I should announce myself. I should cough or knock or simply walk in like a person who belongs here, which I don't, but still.
I don't.
"—she can't stay here indefinitely." A voice I don't recognize. Younger, slightly impatient. "Vinzlee's people are already asking questions. Gregor says there were two cars outside the house at four this morning."
"Zakhar and my men were there by midnight," Iosif says. I'd know his voice now anywhere, that particular quality it has, low, unhurried, each word placed with the precision of someone who doesn't waste them. "There's nothing to find, and if they do find anything, it will lead them to a woman who overdosed during the night."
"That's not the point." Another voice, different again. "The point is that you've brought a civilian onto the estate and she's connected to the Vinzlee name and if anyone traces that—"
"No one's tracing it." Flat. Final. "I've handled it."
"You've handled the house," the first voice says. "You haven't handled her."
A silence.
It stretches long enough that I stop breathing for a moment.
"She stays," Iosif says, "until it's safe for her to leave. That's all."
"Iosif." A third voice, different in tone. Older and measured, the kind of voice that's used to being listened to. "We're not questioning your judgment on the security situation. But there's a conversation we need to have."
"No," Iosif says. "There isn't."
"I was clear in my instructions, was I not?" The older voice says.
"Don't." Iosif again. And there it is, the edge underneath the control, brief and bright as a blade catching light. "Don't finish that thought. I know what you're going to suggest, and the answer is no."
Quiet.
"She's a civilian," Iosif says. "She came to my club in shock with blood in her hair because a man attacked her, and she defended herself. That's all she is. She's not a solution to a mandate I’m not entirely on board with." A pause, and then the words come out lower, with a weight to them that makes my stomach do something complicated. "I'm not going to look at a woman who's already been through something awful and see an opportunity. That's not…I won't do it. We are not doing that."
No one says anything.
I press my back against the wall and wait for the right time to walk in.
"Fine." The younger voice, resigned rather than convinced. "But Sasha Vinzlee still needs managing."
"I'll handle Sasha," Iosif says. "She was at the club all night. She sent a few messages to Mia’s phone checking in, but nothing otherwise. It will be easy enough to tell her Mia got sick, stayed home."
"And the Vinzlee vacuum?" someone else asks.
"That," Iosif says, "is an opportunity we can discuss later."
Chairs scrape. The sound of mugs being moved, the quiet logistics of a meeting breaking up.
I push off the wall and take a breath, then walk into the kitchen like I've only just come downstairs, like I heard nothing.
The kitchen is large, and there are six men in it in varying states of post-meeting. I clock them the second I'm in the doorway: they are all broad and dark-haired, with the same quality Iosif has of occupying a room with their whole body. An older man, distinguished, with silver at his temples is watching me with sharp, assessing eyes that feel suddenly familiar. The same shape eyes, I realise, just older and paler. And against the far counter, facing me, coffee cup in hand, stands Iosif.
He looks different in daylight. Or not different, exactly. He looks like the same man, same dark eyes, same controlled stillness, but in the corridor last night I was too much inside my own disaster to really see him. Now, in the thin winter light coming through the kitchen windows, I can see everything.
He's not just large the way men in expensive suits are large. He's large in the way something structural is large, the way a thing is large when it's weight-bearing. And it's not just his size. It's the way the room arranges itself around him, even when he's standing still against a kitchen counter doing nothing.
He looks at me when I come in, and something that was still in his face becomes stiller.
"Did you sleep?" he asks.
He knows I didn't. I can tell from the way he asks it in such a precise way, already knowing the answer, asking because it's the right question to open with.
