"You didn't come last night." I stopped two feet from him. Not a question.
"No." His voice was low, rougher than usual. Like the word had cost him something.
I turned my face toward him and waited.
"I tried to stay away." He pushed off the wall. I tracked him by the shift of air pressure, the subtle creak of his jacket, the clearing of his throat. He stopped close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him despite the cold. "It didn't work."
"And now?"
"Now I'm here." His voice dropped further. "Which is a problem."
I already knew what kind of problem. I wasn't naive. Viktor watched everything and everyone, and Milo was supposed to bewatching me, not standing outside bus stops at midnight like a man who'd lost a war with himself.
The bus came and went. Neither of us moved.
"He'll find out," I said.
"Yes."
"And then he'll kill us both."
"Probably." He didn't hesitate with his answer or give me false assurances. He told me the flat truth, delivered like a man who'd already made his peace with it.
Something in my chest shifted. Not fear. Respect, maybe. Or recognition.
I tilted my face up toward his. The cold had turned the tip of my nose numb and I could feel the warmth of his breath. We weren't dead yet.
"Then it looks like we have a problem," I said.
The silence between us held for a long moment, pulled taut as a piano wire, and I made my decision.
"Walk with me?"
He fell into step beside me without argument, matching my pace, leaving just enough space between us that we weren't touching. I counted steps out of habit, but my mind was already composing what I was about to say.
"I know things." I kept my voice low, level. "About Viktor. And the rest of them."
Milo said nothing. But his footsteps slowed almost imperceptibly.
I swung the bat.
"I know what this restaurant is. I've known since the day Vostok Holdings signed the papers. I know Viktor is Bratva. I know the back room hosts arms deals and money laundering negotiations every Thursday and alternate Saturdays. I know a man named Yuri handles the Galveston shipments, and I know the judge they've bought is named Whitmore, because Viktor said his name on the phone six months ago while I was playing Debussy ten feet away."
The silence that followed pressed against my eardrums like a change in altitude.
"This restaurant is the only thing I still have from my past life," I said. "After my father died, I could have walked away. Taken disability. Moved to some quiet town and spent the rest of my life feeling sorry for myself." My nails dug into my palms. "Instead, I came back to the only place that still felt like home to me. And I sat at that piano and I listened. Every conversation within range of these ears," I tapped my ears with my palms, "I remember all of it. Voices, words, dates, amounts. Everything. We can use it against them."
"Jesus Christ, Raven." His voice came out strangled. The mask was gone—no warmth, no easy charm. Just a man realizing the ground beneath his feet was mined. "You shouldn't be telling me this."
"They took my father's life's work and turned it into a cash register for their empire. And they looked at the blind girl with the cane and decided I was nothing." The words tasted like iron.Like biting down on a coin. Like swallowing something I'd held between my teeth for years. "But I'm here. And I'm not nothing. And I wanted to be good for something. Even if no one ever knew it."
The confession sat heavily between us. The Bratva intel was currency. Names and dates and shipping routes—those were weapons, tools, leverage. Butthis. This was the soft thing underneath all of it. The reason I hadn't left when leaving was the sane choice.
I'd needed to matter. Even if only to myself.
"Raven." He paused, and I felt his worry for me. "Do you understand what they'd do to you?"
"No, but I'm sure it involves pliers and a shallow grave."
