Page 44 of Captured By the Pakhan

That's the thing I'm not ready for. I've seen Bratva ink in case files for nine years — I did a two-week course on it at Quantico that I mostly slept through and then a lot of reading afterward that I didn't — and it's a language. It's the only criminal iconography in the world that's genuinely a language, and I can read about sixty percent of it.

Left shoulder: the stars. Eight points, both sides of the collarbone. I kneel to no one. You don't get to wear those, historically — you take them, and if you take them wrong somebody removes them with a blade.

Ribs, right side: a cathedral. Four domes.

Four.

That's a sentence count. Four terms. Except there's no record of Ilya Yaroslav ever being convicted of anything anywhere, so either the domes are inherited iconography he has no right to, or the record is wrong. I know which of those I'd put money on.

Forearm, inner: a rose on barbed wire, which is a birthday inside. Sixteen or under.

He was in something at sixteen.

And the scars, which are a completely separate document.

Two through-and-throughs on the left side, old, badly closed, the kind you get when a man with a kit does it in a room instead of a surgeon doing it in a theatre. Something long and pale across the back of one shoulder that I'd guess was a blade. A puckered mess low on the right hip that isn't a bullet and isn't a knife and I genuinely can't identify, and it's the only one that makes my stomach turn over, because I can't rule out the possibility that somebody did it slowly.

He gets a shirt out of the bag, doesn't put it on, and turns around.

"You are reading me," he says.

Caught. "I'm assessing a security asset."

"You are reading me. Go on, then."

"Excuse me?"

"You are the only person in eleven years to look at that and understand any of it." He drops the shirt on the bed. "So. Read it."

And here's what I should do. I should say something dry, go to the window, and get through the next eight hours like a professional adult.

Instead I stand up.

"Stars are the rank. You took them, you weren't given them, or you'd have them lower." I walk over — not close, four feet, then three. "The cathedral's four domes, which is four terms inside, except you've never been convicted of anything on any continent, so either you're wearing somebody else's sentence, which would get you killed in the wrong room, or⁠—"

"Or?"

"Or you did four, and none of them are in a file, which means they weren't here."

Something moves behind his eyes.

"Two in Russia," he says. "Both before I was twenty-one, both under a name that no longer exists. One in Georgia, which was six weeks and a misunderstanding. And one that was not a prison."

"What was it?"

"A room," Ilya says. "For nine months. When I was sixteen."

I look at the rose on the barbed wire.

"That's what this is."

"That is what that is."

Three feet is suddenly not very much room, and neither of us has moved, and I can feel the heat coming off him.

"And this one?" I put two fingers, barely, against the pale ruin low on his hip. He doesn't flinch and doesn't breathe. "Because that's not a knife and it's not a round, and it's the only thing on you I can't read."

"No," he agrees. "It's not."