6. Lev
Lev
“He lasted longer than the last one. That’s the only good thing I’ll say about him.”
Danil says it with his back to me, hosing the concrete down toward the drain, the water running out pink and thinning to nothing at the grate.
The men took the body out through the loading door forty minutes ago in the back of a produce truck that runs the same route six days a week and has never once been stopped.
By Friday there’ll be a slab poured over him in New Jersey, and a warehouse will go up on top of that, and men who’ve never heard his name will park their cars where his mouth used to be.
“He lasted long enough to give me the buyer,” I say. “Everything after that was housekeeping.”
“Krutov’s man in Coney Island.” Danil kills the hose, coils it on the hook. “You want him tonight?”
“I want him breathing and comfortable, and certain nobody’s onto him.
A dead middleman tells Semyon somebody’s looking.
A live one tells him nothing at all.” I take my coat off the rail and put it on over the shirt with the ruined cuffs.
“Put two on him. They watch, they don’t touch, they don’t get creative.
If one of them so much as bumps into that man at a bodega, I’ll take the hand he used. ”
“Understood.”
“And Danil.” He stops with the hose still in his fist. “She saw.”
He doesn’t ask which part. He looks at the door at the end of the corridor, the one she came through, then back at me.
“You want me to say she shouldn’t have.”
“I want you to say what you’re chewing on.”
“She rolled toward it.” He shrugs, one shoulder. “Most people run. She had a clear look at a man’s face in pieces, and she came forward another six feet to ask a question. That’s what I’ve got.”
My hands are still tacky when I return to the penthouse, the blood dried into the creases of the knuckles and the beds of the nails. Her door’s shut, probably locked too.
I go to my own room and strip. The shirt goes in the bag for the incinerator downstairs, cuffs first, and the watch comes off last and goes on its usual spot on the dresser, face up, both hands stopped where they stopped nineteen years ago at eleven minutes past four in the afternoon.
I don’t wind it. I’ve never wound it. A man came to my mother’s kitchen with it in a paper bag and told her the organization regretted the necessity.
I was fifteen, and I said thank you, because there were three of them and one of me.
The steam in the shower floods the bathroom in under a minute. I put my hands under the water, and the water goes red, then rust, then clear, and I stand there with my head down and let it beat on the back of my neck until the muscle across my shoulders quits arguing.
I’m not thinking about her.
I’m thinking about the sit-down in spring, about which of Ustin’s captains will need buying and which will need burying, about the Coney Island middleman and what he’s worth alive. That’s the list I’m going through.
And then I’m not thinking about the list anymore.
It’s her mouth. You’ve got blood on your watch.
She stood in a hallway with a man bleeding out ten feet from her chair and went straight for the one thing on my body I’d kill a man for touching, and she did it with that dry little tilt in her voice, and my cock’s already half hard against my thigh before I’ve caught up to what’s happening in my own shower.
I put a hand on the tile. That should be the end of it.
It isn’t. It’s the color coming up her neck that I can’t ignore, that climbs from her collarbone to her jaw.
She was afraid, I could hear it in the shallow way her breath was riding, and she was probably wet for me at the same time in a corridor that smelled like a slaughterhouse.
She hated it, and yet, she stayed. She hates it in a way that makes her sharper instead of quieter.
Every other person who’s ever stood on that concrete came away smaller.
She came away with a comment about my father’s watch.
My hand goes down, and I don’t stop it.
My cock is hot and heavy in my palm. I close my fist and drag my thumb across the head, the water a poor substitute for her tongue, and the image of her, the set of her jaw, the freckles I want to count one by one, the flash of defiance in her eyes when she realized her room had been changed to accommodate her, all of it floods my mind. She’s a challenge I didn’t see coming.
I stroke myself, slow at first, then faster, the water cascading down my back, my breath catching in my throat.
I see her in that hallway, her eyes locked on mine, the way she didn’t flinch.
She’s a survivor, a fighter. She’s the one person in this whole godforsaken city who’s not afraid of me, and that makes her more dangerous than any man I’ve ever faced.
I imagine myself between her thighs, my hands on her hips, her fingers digging into my back.
I hear her gasp, feel her shudder against me.
I imagine her whispering my name, the sound of it in the dark, her body arching towards mine, seeking more.
I imagine the taste of her skin, the scent of her hair, the feel of her in my arms.
I imagine my cock entering her pussy for the first time.
I come with a grunt, my release hot and fast, the water washing it away.
I’m panting, my head bowed, my body humming.
I’ve never wanted a woman like this, never felt this kind of raw, unadulterated need.
I’ve never wanted to possess someone so completely, to break them down and build them back up, to make them mine in every possible way.
There’s a word for what I just did in my own shower over a woman I bought at a card table, and it isn’t a word that belongs anywhere near a man in my position.
She’s an asset. She’s the last drop of Filatov blood breathing in two countries, she’s a name that gets me through a door in spring that money has never once opened.
Wanting is the crack they come in through.
My father wanted to be loved by the organization, he wanted thirty years of loyalty to mean thirty years of loyalty, and they put him in the ground at eleven minutes past four on a Tuesday for a theft another man committed, and the watch on my dresser has been reminding me of it every day since.
I shut the water off and stand in the steam, letting it run off me.
Cold works its way up through me while I dry off, and I let it come. It’s the useful one. Rage makes men stupid, I’ve made a living off men who rage, but cold is a tool with a handle on it. She’s under my skin at the depth of a splinter, and splinters come out.
I dress. Black shirt, black pants, the watch back on over the pulse, and the steel’s cold against my wrist for the first minute, and then it’s my temperature, the same as it’s been every day since I was fifteen.
Discipline is the only thing that’s ever loved me back.
So it’s simple. I keep the wedding on Saturday, because the church, the paper, and the witnesses are the whole point of this charade.
I keep her in this apartment where four men and a camera on every approach make her the hardest woman in the five boroughs to kill.
I keep Danil on her outside of the apartment, and I keep the Coney Island middleman breathing until he’s done being useful.
And while all this is going on, I’ll keep myself away from her.
Not out of mercy. Mercy’s a thing you extend to people who can hurt you, and I’ve spent my whole life making sure the list of those is empty.
I keep away because a man who wants a thing pays over the odds for it, every single time, and I’ve never once paid over the odds for anything, and I’m not going to start now.
We’re simply two people occupying the same floor plan on a piece of paper the state recognizes. I’ve done business with men I liked less and shared less air.
I go out to the kitchen because I’m not going to sleep, and the office is downstairs, and there’s nothing in this room but the bed and the thought I just had in the shower.
The mug’s still on the island. Dead center on the marble, one white mug she left there as a dare, and it hasn’t moved, because nobody in this apartment is going to move it but me, and I’m not giving her that.
Every object she’s touched in this apartment is a message, and every message says the same thing. You did not ask.
The captains will eat her alive if they ever get near her.
But I won’t let them. That’s what the ring’s for. That’s what Saturday’s for, and the church, and the witnesses, and the priest my father’s money paid for the roof over, thirty years ago, before they decided a man who’d given them everything was a convenient place to put another man’s crime.
At five in the morning, her door opens.
I hear the lock first, then the wheels, though they don’t make a sound anymore because I put oil in them, so what I actually hear is the wood and her breath and nothing else.
She comes down the hall in the dark, and she doesn’t turn on a light until she comes into the kitchen, where I’m standing with a glass of water like a burglar who lost his nerve.
She stops at the mouth of the hall. I can make out her outline: hair down from the braid, an oversized shirt, her hands on the rims.
“You washed the blood off,” she says.
“That’s usually how it goes.”
“I thought maybe you kept it on. As a look.” She rolls three feet into the room and stops again. “Are you going to tell me his name?”
“No.”
“Right.” Her chin moves. “Then I’m getting water, and you’re going to stand there in the middle of the night being ominous about it, and neither of us is going to sleep, and that’s the arrangement, apparently.”
She comes to the island. She’s within arm’s reach of me for four seconds, close enough that I get the smell of her hair.
I don’t move or say a word, and she takes a glass down from the low cabinet I had rehung at her height and fills it at the tap she can reach with ease.
She doesn’t thank me for either one, and she never will, and she’s right not to.
Then she turns her chair and goes back down the hall.
“Vasilisa.”
The wheels stop. She doesn’t turn around.
“Saturday,” I say. “Eleven o’clock. Wear whatever you want.”
“Oh, I intend to.”
The lock clicks in place after her, and I stand in my kitchen, running the list again from the top, and it holds for eleven, maybe twelve seconds.