Page 71 of Captured By the Pakhan

That's the piece I keep coming back to, sitting in a leather chair with my hands flat on a desk. Not that it exists — I'd have been surprised if it didn't; he's a Pakhan and I broke into his house. It's the date. Day two. Before the deal. Before the kitchen, before the terrace, before the hill, before Kansas.

Before he had ever heard me say one single true thing.

The first thing this man did, when he had me in a shed and hadn't decided whether to kill me, was find out who I loved.

And then he kept doing it. Every week. Through all of it. Through the office and the road and the ocean and the wax, and I am offering you an hour in which you are not able to, somebody was standing in a car park in Maryland with a long lens, and the pictures came here, and went in this drawer, and he put them in it with his own hands.

I look at the photograph of my mother at my father's grave for a long time.

Weeks. You have been in a house with a man who has had your mother photographed every week for weeks, and last night you told him you loved him.

I square the pages. I put them back in order — the Bureau file, my mother, the doctor, the twelve photographs, Logan, the list. I close the folder and set it in the drawer at the exact angle it was sitting at, which I checked before I lifted it, because I have been doing this for nine years and thirty-eight days of forgetting doesn't take that away.

I close the drawer.

I stand in the middle of the room and take one slow breath and look around for anything I've moved, and there's nothing.

Then I go out, close the door, and hear the lock take.

And here's the thing I notice on the stairs, and it is the ugliest thought I have ever had about myself:

I'm not surprised.

Some part of me — some professional, twelve-year-old, standing-in-the-corner part — has known since the night in the office when he closed that folder in front of me without one flicker on his face, and has spent thirty-eight days negotiating with itself about it.

You saw it. You saw the tab with your name on it in November, and you got on with your life.

I find Sergei on the terrace with a book.

He looks up and does the thing where his whole face reorganizes, and the emotion it invokes goes through me like a hook in flesh.

"Hey, kid."

"You're up late."

"I'm up early, you monster; it's not even three." I sit down on the step beside him. "Can I ask you something stupid?"

"Yes."

"The front gate. How does it actually open? Because I've watched Andrei do it about forty times and I still can't work out whether that pad is a code or a scanner or both, and I'm supposed to be the security in this house, and it's frankly humiliating."

Sergei laughs.

He laughs, and puts his book down, and starts explaining it to me — all of it, the code and the reader and the fact that the camera at the top has a blind spot on the left post that Grigor complained about in the spring and nobody has fixed — in the exhaustive, delighted, uninterruptible way he explains everything.

And I sit on the step in the sun beside a ten-year-old boy who has drawn me into a picture of his family, and I ask him a follow-up question, and I do not let one single thing show on my face.

Chapter 19

Ilya

Los Angeles, 3:52 AM

Iknow before I open my eyes, because the house is the wrong temperature.

A door has been open somewhere for a while. Not long — an hour, perhaps less — but long enough that the air on this floor has changed, and I have slept in defended buildings for twenty-five years and my body notices that before my mind is available to be consulted.

The bed is empty.