Page 36 of Marrying the Pakhan

She settles back against my chest instead of pulling away, and we lie there a while longer, not talking, just existing in a version of morning I’ve never once allowed myself before her.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand, breaking it.

I consider ignoring it. I don’t, because fifteen years of habit doesn’t disappear over one good morning, and Dimitri doesn’t text before eight unless it matters.

Got a lead on Pavel. Need you at the club when you can.

Harper watches my face change. “That doesn’t look like a happy text.”

“It’s not bad news. Just business.”

“You always say that.”

“Because it’s usually true.” I sit up, already thinking through the morning ahead. “I need to shower and get into the club this morning.”

“Everything okay?”

I hesitate, weighing how much to give her, still not ready to hand her the full weight of Pavel Ivanov before I understand what we’re actually dealing with. “We’re making progress on something I’ve been tracking. I’ll tell you more once there’s something worth telling.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“No. It’s not.” I lean down and kiss her once, unhurried, before pulling back. “But it’s honest, and I promise you’ll have the whole thing the second I do.”

She studies me a moment longer, and whatever she decides, she doesn’t push, the same restraint she showed at the courthouse weeks ago, trusting me with the gap even when it clearly costs her something to do it.

“Go,” she says finally. “I’ll get Ginger up for school.”

I shower fast, dress in a fresh shirt from the closet, and at the door I turn back to find her still in bed, sheet pulled up, watching me with a look caught somewhere between amusement and a tenderness I’m not used to being on the receiving end of.

“For the record,” I say, “I meant what I said. I don’t want you gone.”

“Good,” she says. “Because I wasn’t planning on going anywhere.”

She says it easily, like it costs her nothing, though I know better by now, know how much it costs her to say something like that out loud to anyone after everything she’s already lost. I file the sentence away, the way I file everything that matters.

I leave with that sitting warm in my chest the entire drive to the club, an unfamiliar feeling I don’t examine too closely, not yet, not until I’ve dealt with the considerably less warm feeling waiting for me in Dimitri’s office.

He’s already there when I arrive, tablet out, expression tighter than it was last night.

“What have you got?”

“A name. Someone who used to run logistics for Pavel back before he disappeared. Still alive, still local, doing legitimate work now under a name that isn’t his own either.” Dimitri slides the tablet across the desk. “If anyone knows what he’s been doing the last eleven years, it’s this man.”

“How’d you find him?”

“Old contact of mine remembered a face at a funeral last spring. Didn’t think much of it at the time, mentioned it in passing when I started asking around. Took some digging to confirm it, but it’s him.” Dimitri taps the screen. “He’s been keeping his head down. No criminal activity we can find, nothing that would draw attention. Just a quiet life under a borrowed name.”

“That fits. Pavel wouldn’t have trusted anyone who couldn’t disappear as cleanly as he did.”

“Can we get to him?”

“Carefully, and quietly. He’s spent over a decade making sure nobody finds him either. I don’t want to spook him into disappearing again before we get anything useful.”

“What’s our approach?”

“Money first. If that doesn’t work, we remind him what happens to men who protect people like Pavel when the wrong side comes asking.” Dimitri’s voice stays level, but there’s an edge underneath it I recognize from years of watching him handle exactly this pressure. “I’d rather not need the second part.”

I look at the photograph on the screen, an older man, unremarkable, a face built to disappear into a crowd on purpose.