I hear Petrov’s voice, louder than it was before, like he’s feeling even more confident in their mission. Dominik responds with agreement at the correct intervals. When he ends the call, he takes a deep breath that I interpret as relief.
“Tell me,” I plead.
“Two pallets of guns are loaded,” he says. “Two more to go.” A pause. “Several bikers fled. No bodies we care about.”
“You mean?—?”
“My men are all alive and unharmed,” he says.
I don’t know if it makes me a monster for being relieved for them or human for being honest about what I care about first. What I do know is that Dominik’s men mean something to him, and it would pain him if he lost any of them that are truly loyal to him. I let the tension leak out of my tense neck and spine one vertebra at a time.
Then, the elevator chimes. My spine goes rigid, fingers curling around the edge of the table as if I can hold myself in place by force alone.
It’s followed by the faintest mechanical sigh of doors opening. Dominik turns his head. The slow shift of his attention is a thing I’m starting to recognize as a kind of violence. He doesn’t reach for the gun I know he always carries on his hip. He doesn’t need to.
“Stay,” he says as he places his phone down on the table. I brace my hands on the table and nod. He steps toward the foyer and opens the door.
I stay and hear their voices from the hall. One is Dominik’s, the other is a rumble of dread.
Gavriil.
I stand before my body decides to. When Dominik told me what to do if his brother arrived, I pictured myself doing it—stammering, stepping aside, being a polite disaster. I don’t want to be that person anymore.
I walk softly, careful that my steps make no sound. When I reach the edge of the hallway, I stop because I promised. The men are three feet away, right in front of the elevator bank. Dominik standing strong, tall, even though his wound must be shouting at him. Gavriil is broader than his brother, more rigid. His suit and tie are perfect, his hands empty but still dangerous. He looks at me like a man accustomed to weighing objects he might invest in or break. I meet his gaze because he doesn’t scare me.
But also because there’s a sort of magnetism that surrounds him that’s hard to fight.
“I told you—” Dominik begins.
“I’m behind you,” I remind him, and it’s absurd how much that pleases him. His shoulders dropping half an inch like I just gave him permission to breathe. Gavriil’s jacket tells its own story: the slight, weighted pull on the left side where something heavy sits inside his inner pocket. A gun, carried close to his heart. It would be lunacy to ever put myself between two men built to kill each other.
Gavriil’s mouth shapes something like a smile and then changes its mind. “You’re not going to invite me in?”
“Not tonight.”
He opens his mouth as if to challenge that, or make a smartass remark, then suddenly closes it again before he asks, “The guns?” thankfully in English.
“Four pallets, as I’m sure you’ve already been told,” Dominik replies. “That should be most of them.”
“And the money?”
That question hangs in the air there. After what feels like years, Dominik answers, “We’ll need something more persuasive than fear to locate the cash.”
Gavriil makes a small sound that might be his agreement. His attention slides over to me again, slow, clinical, not leering, which is worse, in a way, because it’s the way men look at property before they decide if they want to own it. He says something in Russian that I know pertains to me because Dominik’s hand balls at his side, a clenched fist that pretends it doesn’t want a throat in it.
“It’s rude to talk about a person in another language like they’re not here,” I say to them, my voice thankfully steady.
Gavriil doesn’t blink. Then he tips his head, an acknowledgment, like a chess player accepting that the person across the board found the move he didn’t think she’d see.
“You are still here,” Gavriil says. “That is the problem and the solution, as my brother would say.”
Gavriil stares at him. Something passes between them that isn’t words, or maybe it is a word I don’t know yet. The bigger man breaks the look first, not because he’s weaker, I think,but because he’s playing the long game and we don’t yet know the rules he’s set.
“You have forty hours,” he says. “Not forty-eight. My patience is expensive, and I intend to be paid.”
“You’ll have your guns by morning,” Dominik answers.
“Too bad there was more to our deal than guns,” Gavriil says. “And I have a reputation to uphold.”
