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Pavel’s face, already pale, turned a sickly gray. Zhoglo smiled inwardly. The fool, after all the expensive mistakes he had made, the money he had cost. Thinking he could wiggle out of his punishment. Thinking he could whisk his wife and his remaining son out of danger.
No place in the world was beyond Vadim Zhoglo’s reach.
“I had them bring Marya and Misha to my home so that my men could keep them safe for you,” Zhoglo soothed. “Rest easy. They are my pampered guests. I was sure you would want to reprove the cowardly bitch yourself. Abandoning you in your time of need. The perfidy of women. Mikhail? Is the line open?”
“Yes, Vor. One moment, while Aleksei calls the woman to come to the computer,” the man said.
The digital image disintegrated into a muddled soup of pixels, and then slowly resolved into the image of Marya Cherchenko, holding her little son on her lap. Her eyes were hollowed, her mouth flat and bluish in her thin face.
How odd the way perceptions changed, Zhoglo mused. He had remembered considering Marya a beautiful woman, but now she looked drained, almost old. Skin stretched over her bony face, her hair was dull and lank. It was the way of all flesh, he thought, with a flash of melancholy.
The little boy was likewise miserable. His eyes were enormous and shadowed in his pinched face.
Pavel stared at them. They stared back.
“Papa?” the little boy whispered.
Zhoglo looked on, well pleased, and wiggled his fingers in the pockets of his finely tailored linen pants. The other men in the room all had the studied blankness one might expect, as they watched their colleague’s punishment. But he could feel the general level of tension in the room. It was very high. The same thought, in all the men’s heads—he could see it as if it were stamped in neon on their foreheads.This could be me.
He made sure that these moments were public. His men needed to know what would happen if they failed him. If they did not give their best, and more than their best, in his service. Each of those men were desperately grateful to be in his good graces right now. Eager to please, to ingratiate himself. Each would bring any hint of betrayal to him, and lay it at his feet, like a cat bringing a dead rodent to its master.
Just as it should be. Everything in its proper place. The boundaries that he established kept these men safe, supported their families, gave their world structure.
He was, after all, responsible for sustaining his slice of a vast shadow economy. Without him, tens of thousands would starve and die.
Fear was a useful tool. He had learned that as a child on the streets of Kyiv. A leader had to be cruel and ruthless. To use fear like a surgical instrument to remove rot before it spread and killed. It was his responsibility to wield that tool. Indeed, it was his sacred duty.
And if he also enjoyed it, well…who would begrudge a burdened, hardworking man of business an occasional small pleasure?
“Are you having an affair, Becca?”
Marla’s sharp voice made Becca jump. The cell phone in her hand thudded down on to the computer keyboard with a rattling clatter. “Excuse me?” she asked, flushing hotly. “What makes you say that?”
Marla rolled her eyes, her lips curving into a tight, mirthless smile. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Could it be the fact that you’ve just checked your cell phone for text messages for the tenth time in the past eight minutes? Or maybe the fact that you got to work today at 10:25 AM—”
“I told you, Marla, I had to rent a car! I called you this morning to let you know! The place opened at nine, and it took forever to fill out all the paperwork!”
“Or could it be the ninety-minute lunch hour?” Marla continued, as if Becca had not spoken. “The one that involved a trip to the mall, and a stop at…” She leaned over and neatly snagged the shopping bag out from under the desk, where Becca had tried to discreetly stow it. “Ah. I might have known. Victoria’s Secret. And what have we here?” She pulled out a handful of intimate items, labels still dangling from them. A flesh-toned, ribbon-trimmed bustier, an insubstantial matching garter belt, long stockings with embroidered back seams. “Good God, Becca.”
“That is private!” Becca yanked her lingerie back and stuffed it into the bag. “It’s none of your business!”
“Well, when you start taking advantage of office time to run your own extremely personal errands, I’m afraid that it is.”
Becca started to fume. “Marla, I can count on the fingers of one hand the times that I’ve taken an actual lunch break since I started this job three years ago!”
“Yes. I know.” Marla wrapped her leathery, salon-tanned arms over her chest and pursed her lips, looking angry and worried. “You’re usually so precise. I would even say perfectionist. Which is why this erratic behavior jumps out at me. Like leaving Jerome’s vacation home wide open to the elements? And losing his keys…where was it again? In the woods, for God’s sake? Not bothering to call when you got back to town? Not bothering to come to work? For days!”
“I told you,” Becca said tightly. “I am terribly sorry about what happened at Jerome’s house. I had…I had a momentary lapse of reason.”
That was the best she could do as an explanation, but it didn’t satisfy Marla. Becca racked her brains trying to think of a way to justify what had happened, but everything would sound lame and forced. And false. The truth was untellable.
Hey, Marla. She hadn’t locked Jerome’s door or brought back his keys because she’d been running for her life from a bloodthirsty villain. Accompanied by a sex god commando who was meeting her this very night to ravish her in a hotel room. Who had begged her not to notify the police, or else she’d die a grisly death. Uh-huh. Yes. Of course.
She had a sneaky premonition that juicy, colorful tale wouldn’t be quite the thing to guarantee her continued job security at the club.
“Hmmph,” Marla huffed. “I certainly hope that the lapse is momentary. And that it won’t happen again. I would be justified in firing you for what happened this past week. The reason I haven’t done so yet is because you’ve always been reliable before, and you’ve been through a great deal, what with that awful situation with that scum ex-fiancé of yours. But I don’t give third chances. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes,” Becca said tightly. “Quite.”
