I frown. “My phone?”
“It can be tracked.” He holds his hand out to me. I walk over to my nightstand and hand it over to him. “Will I get it back?”
“Of course, you will.” He turns the phone off and puts it in his pocket. “It’s been a few hours. You’re probably hungry. Join me for dinner?”
“All right.”
He leads me out of the room and down the hallway, toward the stairs. “With everything going on, I didn’t really have time to have anything fancy made.”
My stomach turns a little. I don’t actually remember the last time I ate. I’d be happy for greasy pizza right about now. “I’m sure whatever you have will be fine,” I tell him.
He leads me to the dining room. It’s surprisingly small with a normal sized, rectangular table that looks to be made of heavy, black wood. There are two settings already made up for us with a modest centerpiece of yellow flowers. Opposite the door, there is a wall of curtains drawn to cover what I imagine is a large picture window. And only two of the walls have decorations, paintings ofbeautiful landscapes here, not portraits. The single wall without anything on it looks odd. It’s wallpaper and wood like the others, but there are very thin folds with hinges every few inches.
I want to ask about the wall, but he’s pulling out my chair. I sit down and instantly, his help brings us dinner. A pasta dish is set before me on a plate with gold rimming. It looks and smells delicious, round, cylindrical noodles that look like little pipes, a seasoned red sauce, and what I assume is hamburger meat. I immediately dive in, spearing one of the little pipes with my fork. It tastes warm and filling.
“I guess you like it,” he says.
I nod eagerly. “It’s very good.”
There’s that smile again, so uncharacteristic and charming all at once. He looks down at his own dish and says, “I forget what my cook called it. It’s something that they made when he served in the Navy in Russia. He wasn’t expecting to cook for two tonight, so he just whipped it up on the fly.”
“It’s nice,” I tell him. “Very nice.”
We eat in silence for a few minutes. There’s a pattering on the windows beyond the curtains. Rain. Of course it’s starting to rain.
“So,” I ask him, “how long do you think I’ll be staying here?”
He hesitates, his fork slowing down as he moves the noodles around in his plate. “I’ll be honest with you, Natalya. I don’t know.” He sets his fork down and addresses me directly. “The gravity of what’s happened… Let me just tell you that it’s not all on you. There are things that were already in motion that up until now did not involve you at all.”
My stomach starts to turn a little. I glance at the wine that’s been provided for us. Wish I could drink it. “Can I ask you something? Honestly?”
“Anything.”
A single word that he’s said before that turned a key somewhere inside me. It turns a little more now. “Were you supposed to kill me today?”
He tilts his head at me. “What?”
“I saw you kill somebody. I mean, clearly, it was someone you weren’t supposed to and now you’re in all this trouble.”
“Natalya, I am Pakhan now. I don’t answer to anyone. I’m the king of this Bratva, of this territory. You understand?”
I nod.
“And if I were going to kill you, you’d already be dead. We don’t negotiate with targets.”
That makes me feel a little better. “Okay, so, what happened in the park… that was about me? Someone’s after me because of what I saw?”
“It was mostly because of me for pulling the trigger on that guy last night,” I tell her. “But I wouldn’t rule out that they are looking for you, too. The Amur have enough spies to have full knowledge of everything that’s happened so far.”
The Amur. The name only vaguely appears in my memory. Something that maybe my father said or mentioned in passing to someone that was overheard.
“They are another Bratva,” he says to me. “And I’ve started a war with them.”
My stomach flips again. The story Ilya told me… That whole thing was about vengeance. “Why would you do that?” I ask him. I’d like to hear it from him.
“It’s complicated.”
I look back down at my half eaten plate of food. Complicated. That’s the second time he’s said that. How complicated could it be?
