ROMAN — Volkovskaya War Room, 20:10
Isign the contract before I can talk myself out of it.
The fountain pen is heavy in my hand. Brass and bone. Old. My father used it. My grandfather before him. Three people died this year after signing with this same pen. A lieutenant who thought he could skim from the obshchak. A banker who believed the FSB would protect him. My father’s mistress, who screamed herself hoarse before her throat finally gave out.
I know the exact moment screaming stops. The body just quits. The voice breaks. I’ve heard that silence too many times,standing in doorways while men I called brat’ya did the kind of work you don’t come back from.
Outside the windows, the November night presses against the glass. Solntsevo lies below—my territory, my problem—Moscow under my feet. The iron gates in the courtyard carry our wolf sigil and St. George driving a spear through the dragon. The same symbol is tattooed across my shoulder blades. They inked it into me when I turned sixteen. Two enforcers held me down while the needle dug in and Vadim stood over us and said it like a command:Volki ne plachut.Wolves don’t cry.
I didn’t.
The marriage contract lies on the old mahogany desk, the same one that survived the Soviet collapse and three generations of Volkov pakhans.
Two signature lines.
Mine already there in dark ink.
Hers still blank.
Anya Nikolayevna Morozova.
My fingers drift to the violin resting beside the desk. My mother’s Stradivarius. The only thing that made it out of the fire before the Chechens finished the job. I lift it, tuck it under my chin, and drag the bow across the strings. Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique comes out without me thinking. Third movement.
The notes get too loud in my head. Too close to other sounds I don’t want.
The D string vibrates under my finger and suddenly I’m twelve again, lying on cold stone. The air stinks of incense, piss, and something sickly sweet that clung to my skin for days. Later, Father Alexei tells me it’s the smell of death.Zapakh smerti.Upstairs, the Chechen crew reloads. Boots on old floorboards. Shouted orders. My mother’s voice cuts off. My father’s next. My brother Piotr’s hand goes slack in mine. I press my face harder into the marble in the church crypt and make myself so still Ihardly breathe. I stay like that until the shots stop, the boots leave, car doors slam, and the silence gets so big I think maybe I died too.
The bow slips on the E string. Ugly sound. I grit my teeth and dig my thumbnail into the rosin until the wood creaks.
That was twenty years ago. Some nights it feels like last week.
The music turns sharper because I can’t stop hearing Vadim’s voice from this morning.
Marry the chemist’s daughter or I give your seat to Yuri.
Yuri is twenty-four and thinks trafficking teenage girls is just part of doing business. He slapped a server at Café Pushkin last month because the vodka wasn’t cold enough and then smiled about it. That smile is what made me want to put a bullet in his head.
I would rather put my Makarov in my own mouth than let him inherit this Bratva.
The last note dies rough when I lower the bow. Something buzzes wrong near the bridge. Out of tune again. The last time I tried to fix it myself, the A string snapped and left a welt across my knuckles that took six days to fade. I run my thumb over the spot. The skin is smooth now, but the memory stays.
My hands want to break something. The violin. The glass. Vadim’s neck. I flex my fingers instead and watch the wolf tattoo across my knuckles shift with the movement. Some nights I wake up scratching my arms like the ink wants to get out.
Her file is open on the desk, the edges bent from how many times I’ve gone through it. Twenty-five years old. Toxicology doctorate from Basel. Top of her class. Vadim never picks idiots when there’s money involved.
The surveillance shots show a woman who looks like she forgot how to relax—grey eyes caught mid-blink, hair tied up like she didn’t care what it looked like, scars along her left forearm where acid burns healed bad. Lab rat marks.
She looks ordinary at first glance. A scientist. The kind of woman who rides the metro, drinks cheap coffee, pays rent late sometimes, and has never watched a man bleed out on a carpet while his fingers twitch through the fringe.
A sticky note sits crooked over her photo in Luka’s messy handwriting:You’re going to like this one.
I peel it off and fold it in half, then half again, pressing the creases until the paper is ready to tear. Luka has been my sovietnik, my advisor since we were fifteen and he pulled me out of the Moskva when Vadim tried to solve a problem by tossing me in the river. He thinks he knows what I like.
Maybe he does.
That’s half the problem.
I flip the page.
