“I imagine you have questions,” he said.
“I imagine you have a speech,” I answered.
The smile widened slightly.
“Composed,” he said, the same word Mikhail had told me–the word he had apparently used about me on the phone the previous night, which told me the phone call had happened, which told me Mikhail had received the communication and was therefore doing whatever he was doing in response.
He was doing something. I kept this in the part of my mind that did not show on my face and looked at Volkov with the steady eyes and waited.
“I want you to understand,” he said, “that you’re here because of the value you represent. Not as punishment, not as cruelty. You’ve done nothing that I hold against you personally.” He paused. “You were placed in an impossible position and you made the choices available to you. I respect that.”
“You engineered the impossible position,” I said.
“I created conditions,” he said. “You made choices within them. That distinction matters to me.” He looked at me with what might have been genuine consideration. “I’m not a man who enjoys hurting people who don’t deserve it. You are here because your husband has something I want and your presence is the most efficient path to the conversation.”
“What does he have that you want?”
“The eastern properties,” he said. “Three casino operations and the laundering infrastructure connected to them that your husband has been systematically dismantling for the past two weeks.” He paused. “A conversation is all I need. Terms. Anegotiated arrangement that allows both operations to continue functioning.” He spread his hands slightly. “This doesn’t need to be violent. I have never wanted it to be violent.”
I looked at him.
He was lying about the last part. Or not lying–believing his own framing, the specific kind of self-deception available to men who had constructed a narrative of themselves as reluctant participants in the violence their decisions produced. The convoy had been violent. The coercion had been violent in every sense that mattered. The debt trap had been a form of violence with paperwork instead of weapons.
He did not experience it as violence because he was at sufficient remove from the mechanism.
“He won’t negotiate,” I said.
“No,” Volkov agreed pleasantly. “Not willingly. But men with attachments do things that men without attachments would not do. That’s not a weakness in Mikhail specifically–it’s a feature of being human.” He looked at me with the appraising quality. “You are the attachment he didn’t plan to have. I find that—” He paused. “Instructive.”
“You’re going to use me to make him choose,” I said.
“I’m going to create a situation in which the costs of refusing to negotiate become legible to him,” he said. “That’s all.” He paused. “You are the instrument of that legibility.”
I was quiet for a moment.
“People will die,” he said. “When he comes.”
I said nothing.
“I’m not saying that to manipulate you,” he said, and the specific quality of honesty in his voice was the most unsettling thingabout him–the fact that he was, in his way, telling me the truth. “I’m saying it because it’s relevant to what I’m asking you to understand.” He leaned forward slightly. “People are going to die because you exist in his life. Not because of anything you did or anything he did. Because the attachment exists and I have chosen to use it.” He paused. “I want you to sit with that. Not as a threat. As a fact.”
He stood.
“I’ll leave you to think,” he said. “We’ll speak again tonight.”
He left.
I sat with it. Not because he had asked me to. But it was true that people would die because I existed in Mikhail’s life. The convoy had already demonstrated this. Whatever Mikhail was currently moving toward was going to demonstrate it further.
Not the captivity. Not the room or the guard or the locked door or the window that looked east over the desert with no exit in it. The captivity was a practical problem with a practical solution that was currently in motion and would arrive when it arrived. The weight was the other thing–the knowledge that every person who put themselves between me and the threat was doing so because I had allowed myself to become the thing Volkov had constructed me to be.
The attachment.
I pressed my hands flat on my thighs and looked at the desert and let myself think about him.
Not the Pakhan. Not the operational man, the controlled surface, the grey eyes that swept rooms and catalogued everything in them. The other version–the man in the library chair at two in the morning, awake when he could have beensleeping, his arm around my shoulders because the space between us had needed to be smaller.
The man who had kept me. Not in the possessive sense of kept–in the other sense. Had held on. Had done the accounting with his thirty years of a rule that did not allow exceptions and had found, in the specific architecture of what had happened, something that the rule had not been designed for and had applied his judgment rather than the rule’s automation.
