6. Razvan #2
She’s sitting in this cell with my hand around her throat thinking about exactly what I said and I can see it happening and I’m thinking about it too, her pretty mouth, open, wet and taking me so well, unable to form words around the large thickness of my cock between her lips, what I’d make her moan with those pretty lips instead of threats and curses, and we are both completely aware of what is happening and neither of us is moving or speaking or doing anything except existing in the same charged and deeply insane air.
Her eyes drop to my mouth.
“Chёrt voz’mi.” The curse tears out of me and I yank my hand back and step away from her hard, putting the wall of the cell to my back, and drag a breath in through my nose.
I’ve had men beg at my feet. I’ve had men offer me money, loyalty, names, territory, everything a person can put on a table. None of it reached me. Not once. I am not a man who gets reached.
This woman, who has nothing, who is sitting in a chair in my compound with nothing to offer and nothing to bargain with and still looks at me like she’ll find a way to make good on every promise she’s screamed at me, is doing something that has no name I’m willing to give it.
I still intend to kill her.
I tell myself this on the way out of the cell.
I tell myself this walking up the stairs and down the corridor and standing in my office staring out the window at the dark grounds while day three bleeds into the edges of the compound.
I intend to kill her.
The drive will open eventually and she will have served her purpose and that will be the end of Lena Sokolova.
I tell myself this through all of it, steady and deliberate, the way you tell yourself something you need to keep being true.
It gets harder every time.
I pour the first drink before I’ve fully sat down.
Scotch, neat, the good bottle that lives in the bottom drawer and only comes out when something has gone wrong enough to warrant it. My father’s favorite.
He brought it back from Edinburgh seven years ago and told me to save it for the days I couldn’t think straight.
I think he would find this particular occasion deeply ironic.
I drink.
Sit in my chair and drink and stare at the wall and try to locate the version of myself that existed three days ago, the one that was straightforward and functional and did not have a girl in his basement making his hands uncertain.
I want her.
The thought sits in my chest like an ember I can’t stamp out, and I hate it with a thoroughness that would be impressive if it were doing anything useful.
She is Pyotr Sokolova’s daughter. She is leverage and liability and a loose thread that needs cutting and I had my hand around her throat twice tonight and the second time I was thinking about her mouth.
I pour another drink and don’t touch it.
The door opens.
Mike first, then Lyosha filling the frame behind him, then Dmitri somewhere at the back, and I look at all three of them and feel something that might be gratitude in a different life and right now just feels like too many people in a room.
“Get out of the compound,” I say. “All of you. Take the night.”
Silence.
“Razvan.” Mike’s voice is careful. “That’s not a good idea.”
“I didn’t ask for an assessment.”
“Your father just died,” Lyosha says, with the blunt directness of a man who considers dancing around things a personal failing. “This is not the time to be alone in a house with your thoughts. Your thoughts are bad company right now.”
“My thoughts are fine.”
“You’ve been white-knuckling that glass for the last ten minutes,” Dmitri observes from the doorway, entirely unhelpfully. “That’s not what fine looks like.”
I set the glass down. Carefully. “Take the men with you. Leave four on the perimeter, two on the lower level. I want the rest of the compound clear by midnight.” I look at each of them. “That’s not a request.”
Another silence. This one has a different shape, the shape of three men doing the math on whether to push back against something and deciding, individually and at different speeds, that the answer is no.
Lyosha leaves first. He grips my shoulder once on his way out, brief and hard, his version of everything words aren’t built for, and then he’s gone. Dmitri follows with a look that says he has opinions he’s choosing, for once, to keep behind his teeth.
Mike stays.
He stands in the doorway after the other two have gone and looks at me across the office and I look back at him and neither of us says anything for a moment.
“Don’t kill her tonight,” he says.
“Mike.”
“I mean it.” His voice is quiet. Not pleading, Mike doesn’t plead, but close to something. “Whatever you’re feeling right now, whatever tonight is, don’t let it end in that cell. Promise me.”
I say nothing.
He holds my gaze for three more seconds, then nods, once, and leaves.
The compound goes quiet in stages.
I hear it happening through the walls, the gradual thinning of movement and voice and footsteps until there’s nothing left but the skeleton crew on the perimeter and the two men on the lower level and the particular silence of a building that used to have my father somewhere inside it and now has only me.
I pour the third drink.
I don’t touch it either.
My father would have known what to do with all of this. He would have sat across from me in the chair Mike just vacated and said something that cut directly to the center of the problem without any of the noise around it.
He had that quality, the ability to look at a complicated thing and find the single true sentence living inside it.
I used to sit across from him and wonder how long it would take me to learn it.
I’ve run out of time to learn it from him.
That lands differently tonight than it has the other nights, heavier, and I sit with it and let it be heavy and don’t try to make it into something manageable because it isn’t.
The drink is doing nothing.
That’s the thing about grief that nobody tells you, that the things you reach for don’t reach back.
The Scotch sits in my blood and produces no warmth and no distance and no version of numb that I can use, and I’ve been sitting here long enough that the ice I didn’t add has become a metaphor.
I get up.
I tell myself I’m walking the compound.
Checking the perimeter in the way I check it when I can’t sleep, a habit my father built into me young.
Know your ground, Razvan. Know every corner of your ground.
I walk the east corridor, the north hall, the back passage that runs alongside the kitchen, and I know when I start descending the stairs to the lower level that I am not checking the perimeter.
I am not checking the perimeter at all.
The two guards see me and step aside without a word.
I stop outside the cell door and my hand rests on the frame and I stand there in the quiet underground with the Scotch still doing nothing in my blood and my father three days dead and her on the other side of this door, and I don’t know what I’m doing here.
I open the door anyway.