But at pace seven, something made me slow.
A voice. Coming from the back hallway, near the office that used to be my father's. Low, unhurried, speaking Russian. That wasn't unusual. Russian was the unofficial second language of this place. What made the hair on my arms prickle was the voice itself.
I'd never heard it before.
And I knew every voice in this building. Every one. From Viktor's oil-smooth baritone to the busboy who hummed off-key Cardi B while he stacked plates. Learning how to separate the sounds had given me a census of this place more accurate than any employee roster.
This voice wasn't on it.
I stopped mid-stride, feigning an adjustment to my cane strap. Tilted my head. Let the room's acoustics do their work.
Male. Mid-fifties, maybe older. Pitch sat in the baritone register, but with an unusual nasality that suggested a deviated septum or old fracture. His consonants were precise. Educated, Moscow-born probably, not the rougher regional accents I was used to hearing from Viktor's crew. He spoke the way people spoke when they were accustomed to being listened to. No filler words. No hedging. Sentences that landed like gavels.
And there was a quality to the cadence that I'd learned to identify in the back booths over two years of listening: authority. Not Viktor's borrowed, enforcer-grade authority. Something higher. Something that made Viktor the subordinate in the room.
Whoever this man was, he wasn't reporting to Viktor.
Viktor was reporting to him.
The voice stopped. A door closed. My father's office door, I knew its particular click and shudder and location. Footsteps with hard-soled dress shoes, a heavy tread, and the gait of a large man who didn't rush for anyone moved toward the dining room.
Toward me.
I gripped my cane and resumed walking, keeping my pace even, my face blank. The helpless blind girl on her way to the piano. Nothing to see here.
The footsteps passed behind me. Close enough that I caught his scent. Tobacco smoke, not cigarettes but pipe tobacco, something expensive and sweet with a cherry undertone. Leather, the kind that came from shoes that cost more than myrent. And underneath, the cold, mineral smell of a man who'd recently been somewhere damp and underground.
His breathing was controlled. Slow. Nasal on the inhale. The same deviated septum I'd heard in his speech, creating a faint whistle on every third or fourth breath. A rhythm I could pick out of a crowded room if I heard it again. I filed it alongside his footfall. Heavy, deliberate, the left foot landing a fraction harder than the right. An old injury, maybe. Or just the asymmetry of a large man who'd carried his authority in his body for so long it had worn grooves into his gait.
He didn't speak to me. Didn't acknowledge me at all.
But he slowed as he passed. Just for a beat. The air between us shifted, and I knew he'd turned his head. The way you turn when you're assessing something. Deciding what it's worth.
Then the footsteps resumed, that uneven left-heavy cadence fading toward the front of the restaurant.
I reached the piano. Sat. Propped up my cane. Placed my hands on the keys.
My fingers were shaking.
Not from fear. From the thing that always followed my fear. The hot, bright rush of adrenaline that made the world snap into sharper focus.
New players meant new risks. New risks meant the ground I'd been standing on all this time had just shifted beneath my feet.
And the information I'd been hoarding—the archive, the leverage, the loaded gun I kept telling myself I didn't need to use yet—had just become a hell of a lot more dangerous to hold.
I launched into Scriabin'sVers la flamme. The opening measures trembled out of the piano. Low, uncertain, a darkness groping for shape. The piece built the way fire built, slow and inevitable, each phrase layering heat on heat until the whole thing caught and consumed itself.
Toward the flame.
That's where I was headed. I could feel it.
The question was whether I'd walk into it on my own terms, or be dragged.
My fingers drove harder into the keys as the piece climbed toward its shattering climax. The sound filled the empty restaurant, and somewhere in the building, the man with the pipe tobacco and the Moscow accent was listening to a blind girl play with her whole body while the bruises of another dangerous man throbbed hot beneath the her skin.
I hit the final chord and let it ring until the strings went silent.
Then I sat in the quiet and listened to the building breathe around me, filing every new sound, every shifted pattern, every crack in the world I thought I knew.
