Page 8 of Secret Baby of the Bratva
“That isn’t the point.”
Everything inside me wants to say that it should be the point. My brain is busy cataloging every detail against a future I can’t see yet. His cuff button is mother-of-pearl. The seam at his shoulder sits perfectly, no strain where men who lift wrong tend to pull fabric.
His cologne carries cedar and something cold, maybe vetiver. The room temperature is cooler than the hallway; the shock of it has calmed sweat I didn’t realize had formed between my shoulder blades.
The tiny LED on the camera outside this room pulses red, and for the first time since I noticed it earlier, I wonder if that light means anything about where the footage goes.
He studies my face without hurry. He looks for lies not in my words but in how my body can’t conceal a heartbeat. He sees that I want to run. He sees that I won’t.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says.
“I work here.”
His eyes flick to the clipboard then back. “Nothere.”
The line lands like a stamp on paper. Final. I should apologize and beg, but the same part of me that made a joke about permission this afternoon won’t unclench. I swallow and lift my chin. My voice sounds steadier than it feels. “I came to find a missing invoice.”
“I heard you.” He tilts his head toward the space where the kneeling man fell. “You found something else.”
“That wasn’t my intention.”
“Intentions don’t matter.”
I breathe twice before I answer. “Someone will notice I’m gone if I don’t go back soon.”
“They will notice you are busy,” he says. “Busy is a story that satisfies most people.”
He steps one pace closer. It isn’t a lunge. It isn’t a threat spelled out. It is an adjustment that tightens everything in me to a wire. I keep my gaze on his and burn his features into my memory, because memory is the only weapon I have within reach. I don’t know yet if I’ll ever get to use it.
The awful clarity that clicked on when the gun fired doesn’t dim. It sharpens. I didn’t fantasize the way he looked at exits this afternoon rather than art, and I didn’t misread the control in his voice. The room tells me truth now without metaphors.
Dimitri Sharov kills as easily as other men sign checks, and I stepped into the one corridor in this building where the polished language of a charity gala won’t save me.
The door sits wider now, because my hand wouldn’t hold steady when the shot shook the room. The drain in the concrete stares up like a black coin. The scent of oil wears the iron smell and walks it right into my head. The auction’s leftover music reaches me as a faint shiver through plaster and metal. It almost sounds pretty.
I don’t run. I don’t scream. I hold still, because stillness is the only choice that feels real. His voice remains even and low, and he doesn’t raise the gun. He doesn’t need to. The command he already gave keeps my feet rooted.
I understand something with a clean snap that has nothing to do with fear. There’s no version of this night where I walk away by pretending I saw nothing. The door has opened ona world that doesn’t accept bystanders. My life has the shape it had an hour ago only if he allows it, and I can’t lie to myself and pretend otherwise.
Chapter Four - Dimitri
The first thing that moves is her breath. I watch it stutter against her throat, see the swallow she cannot smooth. Panic drags across her face and does not quite settle. It leaves room for something brighter behind her eyes, a light that belongs to a person who argues with the world on principle. Trouble announces itself in details like that. The moment I see her, I know what she is to me. A risk.
“Stay where you are.”
The command goes out even and quiet. She obeys, not because she wants to, because every part of her is trying to catalog exits while her body refuses to retreat.
I step forward and let the door swing a fraction wider. The air in the utility room tastes of oil and iron; the hall still carries the stale edge of chemical cleaner. The body on the concrete has turned the quiet into something prickled and thin.
She keeps her eyes on mine, which tells me as much as her feet tell me. Fear is present, but defiance keeps it from taking the lead.
I lift my wrist and touch the face of my watch in a way that means something to my men, then keep my attention on her. Footsteps answer at the far end of the corridor. Two of my people break the corner and plant themselves where the light cannot catch their faces fully. They don’t speak.
“Turn around,” I say.
She doesn’t move. The chin goes up a fraction. The clipboard tightens to her chest; the edge bites her palm hard enough to make a pale crescent under the skin. She has already calculated that if she turns, she gives me her back. I can respectthat calculation; I prefer to see the eyes of anyone who means to survive me.
“No,” she says.
