She said she would kill me.
I’ve had grown men beg for their lives in front of me.
I’ve had soldiers, actual soldiers, men who’ve held weapons and used them, go to pieces when I walked into a room.
This girl, zip-tied in the back of my car with a gun two inches from her spine, looked at the serpent on my wrist and told me she was going to kill me with her eyes absolutely dry.
I’ve been thinking about it for six hours.
“You have the face again,” Mike says, from the armchair he has claimed in the corner of my office like he lives here.
I look up from the window and glare at him. “I don’t have a face.”
“Razvan.” He sets down his coffee. “She’s been in the lower level since three this morning. It’s almost ten. You haven’t gone down once, which means you’re either being strategic or you’re hesitating.”
“Strategic,” I grunt. “I’m not hesitating.”
Mike says nothing.
Lyosha has no such restraint.
He’s been in the doorway for the last five minutes, rolling his neck, practically vibrating with the specific energy of a man who has been promised violence and not yet delivered it. “If you’re done being strategic,” he says, “I’m happy to go down and have a cute little conversation with her. She tells me where the file is, we’re done before lunch and the men can take her body out.”
“No.” The words comes out faster than I intend it to. Lyosha raises both eyebrows. Mike, God help him, looks at his coffee to hide something in his expression.
“I’ll do it myself.” I narrow my eyes at Mike.
“Right.” Lyosha sounds genuinely confused. “Then why haven’t you gone down yet?”
“Because I said I’ll do it myself and I’ll do it when I’m ready.”
Lyosha looks between us and leans against the doorframe.
Mike looks at me directly. “I understand the Bratva rule. The debt doesn’t die with the father. I understand it. But Razvan.” He pauses. “You have to admit this feels different. She’s not a soldier. She’s not connected. She’s a girl who lost her father the same way you lost yours, maybe even worse because from the way she was screaming in that street, she was there. She watched it happen.”
“Don’t,” I snap.
“I’m just saying we’re talking about a girl who witnessed her father’s execution and ran into the night with nothing. Viktor’s not gentle, Razvan. We both know what his men do when they’reexecuting. Whatever she saw in that apartment, it wasn’t clean.” He picks up his coffee again. “She’s carrying the same thing you are right now. Just from the other side of it. This has to be complicated.”
“She is the daughter of the man who had my father killed,” I say, each word deliberate. “She ran with files that can take this family apart. There is nothing complicated about this.”
Mike nods slowly and doesn’t push further. That’s the thing about Mike, he says what he needs to say then he lets it land and doesn’t keep poking at it.
I turn from the window. “Where the fuck is Dmitri?”
A pause.
“Asleep,” Mike says, with the specific diplomatic tone of someone not saying everything they know.
“It’s ten in the morning.”
“There were two of them. Possibly three. I stopped asking questions after the second girl walked in last night.”
I stare at him.
“He’s Dmitri,” Mike says, spreading his hands. “What do you expect?”
I leave them to it and head downstairs, moving through the corridor and down the back stairwell without stopping, because if I stop I’ll think about what Mike said and I’ve already decided I’m done thinking about what Mike said.
