"That would be my read," David says. "Yes."
I think about that for the length of the elevator ride and the walk through the lobby and the moment before Maksim pulls away from the curb, and what I think is that Pavel has been building this for eight months, that the Koshkins are a piece of it, that Yarina Koshkin walking into my club on the night Pavel shot Mikhail is not a coincidence I am willing to file as one, and that somewhere in this city a woman who has been running for thirty-seven months is running again because someone told the right people where to look.
"It never is," I say.
Maksim drives. The location pins on my phone show two moving points — Alex, northwest and fast, taking the long way home,the way she always does when she's afraid, the way she varied her route to the grocery store when she felt my eyes on her and didn't know yet what to do about them. And behind her, steady and patient, someone else. Gaining slowly. Not rushing, which means they're not trying to catch her yet, they're following her, which means they want to know where she goes, which means they don't have the address yet, which means we have a window that is closing.
She is running.
She has been running for thirty-seven months, and she made a promise to a twelve-year-old that she was done running, and now she is running again with her jacket and her bag and her phone going unanswered, and I am three minutes behind her in a car, and the cold, quiet monster within me has been awakened since the moment Rosa called, and it is not going back to sleep. Not until she is safe.
Nikita Koshkin is going to find out what it costs to come for what is mine. He just doesn't know it yet.
Chapter Twelve
Alex
The inside of apartment 4D is nothing like I expected. It's large — larger than 4C, like the building was designed with a hierarchy of space in mind. Sparse, too, in the way of places that have been furnished by someone other than the person living in them, everything chosen for function and quality rather than for any particular feeling.
There's nothing personal on the surface. No photographs, no objects that belong to a life rather than a room. Just clean lines and expensive materials, and the specific quality of space that belongs to a man who has not yet decided to occupy it as anything other than a position.
Victor takes off his jacket, drops it on a chair, and looks at me. I stand in the middle of his living room with my own jacket still on and my bag still on my shoulder and the note that's been in my pocket for days —Moya Sasha— pressing against my hip through the fabric, and I look back.
"How much do you know?" I say.
"Enough," he says. "But I want to hear it from you."
"Why?"
"Because David gives me facts," he says. "And I want more than facts."
I look at him for a long moment. He is standing with his arms at his sides and his expression doing the thing it does — not quite readable, not quite closed, somewhere in between. The one that says he will only wait so long for answers, and he means it.
The apartment is quiet around us. I’m both relieved and utterly rocked to be standing in the apartment of the Pakhan of the Russian mafia in my work clothes with someone three blocks behind me who knows my real name. Truly not knowing which one of the two to be more worried about.
Reluctantly, I take off my bag. Set it on the chair beside his jacket.
"My name. Before," I say. "Was Yarina. Yarina Koshkin." I say it out loud for the first time in thirty-seven months, and it lands in the room with a weight I didn't anticipate.
"I was a part of the Koshkin family from the time I was eighteen. Little more than domestic staff. Which means you do whatyou're told and you don't ask questions about anything you see." I look out the window as the memories bleed through.
"Nikita Koshkin is a very hard man. The kind who believes that people in his house are his in the same way his furniture is his. Property. To be used and maintained and discarded according to his needs."
Victor says nothing. He is watching me, listening, not breaking the moment with questions.
"Evie's mother worked in the house before me," I say. "She died when Evie was two. An accident, supposedly," I look at my hands. "I don't believe it was an accident. I have never believed it was an accident, I spent six years in that house watching Nikita. I know what he is capable of. I know what the people who work for him are capable of.”
"No," Victor says, quietly, finally breaking his silence. "Neither do I."
I look at him. He meets my eyes and holds them, and there is something in his face that is not pity — I have never been able to tolerate pity, and he seems to know this without being told — but something adjacent to it that has more weight and less condescension.
"She was two when her mother died," I say. "And after that she was just — there. In the house. Nikita's daughter, technically, but with no status, no protection, no one whose job it was to make sure she was alright. She was just there, the way thefurniture was there, and Nikita treated her the way he treated everything he owned that wasn't useful enough to justify proper maintenance."
I stop. The words for the next part have always lived in a place I don't open often, stored carefully, the way you store things that have edges. "He hurt her. Not consistently, not with any particular system. Just — when it suited him. When she was inconvenient. When she was too loud or too quiet or present in the wrong room at the wrong moment."
I force my voice to stay level. "I watched it happen for years before I decided I wasn't going to watch it anymore."
Victor takes a slow breath. I watch him take it — the deliberateness of it, the control he applies to his own responses, the way I apply control to mine, two people who have learned that reaction is a liability and have built systems around it.
