Page 13 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t cross the floor to put his body between mine and the sight. He doesn’t try to make this anything other than it is. He stands there with his sleeves shoved past his elbows and another man’s blood going tacky in the lines of his hands, and he holds my eyes down forty feet of concrete with one broken body bleeding between us. He lets me take the whole undiluted thing, because he swore to me in my own living room that he doesn’t threaten and he doesn’t put on a show, and now I’m watching both vows kept inside a single frame.

“Go back home, Vasilisa.” His voice isn’t cruel, but it isn’t soft either. “This part of it was never meant for you.”

“Is he going to die?”

“That went out of my hands about an hour back. It was in them, before that.” He takes a rag off one of the men and drags it across a knuckle. “He sold your name to a man who buys names. That’s what he did, and he knew the price to the dollar when he opened his mouth, and he did it anyway. So no. He doesn’t walk back out of this building, and I’m not going to lie to you to help you sleep at night. Whether you want to or not, I’m the only reason your grandfather’s butchers can’t put a street and a number to your face. That’s what this marriage does for you.”

The man on the floor makes the sound again, gone lower. One of the others says something quick in Russian, and Lev answers without turning his head. They drag the man through a door at the far end, closing it behind them.

I should be nothing but afraid. I run the count, and the fear’s all there, hands gone cold, heart slamming like it’s trying to make bail through my ribs. Underneath it hides the other thing, the one that moved into my throat the first night he filled my doorway, and tonight it’s got teeth it didn’t have before. He picked a bleeding honesty over a comfortable lie. Nobody in the entire length of my life has ever respected me enough to give me the truth while it was still warm.

And I hate it. I hate that my pulse can’t tell fear from the other thing, that the two of them ride down the exact same wire, that I’m parked in a killing hallway with my mouth going dry for the least defensible reason a mouth can go dry. So I do the only thing my body knows how to do when every other system trips offline. I reach for the joke. The joke is the last muscle still firing after the rest have gone dark.

“You’ve got blood on your watch,” I say. “The dead one. Both hands already stopped, so I don’t suppose it’ll hold the stain against you.”

His eyes drop to the watch, to the two hands frozen wherever they froze, however long ago. I’ve hit a nerve, I know I’ve hit it, because his whole expression freezes and he goes still.

“Careful,” he warns. “You keep putting the knife where I’m not plated. One of these nights you’ll get through, and then it stops being your problem and starts being both of ours.”

“And what happens then?”

“Go home, Vasilisa. Go before you learn you didn’t actually want to watch the rest of it. Go before I learn I don’t want to make you.”

My throat’s doing the thing again, that treacherous warm climb. His eyes drop half an inch to the color coming up the side of my neck and then haul themselves back to my face.

I go. Not because he gave the order, but because I’ve seen too much already.

I roll into my room and sit and stare at the door a long, moronic minute. I reach out and lock it.

The bolt slams home with a good, solid sound my chair doesn’t make anymore, and I sit there in the dark on my side of a locked door, and I am not one inch safer than I was. I feel like a woman who threw a bolt because it was the only thing she had left to do, even though it’s just an illusion.

6

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.