“If I have to.” He doesn’t blink. “Whatever happens, it happens on my terms, not his.”
His hand drops away, and I can breathe again. Sort of.
He moves to the dresser, picks up a velvet box I hadn’t noticed, and brings it back.
“Turn around.”
I turn. The mirror catches all of it: the dress, the ugly line of tension between my shoulder blades, and the man standing behind me holding a piece of jewelry that could pay off my father’s debts twice.
The necklace is obscene. Diamonds and rubies, platinum like liquid ice, deep red stones that match the dress exactly. They look like frozen drops of blood hanging in the air on thin wires.
“This belonged to my mother,” he says, lifting it out. For the first time since I met him, his voice actually sounds… softer. “She wore it to every major negotiation, every dinner where she needed them to remember she was a Volkova before she was a wife.”
The metal is cold when he lays it against my collarbones, his fingers brushing my skin as he fastens the clasp at the back of my neck.
“She said it brought her luck,” he adds. “My grandfather had it blessed.” One corner of his mouth lifts without any humor. “Ammo still reached her anyway. But it missed her heart by a centimeter.”
“Comforting,” I say dryly.
“In this family?” His hands come to rest on my shoulders again. “It is.”
We look at ourselves in the mirror. We look… good. That’s the worst part. We look convincing. Power couple. Old money and new blood. I hate how easily we pass for that.
“If anything happens tonight,” he says, eyes on me, “if you get scared and decide to test me instead of trusting me… understand everything you do lands on me.”
“I heard your little speech,” I say. “I’m not promising anything.”
His jaw tightens. His hand squeezes once on my shoulder, not gently. “Anya—”
“You bought my life,” I say, meeting his eyes in the glass. “You didn’t buy my obedience on command. I’ll survive that dinner my way.”
For a second, I think he’s going to lose it. Just snap. His eyes go darker, a muscle in his cheek jumps, his fingers flex like he’s picturing them around my throat. Then he exhales and lets go.
“Sadis’,” he says. “Sit down. One minute before a journey. We don’t tempt fate.”
I blink. “What?”
“It’s a tradition.” He nods toward the bed. “We sit. We think. We go. My mother never left the house without doing it. Neither do I.”
The absurdity of it almost makes me laugh. The Wolf of Solntsevo, scheduling pre-homicide quiet time because Mama said so.
But he’s already lowering himself to the edge of the mattress, and I’m not stupid enough to push on this particular weirdness, so I sit too.
Our arms brush. My heart is hammering. He just sits there, counting under his breath, lips moving slightly.
I follow the rhythm of his breathing, because if I don’t focus on something, the panic in my chest is going to climb my throat and use my mouth like a geyser.
After a minute, he stands. “We leave now,” he says.
* * *
The War Room is exactly what my nightmares would have designed if they’d had a budget.
One wall is all maps—Moscow cut into colored zones like someone dissected the city and labeled each piece. Names are printed over them in Cyrillic and Roman script, little flags of territory. Solntsevo blue. Chechen red. Nice friendly orange where they overlap.
The table itself is ridiculous—huge, old wood. The crystal overhead throws fractured rainbows across prison tattoos and gold teeth and hands that have clearly wrapped around a lot of throats.
Guns lie on the table like part of the place setting. No one even pretends to hide them.
