There's another man following her. He's not one of Ilya's people, and that alone is enough to set my teeth on edge because it means someone else has found her—someone from Iosef, maybe. It would mean my end if Ilya had a reason to follow her, but I’d rather that than Iosef find her and drag her back to that hell that I got her out of.
He’s also not the kind of man I’m used to tracking; neither current military nor mob, and not someone who would pose much of a threat, in my opinion. The man is maybe forty, built like he used to be in shape but has let himself go soft around the middle, wearing a leather jacket that's trying too hard to look casual and jeans that are slightly too tight. He's got the look of someone who thinks he's dangerous, who's probably done some rough work in his time but has gotten lazy and started to believe his own reputation instead of maintaining the skills that earned it. He's the kind of man who would take a job tracking down ayoung woman and think it would be easy money, that she'd be too scared or too weak to put up a real fight, and that he could just grab her off the street and collect his payment without any complications.
He's wrong on all counts, but he doesn't know that yet.
I watch him watch her as she walks down the street, her shoulders hunched against the spring chill and her hands shoved deep in the pockets of a coat that still doesn’t look warm enough. She's trying to blend in and look like just another person going about their day, but I can see the tension in her spine, the way her eyes flick to every reflective surface to check what's behind her, the way she walks just a little too fast to be truly casual.
The man following her is getting bolder, closing the distance between them as the street gets more crowded, using the press of bodies as cover to get closer than he should. He's planning something, working up the nerve to make his move, and I can see the moment he decides to do it—the shift in his posture as he reaches into his jacket for something.
I move before he can.
The alley between the two brownstones across from him is narrow and dark, a forgotten gap where trash accumulates, and rats scurry and people pretend not to see the things that happen there. I grab him by the back of his collar and yank him sideways into that darkness before anyone can register my face or what’s happened, my other hand already coming up to cover his mouth before he can shout.
He starts to struggle immediately. His hands come up to claw at my arm, his body twisting as he tries to break free, his feet kicking out in a desperate attempt to connect with something, anything, that might give him leverage. But I've done this a thousand times, perfected the art of subduing a man quickly and quietly, and within seconds, I have him pinned against the brickwall with my forearm across his throat, applying just enough pressure to make breathing difficult but not impossible.
"Who sent you?" I ask, my voice low and calm.
He tries to shake his head and play dumb, but his eyes give him away. There's fear there, but also calculation, the look of a man trying to figure out if he can lie his way out of this, if he can spin some story that will get me to let him go. He doesn't understand yet that there's no scenario in which he walks away from this alley in one piece.
I increase the pressure on his throat, just enough to make his vision start to blur at the edges and make him understand that I'm not playing games. "I'm going to ask you one more time, and if you don't give me an answer I like, I'm going to start breaking things. Small things at first. Fingers, maybe. Then we'll work our way up to the important stuff. Who. Sent. You?"
When he doesn’t answer, I feel a thick, hot pleasure at the excuse to swing my fist into his face. I keep him pinned to the wall by my arm over his throat as I hit him, letting him feel the inability to breathe mingled with the pain in his jaw, cheek and nose. When he’s spitting up blood and gasping for breath, I stop, then reach up and grab a tooth that’s hanging loose by two fingers.
“Ready to tell me the name?”
When he doesn’t answer fast enough, I yank, then cover his mouth and nose with my hand again to muffle the sounds, dragging him deeper into the alleyway.
He’s choking by the time I give him air again, on his own blood and spit and snot. “Morozov,” he manages, his voice a strangled rasp. “Mikhail Morozov. He hired me to find his daughter, bring her home."
I frown. “Her father is looking for her?” I assumed there was some bad blood between them, and that’s why Svetlana hadn’tgone back yet. But if he wants to find her… “Why does he want to find her?”
It takes two more teeth to get the truth out of him: that Svetlana’s father is under Russian pressure to get back the property that he sold. That all of this, all this pain and humiliation and horror that’s happened to her, is because of her father. I don’t know all the details, but I’m able to get enough to start to piece a picture together.
The rage that floods through me is white-hot and immediate, a fury so intense that for a moment I can't see anything except the memory of Svetlana in that cell, broken and bleeding and barely human, the memory of what was done to her by the men her father sold her to, the memory of her face when she told me what they did, how they hurt her, how they made her feel like nothing. Her own father. Her own fucking father sent her to that hell, and now he has the audacity to send someone to drag her back, to pretend he has any right to her, to act like she's his property to reclaim.
"He wants her back," the man continues, apparently mistaking my silence for interest, maybe thinking he can negotiate his way out of this. "Said she ran away, said she's confused, needs to come home. He's offering good money, real good money, just to bring her back unharmed. I'm not trying to hurt her, man, I'm just trying to do a job."
"Unharmed," I repeat, and I can hear the edge in my own voice, the barely controlled violence that's threatening to spill over. "He wants her back unharmed."
"Yeah, that's what he said. Look, I don't know what this is about, don't know what's going on between you and her, but this doesn't have to be a problem. We can work something out, yeah? You want a cut? I can give you a cut. We can split it, bring her in together, everyone walks away happy."
He actually thinks I'm going to negotiate with him. He actually thinks this is about money, or pussy, the usual bullshit that men like him understand. He has no idea what he's walked into, and no idea that the only reason I haven't killed him yet is that I need to know everything he knows so that I can understand the full scope of the threat before I eliminate it.
"How did he find her?" I ask, ignoring his offer entirely. "How did he know she was in Boston?"
"I don't know, man, he didn't tell me that. Just gave me a photo, told me she'd probably come back here because it's where she lived before, told me to check the usual places, then try the shitty part of town if she didn’t try to come back home. I've been watching her old apartment, her old haunts, and I spotted her a couple of days ago. I was going to grab her tonight, take her to the address he gave me, collect my money."
"What address?"
He rattles off a location in one of the rougher neighborhoods where the old Russian community still has deep roots, where men like me and Ilya and others can operate with relative impunity. Everyone knows everyone and no one talks to the police. It's the kind of place where a young woman could disappear, and no one would ask questions, where her screams would be ignored as just another domestic dispute. Her father could do whatever he wanted to her there and call it family business.
But that’s not ever fucking happening.
"You got a phone?" I ask.
He nods, and I ease the pressure on his throat just enough to let him reach into his pocket and pull out a cheap burner, the type that men in our line of work use when they don't want their communications traced. I take it from him, scroll through the recent calls, and find the number he's been using to contactMorozov. I memorize it, then crush the phone under my heel, the plastic and glass crunching satisfyingly against the concrete.
"Here's what's going to happen," I tell him, my voice still calm and controlled, even though inside I'm screaming with the need to hurt him, to make him pay for even thinking about touching her. "You're going to tell me everything you know about Morozov's operation. Where he lives, who he works with, what his security looks like. And then you're going to die, because that's what happens to men who threaten things that belong to me."
