“Mr. Ravenscroft,” she says. Her English is formal and precise, each word placed with care, the accent underneath it giving everything a particular formal weight. “Please. Sit down.”
I do so.
Her eyes sparkle at me. She’s been waiting for this reckoning. “Mikhail believed in large gestures,” Elena says. “The show of force, the demonstration of power. I have always preferred—” she considers—“quieter methods.” She sets down her wine.
“My husband built something,” she says. “Over forty years. From nothing—you understand? From nothing. His father was a factory worker in Volgograd. His grandfather died in the war. Everything you see—” she gestures, a small precise movement— “everything the Mirror Bratva was, everything it had—my husband built with his hands and his mind and his will, with me by his side.” She pauses. “And now it is gone.”
“It is gone,” I agree. We are now the custodians of the Kuznetsov’s vast wealth.
“Because of your wife,” she says.
The mention of Ivy takes me by surprise. I keep my expression steady, but a new plume of anxiety curls in my chest. “Not because of my wife,” I reply coldly. “Because of your husband's choices.”
She looks at me. Something moves in her eyes—not anger, something colder than anger. “Mikhail made choices. Men always make choices.” She picks up her wine. “And then the women are left to live with them.”
The room is quiet for a moment, tension in every micro movement.
“You didn't want me here to talk about Mikhail,” I say.
“No,” she agrees. “I came here to talk about what comes next. I want the seed phrase, Mr. Ravenscroft. The fortune my husband accumulated over forty years—the fortune that your family then took, along with his bastard son, and his life.”
“The boy's fortune belongs to the boy,” I say.
Her left eye twitches. “The boy,” she says, and something shifts in her voice—not contempt exactly, something more complex than contempt, “is a symbol of my husband's weakness. I want nothing to do withthe boy.” A pause. “I want what ismine.”
She doesn’t mention the children she lost, even though it offers significant leverage. Perhaps it’s too painful. She pushes ahead. “This matter will be closed now, in this meeting. I won’t allow you to leave here with the seed phrase. I will not stop until what I am owed is returned to me. If we don’t reach an agreement, Ivy will pay for what she’s done.”
My anger flares. Howdareshe threaten Ivy. My jaw tightened and my knuckles turned white. “And if we reach an arrangement today,” I say, “you stop.”
She looks at me for a long moment.
“I am a practical woman,” she says. I look at the photograph on the windowsill of all the loved ones who she has lost. I look at the four men positioned around the room—I have placed them all now, including the one by the bookcase who has been very still for a very long time.
I think about Ivy in the Ravenscroft building, in the Ariana Foundation office, heavily secured. Becks beside her. Twenty miles away, safe.
I think about my twelve men on the perimeter of my home and the security protocols and everything I have put in place. The high tech security system at the manor, keeping the rest of the family out of danger. Everyone I love is safe.
“The seed phrase, Mr Ravenscroft.”
I reach into my inside pocket.
“Before you do that,” Elena says.
I stop.
She touches her chest. A small gesture—two fingers, brief, just below her collarbone. “After my husband was killed,” she says, “my heart began to fail.” She says it without self-pity, simply as a medical fact. “Grief, the doctors said. They were being poetic, I think. The truth is that I had spent forty years letting Mikhail carry certain things, and when he was gone—” she pauses—”the weight redistributed itself.” She touches her chest again. “They wanted to give me a pacemaker to keep my heart beating.”
I say nothing.
“I was in the hospital for two weeks,” she continues. “Lying in that bed, thinking about what had happened. About your family. About—” a pause—”her. I agreed to the medical device, but I had a specialist fit it with something extra.” She looks at me steadily. “If my heart stops, Mr. Ravenscroft, something will be triggered. I won't tell you where. I won't tell you what. I will only tell you that it will cause considerable damage to someone—” she holds my gaze—”that you care very much about.”
The room is absolutely silent.
I look at her face. The steadiness of it. The particular quality of her stillness—not the stillness of someone maintaining a bluff, but the stillness of someone who has already accepted an outcome and is simply waiting for it to arrive.
I think about her men not taking our weapons.
I think about the text message before we even knocked.
