Page 12 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Ninety days," I echo.

"Ninety days."

"I want a copy of that file. The original routing, not a screenshot."

"Acceptable."

"And I don't work for you. I work for the kid. If those two things ever point in different directions, I'm siding with him."

A smug shadow moves behind his eyes.

"Agreed," he says, and stands, and holds the door open for me like we've just concluded a dinner meeting.

I walk out into the cold with my legs unsteady under me, and I'm four steps onto the grass when he says it.

"One condition."

I stop.

"If harm comes to my son while he is in your care," Ilya says, perfectly pleasant, "the ninety days end that day."

"And then what?"

He looks at me for a long moment, then he smiles, and I understand that he has been waiting the entire conversation not to answer this question.

"You are the one with three commendations," he says. "You tell me."

Chapter 4

Raven

Yaroslav Estate, 9:40 AM

Andrei Dudin walks me through the house the way a man walks a dog he did not agree to look after.

He's enormous. Six four, maybe more, and built like a door, with ink running up out of his collar and down over the backs of both hands, and he has said perhaps forty words to me since he collected me from the cabin at half eight.

"Kitchen." Forty-one.

"I can see it's a kitchen."

"Camera there. There. Nothing in the pantry." He's already walking. "Dining room."

"Also self-evident."

He doesn't slow down.

The house is bigger than it looked from the tree line — the front is cedar and stone and country charm, and about sixty feet back it stops being charming and starts being a building somebody thought about. The rear windows are triple-glazed and set in steel. The doors are steel. There's a room off the utility corridor with no handle on the outside that he walks straight past without comment, and I don't ask, and he knows I noticed, and that's fine.

"Upstairs." He takes them two at a time. "Boy's room. Your room, next to it. Connecting door. It stays unlocked."

"Whose call is that?"

"His father's."

"And if I want it locked?"

Andrei stops on the landing and looks down at me for the first time since the kitchen.