9. Rowan
ROWAN
Be careful where you plant your feet, Rowan. Your Pakhan has already stepped into waters that aren’t meant to be tread in. It would be a shame for you to also get caught up in the undercurrent.
It’s been nearly a week since he said it.
Instead of brushing off the warning as nothing more than a mad man’s paranoia, I’ve lain awake every night with those words curled around my throat like a noose I can’t cut.
They wait in the dark behind my eyes when I close them, seeping in before consciousness fully settles when morning light wakes me.
They follow me down every hallway and into Ivan’s study.
They crawl into bed with me when I finally try to sleep.
Nikolai Malyshko has a talent for that, I think.
For leaving behind planted seeds buried so deep in a man’s psyche that digging them out is almost as dangerous as ignoring them.
I should dismiss whatever this has unintentionally stirred up in me, bury them the way I do every other threat that carries a blade or a loaded barrel and aims for me.
Loyalty isn’t supposed to come with questions.
It is supposed to be absolute. I’ve spent half my life proving that to Ivan with blood on my hands and bodies in the ground.
He pulled me out of the gutter when I was seventeen and starving and turned rage into purpose.
I don’t ever question the hand that has forged me.
Except… now I’m starting to.
Every time Ivan dismisses the ambush as “outside work” and doubles down on pushing into those government seats, every time he changes the subject about Sofia’s file being found at the scene as nothing more than coincidence, something inside me twists tighter.
I know without thinking that it’s my intuition screaming at me that something is wrong.
This is the exact preternatural sense that has kept me breathing through more fights than I can count.
He is hiding something, that much I know for certain.
But what, I am still not sure. Nor do I want to dig too deeply into it for fear that it will crumble the already very precariously built tower that is still managing to stay upright.
What I should be doing is exactly what I’ve been ordered to.
Ivan’s orders were simple, nearly fool-proof. Keep Sofia breathing under any and all circumstances, keep her contained when necessary and busy when bored, and do not let her leave the estate.
It should have been easy. A temporary detail, I told myself. A minor punishment dressed up as trust after I pushed too hard in his hospital room while Ivan rested and recovered. Nothing more. I have done far worse for far longer.
Only slowly, I’ve come to realize how wrong I was.
Sofia is not the fragile academic with soft hands and even softer instincts I originally thought her to be.
She is far from the image of the sheltered little heiress too delicate to understand the darkness around her, the one I created in my head the moment Ivan gave me this order.
I built that version of her because it was convenient, a porcelain problem that was expensive and breakable that I was forced to guard while resenting every second of it.
Yet the longer I spend time around her, the more Sofia begins to unsettle me because beneath all that softness and sun-warmed beauty and polished upbringing, there is a nerve of steel no one warned me about.
I don’t know when all of this started to become unbearable.
Maybe when she reached out to touch me. I should have stepped away immediately. I know that. A month, a week, a lifetime ago, I would have. I would have shut it down without hesitation with one cold command and put enough distance between us to make the boundary explicitly clear.
But I didn’t.
For one second, I stayed. I watched her hand rise and realized I wanted her to touch me.
I wanted her palm against my chest to see if she could feel how hard my heart was beating beneath my skin.
I wanted, fuck, to know if something in her would understand—would realize—I am not as unreachable as I pretend I am.
And that is the most dangerous truth of all.
She is a fuse waiting to be lit and I am the matchstick hovering too close, hoping her flame won’t catch when it finally does.
That thought keeps returning to me with a heaviness I don’t like, nor do I know how to deal with.
It sits in the back of my skull while I stand beside Ivan in meetings.
It presses between my ribs when I walk past her door at night and follows me into the surveillance room, into the armory, into the hollow hours before dawn when exhaustion strips away enough discipline for honesty to crawl in.
Ivan trusts me because I do not bend. I do not indulge weakness. I have made myself into something reliable. He did not pull me from the bowels of Moscow and make me his right hand just so I could become another man undone by a woman’s touch.
Sofia does not understand the full danger of herself yet. She thinks the threat is outside where the men who attacked Ivan are. She thinks the danger is in the questions she asks and the answers she will never receive, but she is wrong. The danger is what she makes men want.
Men like me.
It is not duty that coaxes me to keep circling her.
It is possession masquerading as protection.
Today is supposed to be quiet.
That is the first mistake I make.
Men like me should know better than to trust the timeframe between detonations, the inhale before the gun comes out and the bullets start flying.
Still, I let myself believe in it for the first half of the morning because exhaustion has made me stupid, and because even men who know better sometimes crave a few hours where the world behaves as expected.
Ivan is behind his desk for the first time since the hospital. That alone should be enough to settle me.
His study has looked wrong without him in it, a throne room with its king removed and the ghosts in the corners growing bolder as the days stretch on.
Ivan Kuznetsov does not belong in bed while his empire turns without him.
He belongs here, behind this desk, with one hand on a pen and the other wrapped around Moscow’s throat.
Paperwork is spread out before him in neat stacks. At a glance, most of them are financial briefings and a few political notes taken from the latest televised state briefing. The slow grind of running a kingdom from a leather chair. One I do not, and will never, envy.
He looks better. There is still a grayness beneath his skin no amount of shaving or expensive tailoring can erase.
His movements remain measured, the slightest hesitation appearing whenever he reaches too far for something or twists too quickly, but his eyes are sharp again.
The old heat is returning behind them, banked beneath patience and calculation.
He barely looks up when I enter, one hand moving across a document with a black fountain pen.
His handwriting is elegant as it stretches across the paper, each line flowing into the next with the patience of a man who has never had to rush unless he chose to.
There is something almost obscene about seeing that kind of refinement attached to the work on his desk.
Ink gliding smoothly over paper while orders beneath it shift money, move men, alter lives, and bury threats.
Ivan has always made violence look civilized.
“You’re leaving the estate.” It isn’t a question.
“No longer than two hours,” I say.
“Where?”
“The coroner’s office.”
His pen pauses.
His mouth curves faintly, though not enough to be called a smile. The expression carries a trace of old approval, the kind he used to give me when I was younger and found the loose thread in something he’d deliberately left tangled to see whether I would notice it.
Once, that look would have warmed something in me. Now it makes Nikolai’s warning stir in the back of my skull once again.
Ivan’s pen taps once against the document, the sound soft against the quiet. “The bodies have already been examined.”
“Not by me.”
His gaze holds mine for a long moment, waiting for me to go on.
I keep my face blank. “They were thorough in the way the reports sent to us usually are. But to me I sensed they were written in a way that seemed like they were interested in closing the file rather than opening up a further investigation.”
The room seems to quiet further around us.
This study has always felt like the center of Ivan’s world because it is where he makes decisions no one else gets to question.
Men have been promoted in this room and condemned within the same breath.
I have stood where I stand now and received orders that have upheaved people’s lives before dawn.
I know the man behind the desk. Which is why his silence on the matter bothers me more than it should.
He leans back slightly. “Dead men rarely offer new testimony.”
There’s no real anger behind the sentiment, nothing to suggest he believes I am questioning his judgment regarding the handling of this investigation.
Ivan knows how I work. He made me this way, or at least he molded what was already there.
I don’t trust other men’s eyes when my own can still be useful.
Reports are only as unbiased as the men writing them, and Moscow politsiya has never been a temple of unilateral competence.
Even the bought ones can be lazy.
“Perhaps. But there is no harm in double checking.”
Something in the air between us shifts then. I can’t tell if I’ve said too much or if the last week has made me hear danger in places it isn’t. There is uncertainty in the new and I hate it.