Page 55 of Cruel Demands

“I know.”

“You remember that before you answer me again.”

My jaw tightens. “I am not a dirty politician.”

The words are true. Mostly. I have bought men. Threatened men. Protected men who did not deserve protection because their usefulness outweighed their sins. I have let clean hands take credit for decisions made in rooms they would deny entering.

But a dirty politician? No. Politician is still a costume I wear over something older.

“Your father promised me things too,” she says.

There it is. The dead man enters the room, as he always does when my mother is afraid.

“My father was a liar.”

“So are you.”

The words should make me angry. If I were telling the truth, they would. They should hurt, but hurt is a luxury I cannot afford while men are threatening my mother through her own gates. I put both reactions somewhere cold and unreachable.

I sit slowly in my chair. “Not to you,” I lie.

“You lie to me most of all.”

“Mama.”

“No. Listen to me.” Her voice steadies, and that is worse. My mother afraid is painful. My mother resolved is dangerous. “When your father died, you promised me that business died with him.”

My eyes lower to the surface of my desk. Dark wood. Polished. No dust. “I remember.”

“You promised me.”

“Yes.”

“The girls. The drugs. The things he did through other men because he was too cowardly to dirty his own hands. You promised me you stopped it.”

“I did.”

The answer comes immediately. That much, at least, is clean.

My father’s business was a sewer running beneath the city. Women moved like product. Children disappeared into debt. Men smiled over dinner and sold poison before dessert. When I took control, I burned parts of it so hot men still speak of that winter carefully.

I did not stop being a criminal. But I stopped being his kind.

“What are you doing, Misha?”

I look toward the door Taylor left through. “I do not know.” The honesty slips out before I can stop it.

My mother hears it. Of course she does. “Then stop before you find out too late.”

12

MIKHAIL

While my mother remains on the phone, I watch Taylor struggle through her first assignment beyond the darkened glass wall of my office. The brighter lights in the outer office allow me to see the desks clearly while reducing me to little more than a shadow from her side. A control beneath my desk can turn the glass fully opaque when privacy is required.

Taylor sits at the desk beside Dima’s with a pen in her hand, trying to convince an entire office that she has not recently made a disastrous personal decision involving its highest-ranking official.

She is good at pretending, but not as good as she thinks.