"Yes." Viktor's tone doesn't change. "He did."
The silence between us isn't comfortable. What’s unsaid takes up more space than the said.
"You're too deep with this girl," Viktor says finally.
"Viktor—"
"I'm not finished." He doesn't often interrupt me. I let it stand. "This isn't like you. I've watched you run operations for fifteen years and I have never seen you make a move that wasn't three steps ahead of everyone else in the room. Last night you were three steps behind your own anger." He pauses. "That's new. That's her."
A beat.
"So I'm asking plainly: what happens when the contract ends?"
"That's not your concern."
"It is absolutely my concern when my pakhan is compromised."
The word is a blade finding the gap between ribs. Compromised. I could dispute it. I don't.
"She's not going anywhere," I say.
"She tell you that?"
I don't answer.
"You're not holding a gun to her head. But are you going to let her go?" Another beat. "Don't become your father."
The words drop into my chest and stay there.
"Don't." Flat. Final.
"He kept your mother for eleven years," Viktor says, as if I haven't spoken. "Didn't love her. Wouldn't let her go. Told himself it was protection. Told himself she was taken care of. Told himself all kinds of things while she got smaller and smalleruntil there was almost nothing left of who she'd been." His voice doesn't waver. "You were raised by your grandmother because your mother stopped being able to raise you. Because by the time she might have left, she didn't know how anymore. He hadn't trapped her with chains. He'd trapped her with comfort and dependency and the complete removal of any life outside of him."
"I said don't."
He doesn't stop. "What if she’s pregnant."
The question is abrupt enough that it takes a half-second to register. Then the cold comes. "She's not," I say.
"You don't know—"
"She's not." Level. "All women processed through the auction were medically screened before placement. Health history, bloodwork. They received a contraceptive injection as standard protocol. Non-negotiable. Non-optional." I pause. "A pregnancy creates leverage. No man participating in that auction would have left himself vulnerable.”
He’s silent as he processes my words. "So you've already thought about it," he says.
"I think about everything."
"That's not what I mean and you know it."
I look down. The room is dark except for the desk lamp, a small yellow circle against all that shadow. Through the gap in the door: stillness, the soft sound of her breathing, the shape of her that I could map by memory at this point—the line of her shoulder, the way she curls slightly to the left.
"You don't need an excuse," Viktor says quietly. "That's what I'm telling you. You don't need a pregnancy or a contract extension or a strategic reason. You just need to make a decision and live with it." A pause. "Let her go, Rafail. She's a good girl. She deserves a life that doesn't require her to be brave every single day just to survive it." His voice doesn't harden, doesn'tsoften. It just carries. "Either keep her. Actually keep her—permanently, with everything that means, with her knowing the full weight of what she's agreeing to. Or let her have a life. Those are the only two options that aren't your father."
I don't respond.
"Everything in between," Viktor says, "is just a newer version of the same cage."
Viktor waits for my response. But I have nothing to give him. Not tonight. Not with the door cracked two inches and her breathing audible from across the room and the reality of what he's just said lodged somewhere I can't reach.
