Page 7 of Secret Baby of the Bratva
The kneeling man says another rush of words, the sound of someone throwing everything out of a burning house to see if anything lands safely. He speaks a name that means nothing to me yet. He closes his eyes on the last syllable as if that might soften whatever lands next.
Dimitri doesn’t soften. He speaks again, and this time I catch the shape of English. He chooses it not for me, because he can’t know I’m here; he chooses it because there’s an economy to being understood without effort when you intend to end a conversation.
“You had your chance.”
The sound that follows swallows the rest of the air. It isn’t as loud as my imagination made gunshots when I was a kid and thought danger arrived with a thunderclap. It’s louder inside a small room than your eardrums expect.
The shock carries through the door and knocks balance loose. I flinch hard enough that my shoulder knocks the hinge. The kneeling man’s body goes forward without drama, a livingshape becoming weight. The concrete answers with a thud that feels wrong in my bones. Copper floods the air.
A sound escapes me that isn’t a scream. It’s smaller and more treacherous, a breath hitched sharp enough to cut the quiet. I slap a hand over my mouth a second too late.
His head turns toward the door so fast I understand that stillness and speed live close together in him. The movement isn’t theatrical. It’s efficient. His gaze finds the opening, takes in the narrow slice of hall, and lands on me.
Every part of me tries to move in a different direction. My heel scrapes on the seam where carpet meets tile. The clipboard tilts. My pulse hammers against the line of my dress like it might bruise me from inside.
The room tightens, though I’m not in it, and the corridor narrows with that odd architectural trick fear plays. My eyes are dry and too wide. I can see the tendons on the back of my hand where it still touches the frame.
He steps toward the doorway. The gun hangs in his hand, not pointed, not hidden. The way he carries it reads as ownership rather than threat, which makes something cold reach under my ribs and squeeze. His face is composed. Not bored, not angry, not anything I can quickly name and file. The calm looks heavier up close.
Words jam in my throat. I try anyway. “I was looking for a file.” The sentence comes out rough and quiet and completely wrong for the moment. I hear how foolish it sounds and want to claw it back into my mouth.
He doesn’t look at the clipboard. He looks at me the way he looked at the exits this afternoon, like a point on a map that matters now. The door, tender to the first bump, obliges my unsteady grip and swings a little wider.
The body on the floor becomes undeniable. The smell becomes a fact I can’t pack away behind glass. I stumble back a step to keep my balance, heel catching, breath tripping.
I’ve seen injuries before in photographs and once in real life when a cyclist wiped out on the street outside the gallery and took skin off both knees, but I’ve never watched life leave a person’s body. The difference between those realities draws a hard line in my head that I know will never fade.
His voice carries into the corridor without any need to raise it. “Stay where you are.”
I stop because the command lands on my nervous system like a weight. It doesn’t sound shouted or cruel. It sounds like a decision that has already been made, and my body obeys before my brain remembers I’m the kind of person who argues with authority for sport.
The ring in my ears from the shot refines into a high thread that I might carry for days. I keep my eyes on his because every instinct says that looking away invites the worst version of this moment.
A tiny drop works loose from the edge of his cuff and falls to the concrete. The sound is too small to hear, but my mind hears it anyway. The kneeling man doesn’t move now. The world has the weird brightness it gets when adrenaline smashes into it, edges too sharp, colors pulled clean.
The smell of oil and iron fixes in my nose so firmly I can taste it. I swallow against nausea that crawls up with a tide’s patience.
I want to think of something clever to say. I want to ask a question that buys me time or suggests I haven’t seen anything worth remarking on. My thoughts are all noise and static. Theonly sentence that makes it to the front of the line is useless. I hold it back with my teeth and breathe through my nose.
He crosses the last of the distance into the doorway. The barrel of the gun points at the floor, but a thing doesn’t need to be aimed at you to be the center of gravity. He fills the threshold without needing to touch the frame. The light behind him flattens his suit into a sharper black and cuts a clean line at his cheek. His eyes are colder than they were in the gallery under soft bulbs. They were attentive there.
They are something else now. They calculate.
“Turn around,” he says.
I don’t. I can’t tell if defiance roots me or fear pins me, and maybe there’s no difference between them right now. My fingers tighten on the clipboard until the edge bites my palm. If I run, he will catch me. If I scream, the wrong people will arrive, or no one will.
I should wish for security to round the corner with batons and rehearsed speeches about restricted areas. I donotwish for that. I don’t want their names in any story that has his.
He reads my refusal and does not repeat himself. The quiet has its own shape now, heavy and inevitable. The storm outside lashes the window at the end of the corridor with a quick burst that fades again. The gallery on the other side of the wall keeps humming, unaware.
I can almost hear Dana’s laugh again if I strain for it, that cultivated trill that donors love. There’s a whole other world ten paces away where people are still congratulating each other for saving something with money. It might as well be another country.
“I’ll step back into the hall,” I say. “We can talk there.”
His mouth doesn’t move. The smallest motion at one corner might have been a response or the light changing. “No,” he says.
My throat tightens. “I’m not a threat.”
