged?”
I shrug, because yeah, kind of. “We’re not safe yet.”
She hugs her knees tighter and looks at me with those pale, washed-out eyes. “Why did you stop him?” she asks.
The question takes me by surprise, even though I don’t know what she means at first.
She tries again when I don’t answer. “The man who tried to take me. You could have let him.”
I think about that. “You’d be dead.”
She shakes her head, slow. “No. You could have let him scare me. Humiliate me. You didn’t.”
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from saying anything soft. “I don’t like bullies.”
This time her mouth does twitch. She gestures with a flick of her chin for me to sit. I don’t want to, but I do anyway. There’s a rickety chair by the window, so I drag it over and set it backwards, arms resting across the top. I’m close enough to touch her foot if I lean forward.
We sit like that for a while, the wind whining through the wall. My hands keep flexing against the wood of the chair, trying to work the adrenaline out.
After a minute, she says, “What happened to Orlov’s last wife?”
It’s the kind of question you don’t ask unless you already know the answer. I flinch anyway.
She notices. “You know,” she says. “I read everything about him. Even the things I wasn’t supposed to. If my father knew he’d be pissed. I don’t think he knows half of what he thinks he does about his new investor.”
There’s no sense lying. “She went off a balcony,” I said quickly. “Eleventh floor. They say she slipped. I don’t believe it.”
Veronica nods like that makes sense. “So if I don’t behave, that’s what happens to me.”
“Not while you’re with us,” I say. But it’s a promise I know I can’t keep.
She looks down at her hands, fingers braided so tight I think she might cut off circulation. “You’re supposed to deliver me,” she says. “Even if it kills you. That’s your job, right?”
I nod, because what else can I do?
She unhooks her hands and then, without looking at me, says: “I want you to ruin me.”
The air in the room goes dead. I think I heard her wrong. I stand up and the room seems to tilt a little as I step away from the chair. “What?”
Her voice is dry as paper. “If you take me, he won’t want me. He won’t want me if he knows that I’ve been fucked by the help— He’ll send me back to Novarra.” She shrugs. “Or he’ll kill me. Or whatever. But at least it’ll be my choice.”
She finally looks at me, and the calculation in her eyes is so clear I can’t pretend otherwise. She’s not seducing me. This is a transaction, and we both know it.
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
She gets up off the bed. Her bare feet don’t make a sound on the splintered floor.
She’s not tall, but she crosses the distance between us like she is, and there’s something in the way she moves that I’ve only seen in men who’ve already made their peace with dying.
Her palm comes to rest flat against my chest, directly over my heart.
Her hand is shaking, but her voice isn’t.
“Do it now,” she says. “Fuck me. Call your brother— he can fuck me too. The driver— Whatever it takes.”
I should stop her. I should get up and leave, or call Mikhail, or just say no. But I can’t. I’m not built for restraint. Never was.
Does she know how much I want her?
My hands come up, hover over her hips.
I don’t touch her yet. I want to, though.
God, I want to.
Her hair still smells faintly of the cheap shampoo from the last rest stop we made, and there’s a cut-glass clarity to the air around us, a sense that if I breathe too hard the moment will shatter.
She leans forward and rises up on her toes to press her mouth against my jaw. Her lips are soft and cold. I shudder and my hands finally settle on her waist.
She whispers, “I want you to fuck me, Sergey.”
It breaks me.
I push my fingers into her hair and pull her face up to mine. Her mouth opens. She wants this, or at least wants to want it, and that’s enough. I kiss her like I’ve been dying to do it all day. Maybe I have.
She moans, a tiny sound, and presses closer, rubbing against me, and her hands slide up my chest and wind around my neck.
I can feel her heartbeat through her ribs, a rabbit’s pace, and I don’t know if it’s fear or want or both.
Her mouth is sweeter than I expected, and that’s the problem.
If she’d tasted like nothing, if she’d just been warm and willing, I could have taken her and never thought about it again. But she tastes like something I could get addicted to, and I already know I don’t have the discipline to kick that habit.
My thumb traces the line of her jaw, careful to avoid the cut. She flinches anyway, and I ease back.
“Veronica.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“I know exactly what I’m asking.” Her eyes are bright and wet, but not crying. “I’d rather it be you than him. I’d rather it be anyone than him.”
She’s not wrong. I know what Orlov does to women who don’t perform to his standards. The woman before the last wife—the one nobody talks about—she ended up in a hospital with injuries that don’t have names in polite language.
But that doesn’t make this right.
I’m about to tell her that I can’t, that this isn’t how it works, that we’re not the kind of men who take advantage of women who are desperate and afraid—but then Mikhail’s voice cuts through the wall from the front room, flat and carrying: “Sergey.”
Just the name. Nothing else.
My hands go still. I hold the position for one more breath—close enough that I can feel it against her mouth—before I step back, release her, and straighten. I don’t look at her face when I do it. I turn and walk back toward the front room.
The curtain swings shut behind me as I stride across the main room. Mikhail stands exactly where I left him, but now he’s holding the burner phone, his thumb hovering over the screen.
“Orlov’s people called,” he says. “They want an update.”
I run my hand over my shaved head, feeling the raised lines of my tattoos beneath my palm. “What did you tell them?”
“Nothing. Yet.” He sets the phone down on the table. “We need to talk.”
I don’t want to talk. I want to go back into that room and finish what I started. I want to forget about Orlov and his money and his power and just be a man for five fucking minutes. Instead, I lean against the wall and cross my arms.
“Are you gonna call it in?”
His lips press into a thin line.
He’s changed his mind. I wonder if he heard what Veronica had asked me… I wonder if I should tell him.
“You should get some sleep,” Mikhail says. “Go wake up Lukas. I’ll keep watch.”
“Fine,” I say. I need to think anyway. I need to not think about her.
I need to not think about how good she would feel on my cock?—
Fuck.