Chapter 3 #2
Detective Alvarez slides a card across the table and tells me to call directly before any move so the police can coordinate.
"Don't let anyone tell you we have no role because the people involved are criminals.
We're investigating the shooting. We can preserve evidence, pursue the attackers, and prosecute what we can prove. "
"But you can't tell the port family I'm not a decoy."
"I can't make them care."
Her answer closes off the hope that police can simply clear my name under the port family's private rules. The library feels smaller.
The detectives leave near three. Konstantin is waiting across the hall, jacket gone and sleeves rolled to his forearms, looking more dangerous for the absence of tailoring meant to civilize him.
When he pushes away from the wall, his right shoulder rises less freely than the left.
He has obeyed the distance I asked for so completely that seeing him now feels intrusive.
The memory of his mouth has no sense of proportion. It returns while I'm looking at the damage he took shielding me, pouring heat through a body that has spent the last two hours shaking from fear.
The heat feels indecent.
"Did they offer you somewhere else?" he asks.
"They offered a protected hotel tonight, with a larger assessment later. Neither option includes a force field around everyone I know."
His attention shifts toward the library door. "I can cover more of your life than the city can devote to one witness, but I won't tell you my people can't fail. They already did."
His admission that his people failed is too blunt to comfort me. I wonder whether he can still see the restaurant arranged inside the library, every body where it fell.
"That still sounds like an army."
"Tell me the part the police can't fix," I say. "All of it this time."
He takes me into a smaller sitting room across the hall, where the fire has burned low and a pot of coffee waits beside two untouched cups.
Across from me, Konstantin takes a chair and keeps both hands visible, as though restraint can be demonstrated in inches.
"The patriarch believes you may have been hired to help me insult his daughter and escape the alliance.
Until the deadline, you're the woman I publicly claimed.
After it, if there's no marriage, he will classify you as a participant in the deception.
That classification isn't law, so the police can't appeal or revoke it.
It's permission inside his organization to treat you as an enemy. "
"And marrying you changes enemy into what?"
"My family. The port family may still hate me, and the people who attacked the restaurant may still consider you useful, but touching you becomes an act against my entire organization.
The distinction carries consequences they understand.
" He shows no pride when he promises that his family will retaliate against anyone who harms me.
The retaliation sounds routine, and that frightens me more.
"Suppose I marry you, survive this war, and decide I never want to see you again."
Konstantin's face remains still, though one thumb presses once against the knuckle of his other hand.
"Then you leave with a home in your name, money already transferred beyond my reach, and a protection detail the contract requires me to maintain.
Divorce would end the marriage. It wouldn't erase your face or your association with my family, so the protection would continue. "
"You have designed an excellent divorce for a man who announced his engagement seven minutes after learning my name."
"I've had a complicated evening."
The laugh that almost escapes me feels like a personal failure, so I swallow it as his phone vibrates on the table.
Konstantin reads the message, then turns the screen toward me without attempting to summarize it first. The port family has repeated the seventy-two-hour deadline in formal language. Beneath it is my full legal name and a still image of me standing beside him in the restaurant.
The angle comes from the port side of the table, captured before the gunfire by one of the men who accompanied the patriarch. My green dress is bright even through the grain of the photograph. Konstantin's hand rests at my waist. I look willing.
Whoever receives this message won't see the stranger who agreed to ten minutes. They'll see a woman at the side of a Bratva boss while he rejects an alliance, seconds before gunfire.
The patriarch's people found my legal identity before the police finished my statement.
My clinic advertises its staff on a public website, and my home address can't be much harder to buy.
Returning to either place would bring the threat into rooms full of neighbors or patients lying helpless beneath paper bibs.
If I run to Grandma, I draw a straight line to the person I've spent years trying to protect from every burden but loneliness.
Konstantin watches me read the message twice. He doesn't touch me, hurry me, or use my fear to pressure me into agreeing to the marriage.
That restraint leaves me more aware of him than pressure would have.
"What if we announce an engagement and put me somewhere guarded until the shooting is solved?"
"An engagement is the claim the patriarch already rejected. Before the seventy-two hours run out, the marriage has to be legal."