Page 46 of Mafia King’s Dangerous Vow

I step past her toward the study because I need distance before the room asks more from me than I can give. At the doorway, I stop.

“Tamara.”

She turns.

“If you need to move something again, call me.”

For one second, shock crosses her face. Then something almost like laughter breaks through the grief.

“Very fair.”

I leave before I answer.

In the study, I close the door but don’t sit. The room is dark except for the city glow and the faint light from Tamara’s workstation. Her material samples are still spread across one side of my desk. Linen. Stone. Wood. Warm neutral things that don’t belong here yet.

Or maybe they do.

My phone waits beside them. Messages. Threats. Business. I ignore all of it.

Instead, I open the lower drawer and take out the photograph I haven’t looked at in months. Elena in the gallery chair, blanket over her knees, smiling beside the Kandinsky as if she had just won an argument.

She had. She usually did.

I set the photo on the desk and look at her face for a long time.

Tamara did not break it because she didn’t care. She broke it because she was unsettled, trapped, reaching for something she could fix.

I understand that better than I want to.

If I’m not careful, this marriage will keep making her reach for things she was never meant to carry.

I look at Elena’s photograph one more time. Then close the drawer.

Outside, Tamara is still moving through the apartment. Quieter now. More careful.

Not peaceful.

But no longer untouched.

14

THE SOFA STAYS. (ALEKSANDER)

By the time Yuri arrives, Manhattan has disappeared behind sheets of rain.

Igor is already in my office, leaning back in one of the leather chairs, his phone in hand. Yuri closes the door behind him and does not sit.

“Well,” Igor mutters. “That doesn’t look encouraging.”

I set my coffee down slowly. “What did you find?”

Yuri places a thin black folder on the desk. “Kalinin buried it well. Most records were scrubbed or rerouted through shell identities. We only got traction after tracing payments tied to one of his former operatives.”

The folder looks too thin for the damage it is about to do.

Photographs first. A younger Tamara. Eighteen, nineteen at most. Standing outside what seems to be a university building in Moscow or St. Petersburg beside a dark-haired man with his arm around her shoulders. She’s smiling openly in the photo.

I have never seen her that unguarded.