Chapter 16
MILO
Dmitri was still talking, but my ears were ringing so loud I barely heard him. He'd been watching her, too. And I hadn't even noticed.
Goddammit.
"She's very good," Dmitri said, almost admiringly. "If she is the leak, she's better than anyone I've seen. The disability makes her nearly invisible. People say things in front of her they would never say in front of anyone else."
"If," I said. "And that's a big if."
Konstantin tilted his head. Just slightly. The same movement Raven made when she was focusing on a sound. The parallel hit me like a fist to the sternum.
"You have been spending time with her," Konstantin said. Not a question.
"Viktor asked me to watch her."
"And you have been...thorough in your surveillance."
Behind me, Dmitri made a sound like a choked off laugh.
"I've been doing my job," I said.
"Your job." Konstantin picked up his pipe again. Turned it. Set it down. "Mr. Scott, I will be direct with you, because I respect efficiency and I suspect you do as well."
I nodded.
"I have reviewed Viktor's reports. I have reviewed the shipping data. I have reviewed the timeline of interceptions and cross-referenced them with personnel schedules, access points, and communication patterns. And I have arrived at a conclusion."
He unbuttoned his suit jacket.
"There is a leak in this organization. And it has access to operational details that are only discussed in this restaurant."
He leaned closer. Close enough that I could smell the pipe tobacco embedded in the material of his suit, rich and dark and permanent.
"And I know that every conversation held within earshot of that piano"—he gestured through the wall toward the dining room—"is compromised until proven otherwise."
The room fell into silence as I waited.
Viktor broke it. "Which brings us to our problem, Milo."
I was shaking my head before he said the words.
"You are compromised," Viktor said.
I didn't move.
"You have been fucking her. Sleeping in her apartment. Spending every night in her bed for the last week, if not longer." He held up a hand when I opened my mouth. "Do not insult me by denying it. I know where you've been. I know where your car has been parked. And so does Konstantin."
My mouth snapped shut.
"You were asked to investigate her," Viktor continued. "Instead, you are inside her. This is not investigation. This is compromise. And it makes everything you have reported unreliable."
The worst part was that he wasn't wrong.
"Here is what will happen." Viktor sat back. Glanced at Konstantin, who gave the slightest nod. Permission granted. Chain of command confirmed.
"You will stop. Tonight. No more visits to her apartment. No more nights in her bed. No more contact outside of this restaurant and only when necessary. You will conduct yourself as a professional, or I will remove you from this situation entirely."
He paused. Let the words settle.
"And if you do not—if I learn that you have gone to her again—I hand her to Konstantin's people. And they will have their conversations with her in a room you will not be invited to."
He took a slow sip of vodka.
"You understand what I am telling you?"
I understood exactly.
Konstantin's "conversation" would last days and ended with dental records being the only way to identify what was left.
"Yeah," I said. "I understand."
My voice came out the way I needed it to. A man agreeing to reasonable terms because the terms were reasonable.
The surfer-boy mask.
The performance of my fucking life.
"Good." Viktor stood. "Take a few days. Clear your head. When the time comes, I will need you sharp."
I stood too. Nodded to Viktor. Turned to Konstantin.
He was watching me with those silver eyes. Still and patient. Reading me the way a jeweler reads a stone, looking for the flaw hidden inside the sparkle.
"Mr. Scott," he said quietly, almost gently. "A word of advice."
I waited.
"Attachment is a liability in our business. It makes intelligent men do unintelligent things." He picked up his pipe. Held it to his nose. Inhaled the unlit tobacco with an expression of appreciation. "I have seen it many times. The outcome is always the same."
He set the pipe down.
"Always."
I gave him the grin. The one that said message received, no hard feelings, we're all professionals here.
"Appreciate the advice," I said.
I walked out of the office. Through the dark restaurant. Past the piano I wouldn't look at. Through the kitchen. Out the door.
The sun was just beginning to lighten the sky when I got outside, and I stood there in the parking lot between Viktor's Mercedes and Konstantin's Bentley and breathed.
The mask dropped.
My hands were shaking, and I clasped them together to hide it as I walked the rest of the way to my car, got in, and closed the door.
I couldn't believe I was still alive.
Once I was in the car and out of the hearing range of any cameras, I pulled out my phone and called the number I'd dialed five days ago.
He answered on the third ring.
"Jesus, Milo. It's too fucking early in the goddamn morning."
"How fast can you get it done?"
There was silence on the other end of the call. Then, "We talked about this. Documents take time. Clean ones, the kind that hold up under scrutiny? Two weeks minimum. Maybe three."
"I don't have three weeks."
"Well, I don't have a magic wand. The safe house is almost set. Cash is liquid. But the paperwork—"
"How fast?"
He exhaled. "Ten days. And that's if I pull in every favor I've got left."
Ten days. I stared through the windshield at the restaurant. The light in the back office was still on.
"Do it," I said. "Fast as you can."
"Ten days, brother. It's the best I can do."
I hung up and started the car.
I didn't drive back to Raven's apartment.
I couldn't. I knew now that Viktor would have someone watching, and I'd been an absolute complete fucking idiot to think he wouldn't. Maybe it was Dmitri, maybe one of his other dogs, or maybe it was a camera pointed at her building entrance.
It didn't matter. What mattered was that the leash had been pulled tight, and any slack I had left just got cut.
Instead, I drove across town to my loft.
When I got home, I didn't turn on the lights.
Just walked to the window and stood there, looking out at the city as it came alive with a new day.
The sky was going gray at the edges. There were more headlights on the highway.
And I watched as a plane descended toward Bergstrom, its landing lights blinking like a slow pulse.
I thought about Raven.
Not the Raven who played Chopin while men discussed murder ten feet away. Not even the Raven who arched under me in the dark, gasping my name while her nails carved lines down my back.
I thought about the Raven who pressed her mouth to my chest, right over my heart, and held there, like she could keep it beating through sheer fucking will.
She hadn't said the words, but I'd felt them building in her for days now in the way she touched my face, and the way her breathing caught when I pulled her close. I'd felt it in the tremor of her lips against my skin.
But she hadn't said them.
And I hadn't said them either. Not because I didn't feel it.
Christ, I felt it like a wound that wouldn't close.
But because saying those words to a woman while you're planning how to smuggle her out of the country felt like making a promise I might not be able to keep.
And I'd rather stay silent than lie to her.
Unlike everything else in my life, what I felt for her wasn't a performance.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and closed my eyes. I was compromised. I've always known it. And they knew it, too. Yet I believed her when she told me she wasn't the one leaking information to the feds.
But what if she's lying?
I shoved the thought down. Hard. Slammed the lid on the box and sat on it.
It didn't matter.
I turned that over in my mind, testing it for cracks.
It doesn't matter. And it held. Solid and unbreakable.
Because I'd made my decision in that freezer, watching Viktor's eyes while he threatened to hand her to Moscow.
I'd made it the night I called my contact.
I'd made it every night since, lying in her dark apartment with her heartbeat matching mine and her secrets in the air between us.
Guilty or innocent. Liar or saint.
She was mine.
And they wanted to kill her.
I turned away from the window and paced across my apartment.
Ten days. It might as well be ten years, because Konstantin wasn't going to wait ten days. Konstantin was going to watch, and test, and build his case with the patient precision of a man who'd done this a hundred times before. And when he had enough, he was going to act.
And running half-prepared meant getting caught. Getting caught meant dying. Both of us.
I ran the options the way I ran crime scenes. Systematic. Clinical. Every angle, every exit, every variable.
Run now. No documents, no safe house, no clean trail.
We'd get maybe forty-eight hours before someone picked up the scent.
The Bratva had roots in forty countries and memories that lasted decades.
You could change your name, change your face, move to the other side of the world, and they'd find you.
Maybe not this month. Maybe not this year. But eventually.
Stay and fight. Kill Viktor. Then what? I couldn't take on the entire Austin organization by myself.
Hand her over.
The thought surfaced for half a second before something violent inside me crushed it.
No. Absolutely fucking not.
Give Viktor what he wants—evidence that she's clean. Except I didn't have evidence. I had nothing. A week of investigation had turned up zero leads on anyone else, and Konstantin's data was pointing in one direction like a compass needle finding north.
Every option ended in blood.
Hers and mine.
I went back to the window and stared at the sunrise. The light was changing, the city sharpening into focus the way it does when the softness of dawn burns off and leaves you with the hard, flat reality of day.
There had to be something else. Some angle I wasn't seeing. Some way we could both get out of this alive.
Something moved at the back of my mind. Not quite a plan. Not yet. More like a shadow. A shape in the dark, too far away to identify but heavy enough to feel. The way you sense a presence in a room before you see it. The way Raven sensed me in that alley before I spoke a word.
It was there. Just out of reach.
And it was dark. Whatever it was, whatever it would cost, it lived in a part of me I'd spent my whole life keeping locked away.
I didn't chase it. Didn't reach for it. Not yet.
My phone vibrated in my pocket and I pulled it out to look at the screen even though I already knew who it was.
Please come home.
Did the darkness she lived in have room for me?
I put the phone face-down on the windowsill.
Then I sat on the couch that a designer had chosen and stared at the wall that a decorator had painted and waited for the shadow at the back of my mind to step into the light.
It would. I knew it would. Because I was my father's son, and when the world closed in around us, we didn't pray or panic or run.
We went to work.
The only question was whether I'd recognize myself when it was over.