"It's not that simple." Without raising his voice. "You will stay."
I turn to face him fully. "You can't keep metrappedhere." The word comes out with more force than I planned — and something in his face changes.
The muscle along his jaw goes tight in a way that's different from his usual tightness — not controlled, but struck, like the word landed somewhere unguarded. His gaze cuts sideways for less than a second and comes back harder. I don't know what I pressed on. But I press the image behind my sternum and keep it.
"I'll give you the day," he says. "Think about what you want — a number, a term, whatever it is. The contract has a full day remaining. You're not leaving until tonight at the earliest."
"I'm leaving now."
He shakes his head. Slow. "You should have taken the extra money when I offered it." He holds my eyes across the length of the table. "Because you're staying regardless. You understand that, don't you?"
I open my mouth.
"You've seen too much," he says, before I can form words. "Two weeks in my home, my operations, my business. You watched me handle a situation in a restaurant. You know things about my organization that most people don't live to know." The calm in his voice is the calm of a man who has considered this from every angle and arrived at a conclusion he's comfortable with. "Any other pakhan would have put you in the ground already — no witnesses, no liability, no loose ends. Clean." His eyes stay on mine. "I like you, Jana. So you live. But you don't get to walk out of here on your terms."
My chest goes cold and concentrated. "I cannot believe you're threatening me."
"I'm not." He means it — that's what sits wrong, that's the part that reaches through my anger and grabs something: he genuinely means it. "I would never hurt you. You know that." He says it the way he states facts, without inflection, because he doesn't believe softness adds anything to what's true. "But I'm also not letting you go. Both of those are true at the same time."
He stands. Straightens his jacket with two efficient movements. "I have a problem to handle this morning. You have the day." He picks up his phone, pockets it. "Use it. Decide what your price is for staying. Decide what you actually want out of this — not what you think you're supposed to want, not what's safe to want. What youactuallywant." He moves toward the door, and I have no logical counter to any of it, which makes me angrier than all of it put together.
"What if it's millions," I say to his back. "What if the number I come back with is in the millions."
He stops. Turns.
He crosses back to where I'm standing — no urgency, no performance, just the direct line of a man who has already decided — and his hand comes up to my face. The backs of his fingers against my cheek. The barest contact, softer than anything I've had from him in two weeks, softer than I knew he had in him. My throat closes.
"Too low," he says quietly. His eyes stay on mine. "You always price yourself too low."
He drops his hand. Walks out.
I stand there with the ghost of that touch on my cheek, four hundred thousand dollars in my account, and the infuriating, humiliating, undeniable fact that I am not going anywhere — and we both know it — and he didn't even have the decency to gloat about it.
Too low.
I pull out my chair and sit back down. Pour more coffee I don't need.
Outside the window, his car disappears through the gates.
I have until tonight.
Chapter nine
Rafail
Kutuzov's office smells like old money and newer ambition — cedar paneling, a fire that doesn't need to be lit in October but burns anyway because men like him burn things when they can. He stands with his back to me when I enter, hands clasped behind him, looking out at the harbor through glass that probably cost more than most men make in a year. He lets me stand there for thirty seconds before he turns.
Forty seconds, actually. I count.
Mikhail Kutuzov is sixty-one years old and looks fifty — the kind of preserved that comes not from luck or genetics but from discipline enforced on the body the same way he enforces everything else: without mercy. His hair is silver. His suit is charcoal. His expression, when he finally turns it on me, is the specific temperature of a man who has decided to be controlled about something that is making him anything but.
"I didn't know," he says.
Two words, and they land like a verdict.
"About the auction." He moves toward the desk but doesn't sit — positions himself behind it the way men do when they wantthe furniture to do work for them. "Volodymyr was operating in my facility, under my name, and I did not know. You can imagine how that sits with me."
"I have some idea," I say.
