Page 102 of Captured By the Pakhan

He nods slowly, doesn't ask why, doesn't look at my hands, doesn't look anywhere near my stomach, and the restraint of it is honestly absurd.

"There is a thing I have done," he says instead, "which I am going to tell you about now, and I want to say in advance that two separate people have informed me that it was a mistake."

"Oh good."

"Your apartment in Brooklyn. The lease was terminated on the fourteenth of April, which you didn't know, because you were in my house at the time and a management company doesn't chase a federal fugitive for rent." He is looking straight ahead. "Everything in it went into storage in Queens. I paid for the storage. Several days ago I had it all moved to Los Angeles, and it is currently in four rooms of my house, and Karina has unpacked the kitchen because she could not stop herself."

I stare at him.

"You moved my furniture."

"I moved your furniture."

"Without asking."

"Without asking, and there is a reason, and it isn't a good one." He turns his head. "I did it on the second day of the hearings, when I didn't know how any of it was going to go, and I did it because I have spent days sitting in car parks outside buildings I am not permitted to enter, and it was the only thing available to me that was useful, and I am aware that this is a description of a man doing something for himself."

"Ilya—"

"You are not leaving me again." It comes out of him with nothing arranged in front of it at all. "That isn't a threat, and I have no leverage, and there is a woman on that plaza who could have me arrested this afternoon. It is simply true, and I would rather say it badly than have you find out I felt it and didn't."

The car goes about a block.

And I sit in the back of it and think: there it is. There's the whole man. He asks about the thing that matters, then moves your entire apartment across a continent without asking about anything at all, and both of those are the same person, and neither of them is going to change.

"I love you," I say.

He goes completely still.

"That's not — I'm not finished." I put a hand up. "You don't get that as a conclusion, you get it as a starting position, because I've got a condition and I need you to hear the whole of it before you answer."

"Say it."

"All of it stops." I turn in the seat to face him. "Every division. The eleven containers, the brokers, the men who sign without reading, the entire thing. You keep the freight company — I don't care about the freight company; the freight company employs 1,100 people and pays its taxes. Everything else goes."

He looks at me.

"Yes," he says.

I blink.

"You didn't think about it."

"I have thought about it since Kansas," Ilya says. "You have simply asked me on a Thursday."

"Ilya, I'm not — I need you to understand what I'm asking, this isn't a⁠—"

"It will take two years," he says. "Possibly three. Eleven arrangements cannot simply be stopped; they must be handed to somebody, and four of them will require conversations that I would rather you were not in the country for. It will cost me a very great deal of money, and it will make three families in this country extremely unhappy with me, and there is a version where somebody tries something about it." He shrugs slightly, which pulls at his side. "And it is going to happen anyway. Stefano Severese has been telling me to do it for two years, and I have been telling him he is soft, and I am going to have to telephone him and be gracious about it, which is the part I am actually dreading."

I sit there.

"You're serious."

"Raven." He turns properly. "I have a son who is eleven in February and a woman who has just been told she can have New York. What exactly do you imagine I am holding on to?"

And that's the moment I do it.

"There's something I need to tell you," I say.