I squeeze my eyes shut. Open them again. Keep my face still because the men by the door are watching now, whether they look like it or not, and I will not give them the satisfaction ofseeing me break over it. I will not give them anything they can use.
An hour passes. Maybe two. It’s hard to know without a phone or a window. My wrists ache. The chair is hard. I focus on keeping my breathing even and my expression neutral, and not thinking about what’s happening at my parents’ house right now.
I hear them before the door opens.
My mother’s voice first. High and thin, not her usual register, the sound of a woman trying to stay calm and not managing it. Then my father’s voice saying something I can’t make out. Then a sound that cuts through everything else, through the concrete walls and the engine oil smell and the cold certainty I’ve been holding on to for the past two hours.
Mila crying.
The door swings open.
They bring my parents in first. My father has blood on his face, a split above his eyebrow that has dried dark against his skin, and he’s moving carefully the way people move when something hurts more than they’re admitting. My mother has a red mark across her cheekbone. She’s holding herself very straight, chin up, the same way I’ve been sitting, and when she sees me, her eyes close briefly like she’s thanking something she doesn’t believe in.
Then the twins.
Mila comes through the door at a run and slams into me so hard the chair rocks backward. Her arms go around my neck, and she’s sobbing, full body, the way she cried the night we told herthe truth about her father, and I hold her as tight as the zip tie allows and press my face into her hair and breathe her in.
Alexei walks in behind her. He doesn’t run. He crosses the room with his jaw set and his hands in fists at his sides, and something in his face that is so completely his father it punches the air out of me. He sits on the floor at my feet, leans against my legs, and doesn’t say anything.
I put my bound hands over both of them.
Renat appears in the doorway. He looks at the scene with the mild interest of a man reviewing an inventory. “Your people on the street put up a reasonable effort,” he says to me. “Two against eight. Not terrible odds for a residential street in the middle of the afternoon.” A pause. “Not good enough, but reasonable.”
“If you’ve hurt those men?—”
“Your concern for Volkov’s employees is touching.” He looks at my father. “Viktor. You know how this works. You’ve been adjacent to this world long enough.”
My father says nothing. There’s a muscle working in his jaw.
“Volkov will receive a message within the hour,” Renat continues. “A location. A time. Simple terms.” He looks at me again. “You’re the message, Mrs. Volkov. You and your family. So I’d encourage everyone to stay calm and cooperative, and this will be over quickly.”
“And if he doesn’t come?” I ask.
“He’ll come.”
“You sound very certain about a man you’ve never been in a room with.”
Something shifts in Renat’s expression. Not anger. Something colder than anger. “I know exactly what kind of man Luca Volkov is. I’ve been studying him for three years. He’s ruthless, he’s patient, and he doesn’t lose things he’s decided to keep.” He looks at the twins pressed against me. “He’s decided to keep you.”
He leaves. The door closes again.
My mother lowers herself carefully to the floor beside me. My father follows. We don’t speak for a moment, the three of us and the twins in a loose circle in the middle of this room, and the silence is the kind that holds too much to be broken quickly.
“I’m sorry,” I say. My voice comes out steady. I’m grateful for that.
My mother shakes her head. “Not now.”
“Mama.” Mila pulls back enough to look at my face. Her cheeks are wet, her eyes swollen. “Are we going to be okay?”
I look at her. At Alexei still leaning against my legs with his fists in his lap. At my father with dried blood above his eye and my mother with the red mark on her cheekbone.
I made this happen. Every step of it. I pulled on threads I didn’t understand, walked into a room I couldn’t walk back out of, and handed the most dangerous network in this city exactly what they needed to get to Luca.
But Luca is coming.
I know that the way I know my own name. The way I knew it when I sat in the warehouse waiting and told myself he wouldn’t, couldn’t, wasn’t mine to call on anymore. He’s coming because these are his children on the floor of this room and because whatever exists between us, broken and complicated and built on things that should have sunk it, he meant it when he said he wasn’t going anywhere.
I just didn’t believe him until now.
