Page 14 of Vicious Doll

The thing is, I can’t put my finger on it, it’s been bugging me since the botched Harlow sting, but why is there something about Volkov that feels familiar?

It’s an itch in my brain I can’t scratch.

The answer sure as hell isn’t just lying around for the taking. Until I get answers that make more sense, I’m sticking with my current travel partners.

Where Volkov is all sleek predator, precise movements and calculating eyes, Mikhail is raw power—broad-shouldered, neck thick as my thigh, silent as a fucking execution chamber. He moves through rooms with the quiet deliberateness of someone who's broken more necks than he's bothered to count.

I catch myself staring at him while he cleans weapons at the kitchen table, those massive fingers surprisingly delicate with the gun parts. His fingernails are impeccable—not manicured, just meticulously clean. A killer who washes his hands before and after the job.

"You keep looking at him like that, he might think you want something," Volkov says, materializing behind me with that fucking ghost-walk of his. Three days and I still haven't heard him approach once.

"Maybe I do," I reply, not bothering to deny it. Subtlety died somewhere around the time I shot a man in the chest to escape Killion's extraction squad.

"Mikhail doesn't talk much," Volkov says, lighting up another cigarette. The man's lungs must look like fucking coal mines. "But he understands everything."

Something flickers in Mikhail's eyes—those flat, gray pools that register everything and reveal nothing. He doesn't look up from the disassembled Glock, but his movements slow fractionally. He's listening.

"How long have you worked together?" I ask, pouring three fingers of vodka into a chipped mug with a faded hammer and sickle logo.

"Eight years," Volkov replies, taking a seat at the rickety table covered with surveillance photos of Harlow and building schematics. "Since Odessa."

The way he says Odessa—like it's a scar rather than a city—tells me there's a story there, one written in blood and probably several missing persons reports.

"And before that?" I press, perching on the windowsill. The glass is frosted with ice crystals, the world outside an indistinct blur of gray and white. We could be anywhere in Eastern Europe—Poland, Ukraine, Belarus. Volkov hasn't bothered to tell me, and I haven't bothered to ask. Geography matters less than the distance between me and Killion's reach.

"Before that, he was Spetsnaz," Volkov says, exhaling smoke. "Before that, nothing worth mentioning."

Mikhail's hands pause over the weapon for a microsecond. Another tell, so slight I'd have missed it without Killion's brutal training in reading bodily subtleties.

"Bullshit," I say, sipping vodka that tastes like industrial solvent. "Everyone's got an origin story."

Mikhail finally looks up, eyes meeting mine with an intensity that makes my skin prickle. He says something in Russian—low, rough, the syllables like gravel churning in a cement mixer.

Volkov actually laughs, a sharp bark of sound that's over before it really begins. "He says you ask too many questions for someone who betrayed her handler yesterday."

"Didn't betray shit," I snap. "Can't betray someone who was using me for bait from day one."

"Is same meaning," Mikhail speaks, his accent thick as molasses, each word carefully formed like he's testing its weight. "Loyalty gone. Trust broken. Only matters who breaks first."

There's something disarming about his simplicity. No mindfucks, no psychological warfare. Just brutal pragmatism wrapped in muscle and scar tissue. He wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t good-looking either, somewhere in between.

"And who broke first with you two?" I ask, gesturing between them. "You seem awful cozy for a couple of stone-cold killers."

Volkov's eyes narrow, that calculating gaze assessing how much to reveal. "War makes strange bedfellows," he finally says. "And enemies of the same monster become...convenient allies."

"Killion," I say, the name hanging between us like an unexploded bomb.

"Killion," Volkov confirms, crushing his cigarette in a makeshift ashtray that started life as a Soviet-era military medal. "And Harlow. And all they represent."

"Which is what, exactly?" I drain my vodka, welcoming the burn. "Because three weeks ago, I was just a housewife looking for cheap thrills, and now I'm in the fucking Kremlin's basement plotting revenge with Russian Murder Incorporated."

Mikhail actually smiles at that—just a brief tug at the corner of his mouth, but it transforms his face from stone monument to something almost human. He says something else in Russian, longer this time.

"He says you are funny for American," Volkov translates. "Most are too...how you say...self-righteous? Even when killing."

"Nothing righteous about me," I laugh, the sound sharp and bitter. "Just trying to figure out which devil gets my soul this week."

I pour another drink, liquid courage for questions I shouldn't ask. "Vahnya—your wife, what happened?” I ask Volkov, watching his face freeze into that perfect mask of nothingness.

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