The voice on the other end laughed. "Who did you piss off?"
"The Bratva."
Silence.
"Jesus, Milo. You know what they do to people who run?"
"Yeah." I watched Raven through the pass-through. Her hands lifted from the keys, suspended in the air the way they always were at the end of a piece. Holding the silence like it was sacred. "I know. But I'm doing it anyway. And I'll have someone with me."
There was a long pause. "Shi-it." He drew the word out with his southern accent. "This is all for a girl?" he asked with disbelief.
I hung up and started planning.
For the first time in my life, the work was going to lose.
CHAPTER 14
RAVEN
Day seven.
I played Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor. The one most people thought was gentle, a lullaby spun from silk and sadness. They were wrong. Chopin wrote it while coughing blood into handkerchiefs, dying in a country that wasn't his, composing love letters to a woman who'd already left. It wasn't gentle. It was a man saying goodbye to everything he loved while his fingers still worked.
Tonight, I understood him well.
The restaurant hummed around me in its usual frequencies, and I cataloged it all the way I always did, sorting the sounds into layers, filing each voice by pitch and location and intent.
But tonight there was a desperate edge to it. Like running your fingers over a lover's face in the dark, memorizing their beauty before someone tears it away.
This might be my last night at this piano.
This might be my last night in this world.
I let that thought sit in my chest for three measures. Let it press against the new bruises Milo had left on my hips last night, the ones that still throbbed when I shifted on the bench. Then I folded the thought into the music and kept playing.
Maybe I should've been terrified. Maybe I should've taken Viktor's threat seriously. Maybe I should have listened to Milo when he begged me to not to come here tonight.
But I couldn't stay away.
Not because I was brave or because I had any kind of loyalty to my job. Not because I was trying to prove anything. And not because I thought Viktor was bluffing about what he'd do if he decided I was the leak he was looking for.
I stayed because this restaurant, this fucking piano, was the last place where I could stillfeelmy father. Where his presence wasn't just memory but something tangible, woven into the grain of the wood and the weight of the keys beneath my fingers. Where I could close my eyes and pretend he was still in his office, checking receipts and humming along to whatever I played.
And because there was nowhere I could run that they wouldn't find me anyway.
The Bratva had roots everywhere. Roots that went deeper than Viktor, deeper than this restaurant, deeper than anything I understood. If they wanted me dead, I'd be dead whether I fled to Seattle or Singapore or some remote village in the Alps.
At least here, I could play Chopin while I waited.
At least here, I wasn't alone while Milo frantically tried to find some kind of evidence to prove it wasn't me they were after.
However, in some ways the room had changed between yesterday and today. Not the furniture or the acoustics, those were still the same. The layout, the way sound bounced off the leather booths and walnut paneling, the precise frequencies of clinking crystal and murmured Russian, it was all familiar.
But the air. The patterns of conversation and silence that I'd spent two years mapping from this bench, cataloging and memorizing like sheet music?
Those had shifted.
For one, Viktor wasn't in his usual booth.
