His voice came from the back office—my father's office—and it was…different. Quieter. Clipped. The way a man talks when he's receiving instructions instead of giving them.
I'd heard Viktor give orders a thousand times. I'd heard him threaten, cajole, charm, and once, only once, plead. I'd filed every variation of his voice the way a composer files key signatures, knowing instinctively which ones signaled danger and which ones signaled opportunity.
This wasn't any of those.
This was deference.
Viktor Smirnov, the man who ran this restaurant like a predator patrolling the perimeter of his territory, the man whose cologne preceded him into every room like a declaration of ownership, was being deferential. And whatever conversation was happening behind that door, he didn't want it heard.
I finished the Chopin and let the final note fade into silence. My hands stayed on the keys as I felt the vibrations fading through the ivory, through my fingertips, through my wrists, until the piano was just dead wood and wire again.
Five seconds of silence. I counted them the way I counted everything.
Then I started the next piece. Debussy.Clair de Lune. Something the diners expected, something that let me disappear into the wallpaper while my ears did the real work.
The office door opened.
Instinctively, I tracked the footsteps as they left the room and entered the main part of the restaurant. The first one was Viktor. I knew his footsteps. Knew the shoes he wore and their particular strike against marble. The confident, even cadence of a man who owned the ground he walked on. But there was a second set of footsteps alongside his. These were heavier. Deliberate. The left foot landing harder than the right.
My fingers faltered on a G-flat.
I recovered in a sixteenth note. Nobody in the dining room would have noticed. But the stutter traveled through my hands and into my chest, where it lodged like a splinter.
It was him.
The man who'd passed behind me that night. The one who smelled like pipe tobacco and had that faint whistle on every third or fourth nasal inhale from the deviated septum. The gait I'd filed alongside his breathing rhythm, heavy and asymmetric, the left-heavy cadence of a man who'd carried authority in his body for so long it had worn grooves.
He wasn't leaving this time though.
Instead, I heard him settle into a booth. And not just any booth. The corner one. The one that Viktor reserved for meetings he didn't want overheard. The leather seat groaned under his weight as he sat down. Ice clinked against crystal. Then the sound of what I assumed was expensive vodka being poured from a heavy bottle.
He was making himself at home.
Viktor's voice carried from three feet away, low and directed. "Raven plays every evening. She has been with us since her father..." A pause. The briefest hesitation. "Since the restaurant changed hands."
"I know who she is," the baritone with the deviated septum said. Precise consonants. No filler words, no hedging. Sentences that landed like verdicts.
I played Debussy and listened so hard my temples ached.
Viktor said a name then…
"Konstantin."
And his voice did the thing.
The thing I'd cataloged months ago when I'd caught fragments of it on the phone, the name that surfaced in late-night conversations and made Viktor's vocal cords recalibrate. His pitch dropped. His cadence slowed. The vowels rounded, softened. It was the vocal equivalent of a dog rolling onto its back and exposing its throat.
Konstantin.
I had a name now. A name to attach to the pipe tobacco and the whistle and the left-heavy gait. A name for the authority I'd sensed the first time.
My fingers moved through Debussy on muscle memory while my mind scrambled to land on a single thought. Konstantin wasn't a visitor. He was a superior. Moscow's eyes and ears, sent to audit—or to judge. And the timing of his arrival wasn't a coincidence.
Because the deadline was today.
Day seven. Milo had said it in bed last night with his arms locked around my waist and his face buried in my hair, the words vibrating against the back of my neck in the dark after he'd fucked me until neither of us could move.Tomorrow's the last day, little bird.His pulse had been all wrong beneath my fingers where I held his hands.
It was the rhythm of a man who was afraid.
