Chapter 18
MILO
The shadow stepped into the light on day five.
I was standing at my kitchen counter, staring at a cup of coffee I'd made an hour ago and hadn't touched, when my phone rang. Pulling it from my pocket, I stared down at Viktor's name on the screen.
A weird sense of deja vu swept over me as I tapped the screen, even before I heard what he said.
"Come to restaurant," he said. "Now."
It was the same command as last time. But there was something different in the tone of his voice that I picked up on right away.
He sounded…what was it? Satisfied?
My stomach dropped.
"On my way," I said, and hung up.
I stood there with the phone in my hand and my cold coffee on the counter and the morning light cutting through the windows of my loft like it had every right to be here. Like it was just another day. Like the world wasn't about to end.
Then I picked up my keys and walked out the door.
The drive to The Silver Table passed by in a blur of morning traffic.
When I finally arrived, the parking lot was nearly empty, but I recognized two of the three cars that were there—Viktor's Mercedes and Konstantin's Bentley. No kitchen staff. No waitstaff. The restaurant was closed for whatever this was.
I sat in my car for five seconds. Breathing. Building the mask.
Then I walked in.
Like the last time, the dining room was dark. Chairs still up on the tables from last night's close. The Steinway sat on its platform, lid closed, bench pushed in.
The office door was open. Light spilling across the hallway floor.
Viktor sat behind the desk. Konstantin occupied the same chair as before, pipe in hand, unlit. Dmitri stood by the bar with his arms crossed, his nervous finger-drumming replaced by a knowing look that said he'd gotten what he wanted.
The air in the room was different.
They were done asking questions.
This was a sentencing.
"Sit," Viktor said.
After a brief pause where I seriously considered running back out that door, I sat.
Konstantin spoke first. "Mr. Scott. Five days ago, I described a pattern of intercepted shipments and explained that the leak had access to operational details discussed within this restaurant.
" He reached into the leather briefcase beside him and produced a single sheet of paper.
Placed it on the desk facing me. "Three days ago, a specific piece of information was introduced into a conversation at a controlled volume, at a precise time, within earshot of the piano. "
He tapped the paper.
"That same information surfaced in a DEA briefing thirty-six hours later."
The room went very quiet.
"The conversation was engineered," Konstantin continued.
"The details were unique—fabricated specifically for this test. They were not discussed anywhere else.
Not on the phone. Not in this office. Not at any other location.
The only place those details existed was in a conversation between two of Viktor's men, at a back booth, during the pianist's second set. "
He folded his hands.
"Combined with Dmitri's behavioral observations, the conclusion is no longer a matter of debate."
He looked at me with those silver eyes. Patient. Empty. The gaze of a man who had arrived at a mathematical certainty and felt absolutely nothing about the human life it affected.
"The blind girl has been listening. She is our leak."
I didn't move.
My breathing was even. My hands rested on my thighs, fingers loose, posture relaxed, despite the fact that every muscle in my body wanted to seize. Wanted to fight. Wanted to vault across that desk and put my hands around Konstantin's throat.
No. I gave him nothing.
But inside, the locked box shattered.
She told you she wasn't feeding anyone. She promised.
And you believed her because you wanted to.
Because you were buried deep inside her when she said it.
Because her hand was over your heart and her voice didn't waver and she was either the most honest woman you'd ever met or the most dangerous liar on the planet.
And now you know which one she is.
Or do you?
The information surfaced in a DEA briefing. Listening and saving information "just in case" was one thing. But getting intel from a piano bench to a federal agency required a pipeline. A contact. A method. Things she'd sworn didn't exist.
I'm not feeding anyone to the Feds.
Her voice, low and urgent, in a dark alley with my hand around her wrist and her pulse slamming against my fingers, ricocheted around my head.
I don't have contacts. I've never spoken to law enforcement. The information stays in my head. That's it.
Either someone else found a way to extract what she knew, or she'd been lying to me from the night she pressed her fingers to my face and read me like sheet music.
Viktor leaned forward. "Milo."
I looked at him.
"You understand what this means."
"Yeah." My voice came out flat. Bored, almost. Like we were discussing a plumbing problem. "I understand."
"Good." Viktor glanced at Konstantin, who gave the slightest nod. "Because this is how it ends."
He stood and walked around the desk. leaning back against the front of it. He was close enough now that I could smell the cologne and cigarette smoke embedded in his jacket.
"You do this yourself."
What the fuck did he just say?
"It's a question of loyalty, yes? To prove you're not a part of this."
"I'm not a part of anything," I told him. "Without people like you, I wouldn't have a job, so why the hell would I do anything to disrupt that?"
Konstantin shifted, the leather of his chair creaking in the heavy silence.
"Biology is a powerful narcotic, Mr. Scott.
When a man is...entangled, his judgment rots.
We found your excessive interest in the pianist concerning.
" He picked up his pipe, examining the bowl.
"It clouds the mind. Makes a man believe a woman’s lies simply because he enjoys the way she screams his name when he's fucking her. "
My jaw ached from how hard I was grinding my teeth. I kept my face blank, forcing my hands to remain still on my thighs, but my blood was burning me alive from the inside out. They thought I was compromised. That I was thinking with my dick instead of my brain.
And looking at the evidence they’d manufactured?
I couldn't even blame them.
"We do not know what she has told you," Konstantin continued, his voice smooth as oil. "Or what you have told her in moments of weakness. Therefore, your word regarding her innocence, and yours, is currently worthless to us."
"So I clean up the mess," I gritted out.
"And I want proof when the job is done," Viktor demanded.
"Not a report. Not your word. Proof." He held up a finger.
"Video. Audio. Her voice on the recording, screaming.
Begging. So that when Konstantin sends this to Moscow, there is no question that the leak has been addressed appropriately and a message has been sent. "
The words landed one at a time. Each one a nail driven into my chest.
"You take her somewhere private. You make her talk. And then you make her stop talking. Permanently." He leaned closer. "As a matter of fact, I will be there to witness."
I realized I was grinding my teeth hard enough to crack them and forced my jaw to unclench.
"Or?" I said.
Viktor's eyes flicked to Konstantin.
"Or my people handle it," Konstantin said quietly. "And their methods will take days. Maybe longer. They are thorough in ways that you and Viktor are not."
So that was it then. If I didn't do it, men who specialized in extracting confessions from human bodies would take their time with her. And they'd enjoy it.
I stared at Konstantin. He sat perfectly still, unlit pipe balanced between his fingers, watching me the way he'd watched me that first night. Reading me. Waiting to see if the attachment he'd warned me about would make me do something stupid.
I gave him nothing.
"Consider it done," I said.
Viktor studied my face. "Do not try to run, my friend. Because we will find you. And if we can't find you, we will find someone you care about."
There was no one I cared about, except for Raven. "I said consider it done." I stood. "Give me forty-eight hours."
"Twenty-four."
I met his eyes. "I don't normally handle this part of things. I need time to get everything ready."
Viktor held my gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded.
"Forty-eight hours," he said. "Not one minute more."
I walked out of the office. Through the dark restaurant. Past the closed piano.
This time, I looked at it.
I stared at the bench where she sat every night, her fingers finding notes in the dark the way they found the bones of my face and the strings that tugged at the heart I never knew I had.
The platform where she performed for men who wanted her dead.
And even now—standing in the wreckage, wondering if everything she'd ever told me was a lie, if every night she'd pressed her mouth to my chest, her head was full of secrets she'd never share—even now, the only thought in my skull was a single word.
Mine.
Possessive. But also just a fact. Like gravity.
Like death.
Guilty or innocent. Liar or saint. The woman who'd looked me in the eye and promised she wasn't giving information about the Russian fucking mafia to the the DEA…
She was mine.
And they wanted her dead.
I got in my car. Closed the door. Started the engine.
My hands shook so hard I couldn't even grip the steering wheel. I pressed them against my thighs until the tremors passed, then pulled out of the lot and drove.
Not home. Not to her apartment.
Instead I went south on I-35 with the windows down and the February air cutting through the car like a blade, because the cold was the only thing keeping me from pulling over and losing what was left of my mind.
I drove for two hours. No destination. No plan. Just the highway and the wind and the open wound in my chest.
Forty-eight hours.
I ran through my options, looking at it from every angle, every exit. Looking for any possible way out.
There weren't any.
Run. Fight. Hand her over. Those were my options.
None of these would work.
Or I could do what Viktor asked and forget I'd ever lost my heart to a blind woman who saw right through all of the bullshit to the man I was underneath. I could go back to my life.
I pulled off the highway and sat in the parking lot of a strip mall.
There was a nail salon. A tax prep office.
A pizza place with a HELP WANTED sign in the window.
Normal people doing normal things while I sat in my car with forty-eight hours to either kill the woman I loved or figure out how to make the entire Russian Bratva believe I had.
My phone sat on the passenger seat. I stared at it.
Then I picked it up and made three calls.
I'm not going to say who I called. I'm not going to say what I asked for. Not yet.
What I will say is this: when I hung up after the third call, I sat in the car with the engine idling and my forehead on the steering wheel and my hands gripping it until my knuckles went white, and I understood with perfect clarity that whatever happened next, the man who'd walked into Viktor's office this morning was already dead.
What came out the other side would be something else entirely.