Chapter 38
KATIE
Artur’s last words seem to linger in the kitchen after the call ends.
We will discuss every option.
At the hospital, he informed me that a relocation car would collect me at noon.
Now he has given up the chair at the head of his council rather than let Ivan bargain with my life, and somehow the greater sacrifice feels easier to understand than the smaller change in his voice.
Artur knows how to lose power for me; asking what I want still sounds new in his mouth.
I leave the kitchen and carry the half-packed suitcase into the bedroom, where I place another sweater inside without folding it.
Lidia sits on the floor beside the bed, wrapping the old burner phone in a clean sock before lowering it into her bag; Cherry would have insulted her technique. Remembering that leaves the bedroom too quiet.
“You’re aware that refusing the armored car is insane?” Lidia asks. “He just abandoned half an empire in a room full of armed men because his uncle called you expendable.”
“I didn’t refuse it. I said I wouldn’t climb inside before Artur arrived.”
“An important distinction to women who enjoy being alive.” She pushes the burner deeper between two shirts. “If a man surrendered a casino for me, I’d at least let him pick the vehicle.”
“He surrendered territory, leadership, and possibly the casino.”
Lidia looks up. “You’re correcting the scale of the romantic gesture while rejecting it. That may be worse.”
She folds another shirt, losing the brittle humor as her fingers reach the collar. “Cherry would tell you to make him suffer for another hour, then climb into the safest car because she didn’t get shot so we could become principled corpses.”
“I know.”
“She also wouldn’t forgive me for saying that as if I get to use her.” Lidia places the shirt in my suitcase with more care than the fabric requires. “I sold your address. Artur still put guards around me at the hospital because you asked. I don’t understand either of you.”
“We’re having trouble understanding ourselves.”
“Excellent. The armed family crisis has professional supervision.”
Without removing the fear, dry humor passes through it.
I close the suitcase halfway but leave the zipper open because packing isn’t consent to leave.
The bedroom still carries the medicinal scent of the wrap around Artur’s ribs, mixed with cedar from the closet where his black coats hang beside my cheap rain jacket.
Reports cover our unmade bed; the sheet remains twisted on his side from the single night of sleep that never properly came.
Against that disorder, my marriage ring catches the security light whenever my hand moves.
I touch the pillow he carried into the hall.
The outer ventilation stops.
The ceiling vents fall silent first, followed by the faint click of the refrigerator shifting onto backup power. I look toward the security panel beside the bedroom door. Its green strip dies from one end to the other.
Lidia rises. “Is that supposed to happen?”
“No,” I answer.
My secure phone flickers between one bar and an empty triangle while the house network symbol disappears. In Atlanta, that kind of unstable signal means somebody is making it happen.
From the front of the house comes a heavy metal turn, followed by the scrape of a bolt withdrawing inside the reinforced door.
I heard that sound near dawn after the construction-site fire, when Artur demonstrated the physical override.
The system could seal us inside during a power failure, but one emergency key bypassed the electronics so his security team could reach the bedroom.
Boris and Ivan inspected its tamper-evident case together at the mansion because nobody stationed here was supposed to possess it.
Ivan has it now.
My heart strikes high beneath my breastbone, driving each breath shallow while cold sweat gathers beneath my shirt.
The taste of old coins spreads across my tongue.
For one second I see the apartment wall broken around Igor’s shoulders, Cherry bleeding below the freight-yard light, then three flickers on the clinic monitor that have no defense except the body fear is trying to freeze.
“Turn off the lamps,” I tell Lidia. “Take your bag into the bathroom.”
She reaches for my arm. “What are you doing?”
“Making the hallway difficult.”
Darkness takes the bedroom. Through the curtains, gray daylight reduces the furniture to soft blocks as I shove the narrow bench from the foot of the bed across the doorway.
Behind it, Lidia drags the reading chair; caught on the rug, the chair has to be lifted rather than scraped as the outer door opens at the end of the hall.
Men speak near the entry.
I recognize one guard’s voice from the hospital rotation and nearly breathe easier. Then the second voice reaches me, Igor’s rough vowels recognizable from the freight yard.
“Bedroom corridor,” he says. “Clear the study first.”
Artur chose a one-story house where the study and bedroom share a short hall. The instruction tells me Igor has seen the floor plan, but it also sends one man past us first and buys several seconds while the others clear the study.
I run into the bathroom, taking the rectangular mirror from its wall hook.
It is heavier than it appeared while reflecting Artur naked behind shower glass, with a beveled edge that bites my palms as I angle it on the bedroom floor.
Crouched between the foot of the bed and the bench, I use the reflection for a broken view through the doorway into the hall.
Lidia crouches beside the tub with her bag clutched against her chest. “You did that very fast.”
“I’ve had practice being trapped in this house.”
Her face tightens because the joke belongs partly to the man coming to save us.
I call Boris, but the connection opens on a burst of static.
“Safe house,” I whisper. “Physical override. Igor is inside.”
His answer breaks apart beneath an electronic shriek, and I hear my name before the connection dies. I slide the warm phone beneath the mattress, leaving both hands free.
Boots cross the hall.
The mirror catches a black trouser leg first, then the edge of a pistol held close against a guard’s thigh. I grip the bed frame, waiting until his shoulder enters the reflection before throwing my weight against the bench.
Wood strikes his knees through the doorway, and the guard falls across the chair as Lidia swings her cosmetics case into his temple. Powder bursts from the cracked lid, filling the air with the sweet chemical smell of stage foundation while he reaches blindly through the pale cloud.
I kick the pistol under the bed.
A second man catches the bench before I can pull it back. He heaves forward, driving the furniture into my hip and numbing my leg. Pain spreads across the bone while my stomach remains untouched, and I twist sideways to keep it that way.
Lidia throws a glass bottle, and it breaks against the wall near his face, releasing enough perfume to burn my nose.
The guard curses until Igor tells him to move.
As Lidia retreats into the bathroom, I abandon the doorway and run toward the cedar closet.
Only after the Diamond Draw reconstruction cleared me and I chose to stay did Artur show me the emergency pistol.
Behind his longest coat, the weapon lies inside a recessed box, reachable without a code if someone knows where to press.
Across the catch, a silver tamper strip bears Boris’s cramped countersign exactly as it did during yesterday’s guard check.
At the mansion briefing after Artur installed the pistol, Boris mentioned breaking the original seal, confirming the weapon and magazine, then signing the replacement strip before a loading-dock alarm pulled him back to the casino.
Ivan closed the panel and applied the new strip alone.
The report seemed too ordinary to remember until armed men crossed the bedroom and the panel became my only defense.
My thumb breaks the signed strip and finds the catch, opening the panel to reveal the pistol inside.
I take it with both hands and turn toward the doorway, but the wrong balance reaches me before the muzzle reaches Igor; the grip is too light. I strike the release, letting an empty magazine well confirm what my body already knows.
When Boris checked the box, the magazine was present; before the panel was sealed, Ivan was alone.
Whatever happened to the weapon happened inside that gap.
Although Boris’s signature proves he inspected the pistol, it does not prove he watched Ivan close the box.
Every later visual check, including yesterday’s, trusted a seal applied after the lie was already inside.
Igor steps over the fallen chair.
The cut around his left eye has opened again beneath the scar, leaving a wet red line down his cheek after the freight-yard extinguisher.
His coat pulls tightly across a thick vest while one hand carries a pistol angled toward the floor.
He looks larger inside the narrow doorway, though the damaged eye fails to follow Lidia moving behind the bathroom wall.
“Still stealing other men’s weapons?” he asks.
“You keep leaving yours where women can reach them.”
His good eye flicks toward my stomach. “Ivan wants the children alive.”
“A touching family tradition.”
I move left.
Igor turns before I finish, anticipating the same blind-side attack I used at the freight yard.
His forearm catches my wrist, knocking the empty pistol upward while his other hand closes in my hair.
Pain burns across my scalp, and I let my knees fold instead of fighting his strength, dropping beneath the grip as my free hand drives the pistol against his injured eye.
Bone meets metal with a soft, ugly sound.
Igor staggers into the doorframe, and blood runs faster across his face while I swing again, but he catches the barrel and twists. My grip gives beneath the pressure, sending the weapon against the floor.