Chapter 9
KATIE
His certainty frightens me, yet desire coils low in my abdomen through the fear, indecently alive as Sergei’s blood dries across Artur’s shirt.
Sergei is dead because he refused to take his hands off me, yet Artur sits across from me with another man’s blood cooling on his shirt, watching as if my next words matter more than the war he started.
The armored car turns onto a wider road, its black interior briefly transformed whenever streetlights sweep across us.
Each passing bar of gold reveals the red stain under Artur’s open jacket, the hard line of his jaw, and one large hand resting motionless against his thigh before darkness takes him again.
Another man’s blood should make him monstrous.
Instead, the shifting light turns him into something carved for violence and seated close enough for my knee to touch.
“You executed him in front of a room full of people,” I say.
“He restrained you after you told him to stop.”
“You could have broken his wrist. You could have put him on the floor without killing him.”
Artur leans forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “I could have allowed him to live after he used your refusal to challenge me publicly. Every man in that room would learn that touching you carries a survivable penalty.”
“That sounds like your pride, not my safety.”
“Both were involved.” His voice stays quiet. “I won’t apologize for killing the man who held you. I’ll apologize for giving you orders until hurting me became more important than making your point safely.”
He looks toward the dark window before continuing. “You told me you weren’t luggage. I heard the security risk and ignored the boundary underneath it. I could have explained what I feared about that room. Instead, I treated obedience as the only acceptable answer.”
The gaps between Artur’s sentences expose the effort behind the apology. It doesn’t make him correct about Sergei, but it gives me room to examine what I did before Sergei touched me.
The admission takes some of the force from my anger. It does nothing for the image of Sergei folding beside the ring.
I press my fingers around the wrist he grabbed. His hand is gone, but I can still feel the pressure. “I flirted with him because I wanted you to see it. You looked at me as if I belonged beside Boris, so I found the one man guaranteed to make you angry.”
Artur’s gray eyes stay on my face as I continue. “Then you turned away. I realized I wasn’t making you angry. I was convincing you I wanted somebody else.”
“Did you?”
“No.” The answer comes easily. “I’m sorry I used that possibility to hurt you.”
The vehicle’s tires cross rough pavement, sending a vibration through the floor as I press my shoes into the carpet and force myself to finish.
“I’m not sorry I approached Sergei, though” I say. “I’m not responsible for him grabbing me after I left. Flirting wasn’t permission to hold me or touch my face.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Artur sits back. “Katie, you could have invited him into your bed and changed your mind with his cock inside you. He would still be required to stop. Your apology belongs to what you intended to do to me. Sergei’s death belongs to Sergei.”
The distinction releases pressure I didn’t know I was carrying. My breath enters more deeply, though the air still tastes faintly of gunpowder from Artur’s clothes.
He looks at my hand around my wrist. “Are you afraid of me?”
The partition is open enough for Boris to hear, but he gives no sign from the front seat.
I could offer Artur the answer that would calm him; it would also be a lie.
“Yes,” I say. “You killed a man when his hand was still warm on my face. Part of me is terrified by how little you hesitated.”
Artur’s expression becomes still as I lean forward until my knees touch his. “Another part of me hasn’t stopped thinking about what you promised when you fastened my dress.”
His gaze drops to my mouth. “Fear and desire can exist in the same body,” I say. “Apparently mine is committed to proving it.”
Artur’s hands stay open beside his knees. “Which one are you acting on now?”
I take his right hand and place it on my bare thigh through the slit, and his palm closes around me at once.
“Guess.”
He pulls me from my seat, leaving me to catch myself against his chest as Sergei’s blood smears under my palm. Artur’s other hand moves around my waist when I settle across his lap, where the hard shape under his trousers presses between my legs.
My pulse accelerates—not because anger or the sight of Sergei falling has disappeared, but because I want Artur’s hands on me to replace the memory of Sergei’s hand on my face.
Artur’s thumb presses into the inside of my thigh. The gown shifts under his wrist, exposing skin above the slit as his erection grows harder under me. His mouth is near enough for me to taste the clean mint of his breath through the smoke clinging to his collar.
I want the kiss to be angry, but I also want him to understand that choosing his lap after witnessing the killing isn’t forgiveness or surrender. It’s mine to choose for reasons that can contradict each other.
I grip Artur’s open collar and draw his mouth toward mine.
Boris’s phone rings before the kiss can begin, leaving Artur motionless with his lips touching mine. Boris answers too quietly for me to understand the first words, but his shoulders stiffen.
“Which property?” he asks. “How many people are inside?”
Artur moves me gently onto the seat beside him, and every trace of heat in the car changes direction.
Boris turns halfway around and reports that the construction office on Pryor Street is burning. The night crew is trapped above the first floor as shooters cover the east exit; two outer guards have stopped responding.
Artur presses the communication panel, ordering the driver to take me to the safe house as the second vehicle follows him to Pryor.
“No.” I catch his sleeve before he reaches the opposite door handle. “You’re not dropping me somewhere to wait for a call that may never come.”
“There are active shooters.”
“There were active shooters at my apartment. I survived without a convoy because I paid attention.” My fingers tighten on his cuff. “I won’t enter the building or interfere with your guards. Let me stay where I can see what happens.”
Artur looks toward Boris, weighing the lost time against the risk.
“We lose four minutes diverting to the safe house,” Boris says. “The site command vehicle is armored.”
Artur’s mouth hardens. “She stays inside that vehicle unless I approve movement.”
“I heard you.”
He looks at me until I add, “I’m not promising obedience. I’m confirming that I heard the sentence.”
The driver turns south, toward smoke rising beyond unfinished buildings as orange light moves through it. Sirens approach from several directions, but gunfire cracks closer than any engine.
The Dymov office occupies a partially renovated brick building attached to an active mid-rise site; plastic sheeting covers several windows. Flames push from the ground-floor reception area, where broken glass scatters across the sidewalk.
Workers crowd behind windows on the second and third floors. Some press shirts over their mouths, and others strike the glass as smoke gathers above them.
The command vehicle stops behind a concrete barrier, and Artur exits with Boris before a guard opens my side.
“You stay behind the barrier,” Artur says. “If the shooting moves closer, you get back inside without arguing.”
I nod because workers are coughing behind the windows and this isn’t the time to win an argument.
Without raising his voice, Artur moves toward the site supervisor.
At his instructions, guards leave cover to secure the parking structure and east yard.
With his next order, he clears the fire-engine route.
Each instruction produces movement before he finishes the next.
The control that suffocated me at the fight now opens a protected lane for ambulances.
The air tastes of ash; heat reaches the street in uneven waves as burning insulation gives the smoke a bitter chemical smell. My eyes water by the time I reach the site supervisor crouched beside the command vehicle.
Two Dymov soldiers fire toward an unfinished parking structure, drawing answering muzzle flashes from behind a row of concrete columns. Artur’s team spreads along the barriers, forcing the shooters away from the east side.
The supervisor holds a radio in both hands; the main stairs open beside reception, where fire has consumed the first landing. A second exit is clear inside, but shooters control the east yard.
When I ask about another stairwell, he points toward the temporary tower on the south wall, which half the night crew doesn’t know reaches every floor yet.
The south stair tower is wrapped in translucent construction mesh, and shadows move behind it. On the third-floor landing, several workers descend before reversing direction and pushing back upward.
I watch the pattern rather than the flames as people at the second-floor windows keep looking toward the same interior corridor.
A man in an orange vest appears there, waving both arms toward the south before the crowd surges the wrong way and swallows him from view.
The workers can reach the temporary stair, but the flow keeps pulling them toward the main exit they know.
“Your foreman is trying to redirect them,” I tell the supervisor. “Everyone following the crowd is dragging him backward. Get one person on each floor to stop people before the corridor splits.”
He raises the radio. “They can’t hear over the alarms.”
“Then use the work lights.” I point to the portable floodlights facing the mesh tower. “Flash the south side. People will move toward what they can see through the smoke.”
At the supervisor’s order, the first light dies, returns, then gives way to a second pulsing against the white mesh.