I’m standing here with his hand on my throat, and his grip on my jaw, and my body is responding to him. Some broken part of me wants him to close the distance and kiss me until I stop seeing Alexei’s face every time I blink.
“I need you to work,” he says quietly, thumb stroking against my pulse.
He pauses, and his grip on my jaw loosens just enough to feel almost tender.
“Can you do that, solnyshko?”
Yes. Because Mishka needs me here.
And God help me, because some fucked up part of me still wants him.
I can’t say any of that out loud. So I just look at him with everything I can’t say written all over my face—horror and want and fury and resignation—and let him see it.
His thumb strokes my pulse one more time. Then his hands drop, and he steps back, giving me space that feels colder than it should.
“Take tonight. Deal with whatever you need to deal with. Tomorrow morning, Anton drives you back to Site 4.”
He pauses in the doorway, shoulders squaring.
“For what it’s worth—” His voice roughens. “I’m sorry you had to see it. Sorry, you have to live with knowing what I am.”
Then he’s gone.
I stand there for a long time, staring at the doorway where he was, my throat still warm where his hand rested against my pulse.
Then I walk to the bathroom, splash cold water on my face, and look at myself in the mirror.
The woman looking back at me watched a man get tortured and executed today. She threw up. She fainted. She cried.
“You can do this,” I tell her. “You don’t have a choice.”
She doesn’t answer.
INTERLUDE — Interpol Regional Office, Vienna, 03:47
The vial looks like a winter sky—cobalt blue swirling in the evidence bag. Eleanor has been staring at it for forty-seven minutes while her coffee went cold, her thumb rubbing hard against the plastic seam until the friction burns.
Three recovered from Hamburg. Seven missing. The math keeps chewing at her stomach.
Her profiler brain notices the numbers automatically: evidence, body counts, statistics. She learned to think in numbers after Emma died—4.3 seconds from breathing to corpse when the drunk driver crossed the median. Now Eleanor measures everything in seconds. Silence. Heartbeats. How long can she hold her breath before she has to feel something again?
Numbers are cleaner than grief.
The door opens, and Zielinski enters carrying fresh coffee and the lab analysis. He sets the mug down too gently—the way he always does when the news is bad.
“You look like hell.”
“Did you read the analysis?”
“Tak.” His Polish accent thickens—a tell he’d deny having. “Forty times more potent than fentanyl. Respiratory depressionwithin ninety seconds. Cardiac arrest within three. No reversal agent past sixty seconds of exposure.”
“Unstable.” Eleanor scans the files. “Shelf life measured in weeks. Which means whoever has the missing vials needs a chemist who can stabilize them.”
Zielinski nudges a file across the table with two fingers. Eleanor opens it even though she’s memorized every surveillance angle, every cold detail of the man who’s kept her awake for six years.
Roman Volkov stares back—sharp jaw, dead eyes, tattoos visible on his forearm where his sleeve rides up.
Heat prickles at the base of her skull. She has the urge to look away, and she doesn’t. Her thumb pauses on the evidence bag.
