This is our mistake. Pavel’s not the type to avoid responsibility, so I will approach it from the angle of a shared error if he brings it up. He will accept his part in this, as I have, and we will collaborate on the next steps to never let this happen again.
Cold, clean, simple math.
I can do this.
I lock the door behind me and head out. When I double-check the doorknob to make sure the lock took, the memory of his cock in my hand shoves forward, and I stumble.
But I don’t fall, which feels like a significant achievement. It’s a low bar to cross, but as long as I keep my threshold for significant achievements that low, today will go great.
6
PAVEL
I wake before the alarm.
This is not unusual. I have not needed an alarm clock since my early twenties, when I trained myself out of slow mornings the same way I trained myself out of most luxuries. Discipline. The understanding that a man who sleeps deeply is a man who trusts his perimeter, and I have never trusted my perimeter enough for that.
What is unusual is the feeling.
I lie in the dark of my bedroom and sit with it. It’s not contentment. It’s not happiness, a word that has always seemed faintly theoretical to me, something that happens to other people in other kinds of lives. It’s something quieter than either of those things, and more dangerous.
Peace.
This is not good.
I shower. I dress. I stand at the floor-to-ceiling windows of my penthouse with coffee I don’t drink for the flavor and watch thecity wake beneath me, gray and indifferent in the early light, and I think about Molly Bennett.
I have been thinking about Molly since she found her way into my office. She’s a problem I have not solved. Not in the years she’s worked for me, and certainly not last night.
She’s exceptional at her work. Precise, perceptive, possessed of a dry wit which she deploys so quietly that half the time you miss it entirely, and the other half it has already landed, leaving mirth in her wake. She walks into rooms as if she belongs in them. The woman is entirely herself, no matter the situation.
I don’t know how being around harsh men all these years has not worn her down.
Instead, she looks at me like she’s constantly deciding how much of my bullshit she’s willing to tolerate, and the answer is always just enough. Her patience with my men is extraordinary. And she does it all with an hourglass figure, a slightly crooked smile, and a tray of those infernal brownies I hate, but appreciate on everyone else’s behalf.
I have managed it. Until now.
I set the coffee down on the windowsill. Outside, the city continues its indifference.
What happened last night cannot happen again. The clarity arrived sometime in the small hours, after she left on unsteady legs. I watched her go and felt something pull tight in my chest that I have no name for and no time to develop one. Then I sat alone in my office in the dark and was honest with myself.
I am a pakhan. I have been one long enough that the word no longer feels like a title. It is simply the shape of my life. Theobligations it carries are not negotiable, and chief among them is that sentiment is a liability. Attachment is a vulnerability. Any man in my position who forgets this does not remain in my position for long.
He doesn’t remain anything for long.
I learned this once before, at a cost I do not revisit. I will not learn it again. Particularly at Molly’s expense. Last night was a one-time event, never to be repeated. For her sake.
Molly arrives early, which is when she always arrives. I know this without checking. I give her twenty minutes to settle, then call her in.
While I wait, I stand at my window again and think about Fedor Vinogradov, because that is the thing I should be thinking about instead of the way Molly looked in the low light of my office last night. Igor brought me the news delivered in the flat, careful tone my sovetnik uses when he’s telling me something I will not want to hear.
Fedor is getting out.
Igor backed it up with a visit from his informant, but I had already trusted Igor’s intelligence. His information is always solid, so why he arranged the meeting with Guy, I will never know. Igor does things his own way, and while I find it confusing at times, he has never let me down.
Someone with influence intervened on Fedor’s behalf, which means he still has allies I have not identified. This is a problem I should have anticipated. The fact that I did not is an irritation I am still processing.
I’m responsible for Fedor’s imprisonment. He had bombed a shipment of mine and killed four of my men. His brigadier, Kirill Andreeva, had killed my own brigadier, Daniel Yatsenko, on Fedor’s order. I could not prove either crime in any court that would have accepted my testimony, and so I handled it the only way available to me.
