Page 19 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Smelled them off the east side and read a lead on a hook. Got the number wrong by one and Andrei's been chewing on it ever since." He watches me carefully as he asks the next question. "Is she pretty?"

"Yeremey."

"It's a simple question.” He opens his hands feigning innocence. “I've read her file. Federal ID photographs are a crime against the human face, so I have no information and a professional curiosity."

"Your professional curiosity has never once been professional."

"You're not answering."

"Your right. I’m not."

"Which," he says comfortably, "is an answer in and of itself. So she is pretty."

I let him have it, because arguing would cost me more sanity than the twelve seconds it will take him to move on to the next topic.

For three days I have been running a business worth half a billion dollars and thinking – at extremally unprecedented intervals mind you – about a woman spitting blood on the floor of my own cabin and smiling at me.

Not the smile of a person being brave. Brave has an effort in it, a visible cost, and there was none — she looked up at me with her lip split and she smiled the way you smile at a man who has just made a mistake he does not know about yet.

A woman who had a window to escape. Who instead spent it on the floor of a strange house with a stranger's child, knowing she’d be caught.

I have gone over the footage enough times now that I have stopped pretending I am looking for tactical information. Still, I can’t wrap my headd around it. She left herself vulnerable, let herself be caught. All to care for a child.

There is no training that recommends that. Only instinct.

She has broken my composure twice now — once in the cabin, and once, three days later, in a corridor at two in the morning when she challenged me ‘Where were you?’. I stood there and let her, and did what I always do. I walked away.

"You've gone somewhere," Yeremey observes.

"Houston." I say, clearing my throught.

"You have absolutely not gone to Houston."

That earns him a stern glare.

He stands, gathering his folder. "Right. I'll have the eleven down to three by Thursday. Try not to shoot anyone before then, we're having a good quarter."

He's at the door when I say it. "Pull everything you can on Raven West’s life."

He stops.

"I have everything on Raven West. I gave you everything on Raven West on Tuesday."

"You gave me the Bureau's version." I turn a pen over on the table. "I want the other one. Where she grew up and who is still alive there. Her mother. Any siblings. Where she banks, where she drinks, what she does on the four days a year she is not working. Every person she has been photographed with." I look up. "Every person she would cross a state line for."

Yeremey doesn’t move. Clearling chewing on my request.

He is a man who is charming for a living and who has, at all times, one expression more than he needs. Right now he has none of them.

"You want a leverage file?"

"Yes."

"Ilya. That's not a background check. That's the file you build on somebody when you want a rope around their neck that you don't have to hold." He comes back two steps into the room. "You have her locked down in the house. You have her name on a federal warrant she can't outrun. You have her boxed in six ways already. What's this really for?"

"She has agreed to ninety days," I say. "People who agree to ninety days leave on the ninety-first."

"So let her leave. She's a temporary bodyguard. What does she actually know that's worth⁠—"