“Yeah, take a look. This is what three years younger than you does for the body,” he said, with a chuckle.
I launched myself out of the armchair and he ran.
His laughter filled the wooden hallway before I heard him thundering up the stairs.
I stared at my leather slippers. Fixed my blanket. Sat back down with a sigh.
I needed to get myself to the pit. Hibernation was over.
??????
The hall seemed longer than usual—or perhaps it was because the further in I walked, the more men fell silent. I could have trained at home, but the motivation was here, at the pit where serious fighters trained. Where men competed under extreme weights and goaded one another to do better. Where the noise and the smell and the particular pressure of other bodies pushing their limits made it impossible to be anything less than what you were capable of.
It was where we separated the wheat from the chaff. It was where the most vicious fighters were forged for the cage.
Murmurs slowly resumed.
Konstantin cracked his neck, drawing attention away from me for a few moments.
I had months of work ahead to get back to the condition I was in before winter. This was my own doing. Olya’s cooking had not helped.
“Ah, my friend has been enjoying many fried dumplings,” Ruslan said, wiping the bench down.
“I tried to tell you,” Konstantin said, setting his bag down.
I was too busy studying Ruslan’s back. Beneath the tattoos and the scars, assessing the muscle as it flexed and shifted. He was only a year older than me and knew this business as well as I did.
Yeah. He would be the first person I beat the shit out of once I was fit again.
Not enough to break bones. Enough to leave some interesting internal bruising.
I began warming up and didn’t stop until my body was drenched in sweat. That session lit something in me that had been cold for months—the need to keep growing, to keep claiming, to keep moving forward rather than standing in a silent house staring at ghosts that didn't want to be found.
The daily grind began.
It wasn't until I went for a shower that I thought of her.
The last time I had been inside her.
The first time I had inspected her.
The woman who had bested me and left.
Her brother had earned his spot as a soldier. It was best to keep him close. If push came to shove he would choose his sister over the Bratva.
That was what she did to hapless men.
What a devious woman. I should have seen past the pretence.
??????
His gaze darted from one side of my office to the other. The young lad looked at everything in the room except me—the bookshelves, the window, the grain of the desk between us—with the restlessness of someone who had been summoned and wasn’t sure why and was trying not to show it.
Spartak still reported back to me. In all these months the boy had never changed his routine. The spyware on his phone had picked up nothing—no unusual contact, no deviation, no communication with his sister that I could trace. Either she hadn’t reached out or he was more careful than he looked.
I was beginning to suspect the latter.
“How is your sister doing?” I asked.
