Page 83 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Ilya." Yeremey's voice, quiet. "Four men. Tonight. Nobody speaks to her. It is done."

I sit on the edge of a dining table in a rented house with a hole through my side, and my hands are not steady.

"There is a version of this," Yeremey says after a while, "where she finds out. That you had eyes on her mother from the second day, and that the same eyes are what kept her alive. And she isn't going to be able to hold those two things in the same hand, Ilya. Not from you. Not after the drawer."

"I know."

"Do you want me to lie about the dates?"

And I sit there for a moment, and I genuinely consider it, and I want that on the record as well.

"No," I say. "She has had enough people arrange the truth for her convenience. She can have the whole of it and decide what I am."

Chapter 22

Raven

Washington, D.C., 6:20 PM

Logan's apartment is on Q Street, and it is exactly as bad as I expected.

Third floor, one bedroom, a couch that has been in four apartments, and a window that looks onto a street with parking on both sides and eleven vantage points I can see without moving my head.

I don't say any of that, because he's already risked his career and I'm not going to critique the accommodation.

"Bathroom's through there. There's a towel on the rail that's clean; everything else on the floor isn't." He drops a bag on the counter. "There's clothes in the bedroom — my sister left a bag here at Christmas and never came back for it; she's about your size and considerably better dressed."

"Logan—"

"Don't."

"I'm going to say it anyway. What you did in that building⁠—"

"Was the minimum," he says, "and if you're about to tell me it was brave, I'd like you to consider how it feels to be told that after five weeks of doing nothing."

That shuts me up.

He's changed since the field office. In the interview room, he was shaking. Here he is, very calm and very fast, putting food on a counter and talking about logistics like a man who has decided to be useful because the alternative is thinking.

"Forty-eight hours," he says. "That's what I need. I've got a friend at OPR who owes me, and I'm going to walk her through the signature block on that classification and let her draw her own conclusion, because the second I say his name out loud to anybody in that building it's over. Forty-eight hours and I can have somebody above him looking at the paper."

"And in the meantime I sit in your apartment."

"In the meantime you sit in my apartment." He looks up. "Raven. Say it back to me."

"I sit in your apartment."

"You are the worst liar I have ever met in my life," Logan says, "which is genuinely remarkable in a woman who does undercover work."

He goes out to get food at seven.

The second the door closes, I am standing at his window with my back against the wall, working the street.

He's wrong about forty-eight hours. That's the thing. He's wrong, and he can't be told, because his arithmetic is Bureau arithmetic — paper, process, somebody above him, an OPR friend who owes him. It's the correct approach for a corrupt Assistant Director.

I know Danesi signed my classification, I know he ran a man on Bureau credentials without a case number, and I know somebody put a welfare check on my mother's house two days ago and closed it inside the hour.

That's enough.