Page 43 of Captured By the Pakhan

"The boy takes the far room. I take the sitting room floor by the door, because that is where I sleep and you know it." Andrei's face is completely flat. "She takes the second bed in the boy's room. That is the correct posture, and it is the posture we have used in every house for four years, and I'm telling you it is correct because that is what you pay me to tell you."

"And if I decline?"

"Then you decline." A pause. "But you will have declined the advice of your head of security in front of the person the advice concerns, and I would like that noted."

Nobody moves.

I stand there with my bag in my hand and my ears going hot and the very strong sense of being an item on an agenda, and the truth is that Andrei is right — it is the correct posture, it's what I'd recommend, and if anybody had asked me I'd have said the same thing.

Nobody asks me.

Ilya doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't move. He looks at Andrei for a long moment, and then he says, "Noted," and that's all, and the word does something to the temperature of the room.

Andrei holds it for two seconds. Then he picks up his bag, walks into the far bedroom, and closes the door.

And Ilya turns and looks at me, and he doesn't say a single thing, and he doesn't have to, because the entire allocation is standing in the room with us.

"That was ugly," I say.

"Yes."

"He's right, you know. Tactically. He's completely right."

"I know."

"Then why⁠—"

"Because there is one door to that suite and it opens onto a corridor," Ilya says, "and if somebody comes through it at four in the morning, I would like the two people in this building who can actually fight to be at opposite ends of it, and not stacked in the same room with my son between them."

It's a good answer.

It's such a good answer that it takes me until I'm standing in the second bedroom, alone, with my bag on the bed and the door shut, to notice the shape of what's missing from it.

He gave me a tactical justification.

He gave it to me unprompted, in a lowered voice, after Andrei left the room — and a man who is only making a security decision does not stand in a hotel suite explaining himself to a woman who did not ask.

I sit down on the edge of the bed.

Through the wall, I can hear the shower start.

Chapter 12

Raven

Salina, Kansas, 10:40 PM

He comes out of the bathroom in a towel, and I immediately realize I have made a tactical error somewhere in the last twenty minutes, but I can't identify which one.

I'm sitting on the edge of the bed with a bottle of water I don't want, fully dressed, boots still on, because I decided about forty minutes ago that I was going to be exactly as professional as this situation demanded, and I have been executing it beautifully.

Then he crosses the room to his bag, and I stop executing anything.

Because I have seen this man in a shirt for twelve days and I had a theory, and the theory was wrong in the direction of underestimating.

He is enormous. Not gym-enormous — there's nothing decorative about it. It's the build of a man who has done physical work for twenty-five years and never once stopped, all shoulder and back, and there's a softness low on the ribs that a vain man would have starved off, and he clearly does not care.

And he's written on.