Page 68 of Captured By the Pakhan

"I did hear it. That is why I'm asking you to say it again." Yeremey's voice has changed. "Because I have spent six weeks watching this and I have not once asked you a direct question about it, and I'm going to ask one now. Is this operation about the man who shot Sergei, or is it about the woman?"

"Yes," I say.

"That is not⁠—"

"It's both, Yeremey, and I will not be separating them, and if you require me to rank them before you will work then we have a different problem." I hear my own voice go flat. "Take Raven off the list. That is an instruction. Whatever else happens in Maryland, whatever we take out of that room — the file on her goes into a fire, and every trace of it goes with him. I want her to be clean. I want her clean if I'm alive at the end of it and I want her clean if I'm not."

The silence on the line goes on for a while.

"All right," Yeremey says quietly. "All right. I'll have the room by Wednesday."

"Thank you."

"Ilya."

"What?"

"When this is finished," he says, "and she is clean, and there is nothing on this earth keeping her in that house — you understand that you will have to ask her. Out loud. With words. Like a man." A breath. "And I have known you for eleven years, and I have never once seen you ask anybody for anything."

He rings off.

I sit in the study with the pen in my hand and the ocean going grey-blue through the glass.

He is right, and Andrei is right, and both of them have been right for six weeks, and neither has said it until this morning, which means they were waiting to see whether I would arrive on my own.

You will have to ask her.

I put the pen down.

And that is when I hear it — out in the corridor, perhaps eight feet beyond the study door, a floorboard I have walked over ten thousand times and know the exact sound of.

It goes once.

Then nothing.

I sit very still with my hand flat on the desk and listen to a house in which nobody is moving, and I count four seconds, and at the end of them I hear it go again — softer, further away, going back down the hall toward the stairs.

Chapter 18

Raven

Los Angeles, 7:40 AM

Iwake up alone, and I know before my eyes are open that I've made a catastrophic error, and it takes me about four seconds to locate it.

I said it out loud.

Everything else comes in behind that, in order, the way a bill arrives.

I let a man blindfold me. I let a man tie my hands to a bedframe in a house I cannot leave, belonging to an organization I have spent nine years investigating. Then I lay in the dark afterward and told him I loved him and pretended to be asleep, and he allowed me to pretend, which means he knows, which means it's in the room now and there is no version of today where it isn't.

I sit on the edge of the bed and put my head in my hands.

And then I do the thing I have not done since Kansas, which is take an honest inventory.

Thirty-eight days.

Thirty-eight of ninety. And in thirty-eight days I have: failed one escape and abandoned it voluntarily, made four characters of contact with the outside world, found two gaps in a perimeter and told nobody, stopped counting the exits in a house with eleven of them, accepted a weapon from the man guarding me, and slept with the principal.