That shouldn’t be the thing that unsettles me most, but it is.
Because it makes this world feel real in a way meetings never did.
And when Maksim parks and gets out like this is the most natural thing in the world, I realize with a strange little jolt that maybe for him, it is.
He grew up here.
I push my door open, but before I can swing my legs out, he’s there, one hand on the edge of the door, the other reaching past me to grab my coffee from the cupholder.
He hands it to me without a word.
I take it and step out with the half eaten breakfast sandwich he bought me on the ride here still in my hand.
He shuts the door behind me, and I follow him toward the house.
Inside, it’s familiar enough to register as the same place, but different enough to make me slow.
Things are changed now. Pieces that used to be here aren’t. Decorations moved. Different things on the walls. The whole house feels cleaner somehow. Stripped of someone else’s taste. Like it belongs to Maksim more fully than it did the last time I stood in it.
He notices me noticing.
“If there’s anything you want changed,” he says, not slowing, “change it.”
I look at him, but he doesn’t look back.
He just keeps walking like the words are simple. Like he didn’t just hand me something I don’t know what to do with.
I take another bite of the sandwich so I don’t have to answer and follow him deeper into the house.
“Come on.”
That’s all he says.
I fall into step behind him toward the basement where the air cools and the sounds of the house fade behind us.
At the bottom, a large metal door waits in the wall like it was grown there.
This thing is thick. Reinforced. Industrial in a way that sends a little prickle across the back of my neck before I’m even close enough to see the keypad mounted beside it.
I slow.
Maksim doesn’t.
He steps up to the pad, then glances back at me once, blue eyes unreadable.
“Twelve-twelve.”
I blink. “That’s the passcode?”
“Yes, my birthday.”
I look from him to the keypad again. “That seems too easy.”
His fingers hover over the buttons for a second.
“No one but the Bratva knows my birthday.”
Something in the way he says it catches at me.
