They dragged Katya toward one of the smaller buildings, her feet scraping furrows in the filthy snow.
“Move.” The guard pushed Harper toward the main building.
Katya’s red hair disappeared through a doorway across the compound, bright against drab concrete, and then the door closed and she was gone.
They took Harper to an office on the second floor, up bare wooden stairs, filth grinding under her bare feet. A vicious shove sent her staggering into a room that might have been the head teacher’s office once.
The room was orderly. Desk, filing cabinets, a lamp with a green glass shade that threw a sickly light across papers and folders. The ordinary furniture of administration in a building where women were bought and sold.
He was already there.
Sitting behind the desk with his hands folded. Average build. Average face. Clean shirt, dark jacket, no insignia. He was someone you’d pass on the street without a second thought. Nothing about him stood out. That was the worst part. The ordinariness. To a man like him, trading in human beings didn’t require monstrousness. It just required indifference.
The man adjusted a pen so it sat perfectly parallel to the edge of the desk, then leaned forward, hands steepled. “Harper Fox. You may call me Stepan. Please sit.” He gestured to the plastic chair on the other side of the desk.
Harper shook her head, but rough hands on her shoulders forced her to sit. The plastic was rough under her thighs.
He pushed his cuff up and checked his watch. “Who came for you?”
This isn’t about me.
She said nothing and kept her expression blank, her face lowered. The posture of a woman who was frightened and containing it, which was exactly what she was.
“The man at the guesthouse.” He unfolded his hands and stood up, then moved to look out the window. “Ex-military. Skilled enough to eliminate four of my men.” A pause that he letsit in the room like smoke. “In his underwear,” he added, as if that detail offended him most.
Something shifted behind his expression. A recalibration. Pav had surprised him.
“How many more are coming?”
She said nothing.Let him sit in it.
He watched her a moment longer, then sighed. “You’re very calm. For someone in your position.”
She didn’t answer.
A flicker crossed his face. “I prefer that.” He moved back to the desk, resting his hands lightly on the surface. “Panicked people are unpredictable.” He paused. “And unpredictable people make poor investments.”
“My family has resources.” She used the tone she used in the ER when she needed a patient to understand the gravity of what she was telling them. “The man you encountered was the first. Not the last.”
Others might come for her. Fox. Zak. She kept her chin lifted and prayed she wasn’t lying.
“Good.” He sat and leaned back in his chair. “Then we wait.”
He wasn’t worried anymore. “Take her.”
The guards stepped forward, flanking her, hands on her arms.
His voice followed her. “The man who came for you. When he comes again—and I think he will—he won’t leave this compound.”
The door closed behind her. He hadn’t been calculating risk. He’d been calculating opportunity. They weren’t hiding from Pav. They wanted him.
She wasn’t a hostage. She was bait.
This was a trap set with the one thing guaranteed to bring Pav through the door—her.
They marched her up another flight of stairs and then along a corridor lined with classroom doors. The guard opened a door and pushed her through into a room, concrete and freezing. The door slammed behind her, no handle on the inside. Keys turned the lock.
If he was alive, Pav was walking into a trap designed to kill him. There was nothing she could do to stop it.
