I go back to the corridor for my bucket and my supplies because the alternative is finding out what Pavel was about to say before he was interrupted, and I have Evie at home. And a promise I made to her that I intend to keep.
My hands are shaking when I come back.
I make them work. I have cleaned up things I didn't want to clean up before. I have done it the same way I do everything that needs doing, regardless of whether I want to do it — mechanically, without looking at it too directly, without letting my brain fully name what my hands are touching. But the shaking won't stop, and the memories won't stay where I've put them, and the floor of this nightclub keeps trying to become other floors I've kneeled on in other rooms. But I keep pulling myself back, back to this room, this bucket, this task, the specific physical reality of now.
I've seen too many bodies in my life. I was supposed to be done with this. I promised myself I was done with this.
"Your hands," the other man says from somewhere behind and to my left.
"Are fine," I say. "Don't talk to me."
He doesn't say anything else. The silence from his direction is worse than if he'd argued. I'm halfway through when the sirens start.
Distant at first, just a soft whirling sound. Then closer. Then close enough to make the matter urgent. Pavel says something in Russian, and the other man answers. There's a brief exchange I can only partially follow — my Russian has never been particularly good, and three years of not using it hasn't helped. — A quick exchange, and Pavel turns to leave.
“Ukhodi. Ya razberus,” Victor says. Low. Final. Non-negotiable.
Pavel turns to leave.
Just like that. A man with a gun who was considering killing me three minutes ago, and now he's walking fast toward the back of the building, not running but close to it, because whatever the other man said was more compelling than his own judgment. He doesn't look back at me. He doesn't look back at all.
That tells me everything about which of them is actually in charge here. Before Victor moves, he says something else — quieter, not meant for Pavel, maybe not even meant for me. Just two words that I don’t catch cleanly enough to translate.
“Ch?rt voz’mi.”
Then his hand closes around my wrist, and I'm on my feet before my brain has decided to stand up.
"Let go of me," I object.
"This way,” he orders, already moving, pulling me with him through the main floor toward a door I have never used. His grip isn't rough, but it isn't negotiable either, the grip of someone who is not entertaining alternatives.
"I said let go." I try to pull my arm back. His grip doesn't change. "I can walk on my own."
"You can walk on your own in the direction I choose," he barks. "You're mine to deal with now, so do as I say."
"I am not yours?—"
"Tonight you are." He pushes through the door without breaking stride. "You can argue with me later."
The rooms beyond the door are ones I've never seen. Narrow service corridors, plain and functional, the working interior of a building that presents a much more expensive face to the world. He moves through them with the total confidence of someone who knows every turn before he reaches it, no hesitation, no checking, like the layout of this place has been in his memory long enough to become instinct.
"Where are you taking me?" I ask because the silence is worse than talking to him.
"Out."
"Out where specifically?"
"Away from the police, which should be sufficient motivation for you to stop asking questions and keep moving."
I do keep moving. I also keep asking questions, because something about this man makes me want to push back, even when pushing back is demonstrably not in my best interest, which is a new and entirely unwelcome quality to discover about myself at three in the morning.
"How do you know this building so well? I've worked here for four months and I didn't know half of these corridors existed," I demand.
He glances back at me once, just briefly. A tick moves at the edge of his mouth. "Because I built it," he says. "It's my club."
I process this while he takes us through a turn into a corridor so narrow we're nearly shoulder to shoulder, and I become acutely, unhelpfully aware of how much space he takes up, and how little of it that leaves for me.His club.That means the man dragging me along with him is Victor Rozovsky, owner of the Onyx. The private corridors, the passages that don't appear on any floor plan — all of it is his. Which means the body on the floor is his problem, and Pavel is his problem. And I am, for reasons I have not yet been able to fully construct, a problem he has decided to handle personally. Instead of letting Pavel handle me the way he had wanted to.
I should be grateful for that, and I am, I genuinely am, but I am also furious at him in a way I cannot entirely account for.
