Page 7 of Captured By the Pakhan

"You are awake," I say. "Your breathing grew rapid the second I said FBI."

The prisoner doesn’t respond, instead, there’s an obvious effort to slow his breathing again.

"Good. Let me explain our little situation here, and you listen carefully." I keep my voice conversational, which is a choice, and one that has historically worked better than the alternative. "You entered my property. You put a bullet through my son. And there is a file missing from my house. I want it back and I want the name of the man who told you where to find me."

I’m met with silence. They give away nothing. Nothing.

I try again. "You will give me the file. You will give me the name. Then, because I am not a sentimental man and you are not a stupid one hopefully, you will give me the rest of it — the office you report to, the case number you're working on, the names of those who came here with you." I let a silence fill the space between us for a moment, before adding, "Then we will discuss what your future looks like."

Again I’m met with nothing. Not a shift of weight. Not a murmur under their breath. Just nothing.

And that — that — is what starts to get to me. Because I have sat in this chair a number of times before tonight and there is always something. A swallow. A tightening in the shoulders. The body tells on people long before the mouth does, and yet his body is telling me nothing at all.

"Andrei.” I turn to look at him. “What did the shot look like on the recording?"

"There's no frame on the shot.” He says with a shrug. “There's only the nine seconds after."

"And in the nine seconds after?" I ask it even though I already know the answer. I want him to know what the cameras caught.

Andrei is quiet, eyebrows raised in slight confusion. Then: "This one covered Sergei."

I look back at the figure in the chair.

"Why?" I ask, voice still conversational. “Why protect a child you don’t know from one of your own? After breaking into his home?”

Nothing.

"You had a window. You had ninety seconds to get out, perhaps two minutes, and every man you came in with used it. They left you. Hell, they are probably off drinking coffee somewhere south of here right about now." I lean in then, our knees touching ever so slightly and a strange unfamiliar warmth runs up my legs.

"Yet you stayed. There is no version of your training that recommends that. Unless you're intended to be a plant. So I am asking you why, and I am asking politely. Mark my words, this is the last time I’ll ask from this chair."

Silence. Utter, flat, professional silence.

My patience is not infinite and it has been a long night, so finally something in me comes loose. I stand up, grabbing a hold of the front of the figure's vest, and I want to see exactly who I’m about to destroy before I lose my temper completely, I take a fistful of the balaclava face covering and pull it off.

Long dark hair comes down out of it in a cascading mess.

Shit. A woman. I stare in utter disbelief.

Thirty, perhaps. She is looking straight up at me without an ounce of fear in her face anywhere, none, not a milligram of it.

A sudden spark goes through me that has absolutely no busines in this room.

She is beautiful, not in a conventional way, no – in a dangerous way. Those wide green eyes, combined with the dusting of freckles across her cheeks, the bridge of her nose. The absences of fear in their beautiful depths, the way her hair has slipped from its tie and fights to fall down along the side of her neck. The mess of it makes me want to reach out and touch it on some odd impulse that I have to fight to resist.

This isn’t a woman afraid of consequences. No, this is a woman who is daring me to give them to her.

The floor goes sideways under me. Not because she is a woman — I have known a great many dangerous women and buried two. But because Sergei’s voice comes back to me then.

Don't punish the woman.

Not the housekeeper. He didn’t mean the housekeeper.

"You will stay here as my prisoner until I decide how to kill you." I say through clenched teeth.

She works her jaw side to side, then spits blood onto the floor between my feet. And then she looks up at me through the hair in her face — and smiles.

Chapter 3