Page 197 of Mile High Ruin

The video was grainy, pulled from a club camera that had never been designed to preserve faces clearly, but I recognized her before the image settled. Sloane stood near the bar with a drink in her hand, dark hair loose around her shoulders, laughing at something someone had said.

Then Viktor Petrov moved into frame. He stood close to her. He leaned toward her while she spoke. She looked up at him and smiled.

I watched the clip once.

Then again.

My stomach turned harder each time.

“We believe she met him there,” Iosef said.

I kept my eyes on the screen.

Petrov touched Sloane’s arm. She didn’t move away.

“That’s where he turned her,” Iosef continued.

Marek gestured toward the footage. “If he approached her before you ever met her, then the rest begins to make sense.”

I remember sitting there with my hands flat against the desk, trying to find one piece that didn’t fit. “Do we know what they discussed?”

“No.”

“Do we know whether she contacted him after this?”

“Not yet.”

“Then we know nothing.”

Iosef’s expression barely changed. “We know she lied about knowing him.”

That was the part I couldn’t argue with.

Now, standing across the street from her apartment months later, I look at the dark window and wonder how much of what I remember belongs to me and how much belongs to Petrov.

Anton is still speaking when movement behind the curtain changes again, but this time I force myself to turn away from the window. Standing here achieves nothing except giving me another opportunity to remember what it felt like to wake with her beside me and another reason to hate the man I became after she disappeared.

The months after the attack were not kind to anyone who gave me a reason to doubt them.

I stopped pretending patience was a virtue. Men who had spent years relying on my willingness to negotiate discovered that willingness had limits. Two businesses connected to Petrov disappeared beneath investigations that began with information nobody could trace back to me. A warehouse outside Constanța burned after its owners refused to tell Anton who had been using it. Three men who had taken money to compromise security at my home were found within eleven days, and by the time I finished with the last one, Marek stopped asking whether I wanted him alive for questioning.

I wanted answers. What happened to the men afterward ceased to interest me.

There had been a time when I distinguished between necessary violence and anger. For several months, I stopped caring about the difference. Work became easier that way.

If a man lied, I assumed the worst version was true until he proved otherwise. If someone hesitated when asked about Petrov, I treated the hesitation as knowledge. Agreements that would once have taken weeks were settled in hours because everyone understood I was no longer interested in arguments about what was reasonable.

They started watching me differently. Even my own men.

Anton never said anything about it.

Marek did, once.

I broke his nose.

He came to breakfast the next morning, looked at me across the table and said he still considered himself correct. I didn’t hit him again, and that was perhaps the closest I came to admitting he was.

None of it found Mila.