Page 10 of Secret Baby of the Bratva
“Already true,” I say. “Try again.”
“It means I should go back to the main hall and pretend I saw nothing.”
“That is a story for children.”
“You shot someone. What answer do you want?”
“The truth. There’s economy in it.”
Her eyes flick to the room and back. She fights the urge to look at the floor again. She fights the urge to vomit. She fights the urge to cry. She holds all of it. That says more about her than her words could. I am not interested in breaking her ina corridor with two men at my back and a body at my feet. A person who will not fold on the first push has more to teach me if I give her room.
I lift my hand a fraction. Petr and Sergei shift their weight and angle their bodies to close the hall completely. She hears them move the way animals hear branches snap in a forest. She knows she is prey in this shape of the world, and something in her still bristles.
“Run,” I say.
She blinks. She looks for the trap inside the single syllable. I give it to her again, quiet and certain.
“Run.”
Confusion flares, then calculation. The part of her that has not had to survive a night like this before wants to believe the permission is real. The part of her that knows how men use hope keeps her feet planted for one more heartbeat. She looks from me to the men at the end of the hall. I tilt two fingers again. The corridor opens by a foot.
She holds my gaze as if that can buy her a second. The defiance shows up again. It does not look like posturing now. It looks like a person who refuses to give a nameless man with a gun the pleasure of watching her beg. The decision arrives in her shoulders before it arrives in her feet.
Annie runs.
Her shoes catch traction; the dress snaps against her legs; the clipboard hugs her ribs hard enough to leave a bruise.
Petr shifts his weight; I raise a palm. Sergei rocks forward by reflex; I turn my head a fraction and he stops. The space opens for her because I let it. She goes past my men with a look that sees their faces and files them with mine. Good. I want her to remember us. Memory is a leash that works from a distance.
Her steps echo and fade into the thicker noise of the event. The building swallows her, the way a city swallows anyone who believes it cares. I lower my hand and let the corridor take its shape again. The air adjusts. The gun smells heavier because the running is gone.
Petr looks at me and does not hide the question in his face. “You’re letting her go?”
“I told her to run,” I say. “I didn’t say I’d chase.”
He waits for the part that justifies it. I let the room answer him for a beat, then give him what he needs. “You remove a civilian in a building with cameras and donors, and tomorrow the news feeds on it for a week. You let her run, and you follow the story she chooses to tell. You learn who hears it. You learn who she calls when she thinks she’s alone.”
Sergei exhales a sound that might be relief. He is too green to understand that we did not choose the easy thing. I let him keep the relief; I do not have a use for it.
“Clean this,” I say, and nod toward the floor. “No noise. No trail. He is a mistake that never happened.”
They move at once. The crate against the wall has supplies for mistakes that never happened. I tilt my head once at the camera in the hall. The red light blinks.
I’ve already looped the feed for this wing; it will give security a polite, uneventful corridor to review if they think of reviewing at all. I step back into the room and holster the pistol.
The weight finds its home under my jacket. The air is colder in here than in the hall. The body is a problem for men with gloves. The information he gave me is a problem for men with quiet cars and a list of doors to knock on before dawn.
I look down at the concrete and feel nothing. That is not bravado. Feeling nothing is the discipline that keeps aperson like me from turning into one more liability. I have paid attention to what the years have taken; I have kept the parts that serve me and cut the rest.
What I do feel is a pressure behind the sternum that carries a different shape. The small woman in the hall with the knife-bright stare has roots in it. Interest is not a thing I indulge without counting the cost.
Petr crouches and works; Sergei bags what he should. I pull my phone and send two messages.
One to Milan:eyes on the curator when she leaves her floor.
One to a number that never receives anything but orders:a car two blocks from the gallery, off-camera approach, visual only.
My thumbs move without hesitation. There is comfort in competent men doing necessary work, in messages that go out and return with the answers I ask for.
