Igor nods and stands. At the door, he pauses, which is unusual enough to have my attention. “There is one other thing,” he says, in the tone that means he has been deciding whether to raise it and has decided he must. “Vet checked in this morning. Nothing to report.” He meets my eyes with the level, careful gaze of a man who has served me for eleven years and earned the right to say the thing he is about to say. “She can’t be everywhere at once, Pavel.”
“She doesn’t have to be. Molly’s side is the only place she needs to be.”
He nods once, then leaves.
Fedor is doing what he can to dismantle my operation. He spent seven years behind bars, considering what he can do to ruin me as I ruined him.
Kamila’s dry voice creeps into the back of my mind.“Ask Fedor.”
She knows I won’t ask him a damn thing. I’d sooner put a bullet in his brain than listen to what he has to say. Perhaps that was her true message. Whatever he did to spook her, she wants him dead for it. That sounds more like the Kamila Mahendru I know.
No amount of thermal cameras on Molly’s apartment will stop a bullet. Or a hit man. She’s in danger, the kind of danger that scared a gun runner from Afghanistan.
I should send Molly away.
The thought slices clean into my chest, then rips its way out.
But it is the rational position. Remove her from my proximity, construct a clean professional distance, make her unremarkable to anyone watching my life for leverage. A generous severance, an exceptional reference, an exit from a situation that is becoming dangerous in ways she doesn’t fully understand, and I cannot fully explain.
She would land well. She is exceptional at her work and she knows it, and whatever she felt about leaving, she would be safe, and safe is the only variable that matters.
I know this.
And then I think about her at my window last week, looking out at the city with those steady brown eyes, working through something complicated with the quiet thoroughness she brings to everything. There’s the way she says my name when she forgets to be careful about it, when the professional register slips. How cold my office would be without her in it. How lifeless.
I cannot imagine my world without her in it.
This is, I recognize immediately, all the more reason to send her away. A man in my position who cannot imagine his world without a specific person in it has handed that person to his enemies on a silver platter, and Fedor is the kind of man who will pick it up without hesitation. The rational calculation has not changed. If anything, this makes it more urgent.
I turn away from the window and sit back down at my desk.
I pull up the contact list for the backup associates and begin making calls, because the shipment is still a problem that requires solving, and I’m a man who solves problems by working through them rather than around them. The first call goes adequately. The second goes less well. I leave a message for the third and expect nothing from it. I make notes, draw contingencies, work the logistics of a route that will be slower, more expensive, and considerably less clean than what Kamila would have arranged, and I do all of this with the focused efficiency that has kept me functional and alive in this business for going on two decades.
The truth is, I turn to logistics because they are easier than my real problem.
At half past six, I hear her knock.
She opens my door and has a folder in one hand and her coat over her arm, which means she’s leaving soon. She stopped in on her way out.
Out to where?
Her voice is tired from a long day, but still bright. “Revised supplier contacts for the Vasiliev account. I flagged three who haven’t responded in the last cycle. You may want Igor to look into whether they’re still operational.”
She’s wearing the dark green dress, the one that does things to my concentration that I have long since stopped pretending to manage. Her hair is slightly loose from wherever it started the day, and she looks tired in the way she looks at the end of long days, which is to say competent and tired simultaneously, which is a combination I find unreasonably compelling.
“Thank you.”
She reads my face, and something in her expression shifts. “Everything alright?”
“Operational issue. Nothing that requires your attention.”
She holds my gaze for a beat longer than she strictly needs to, and I can see her deciding whether to push. She decides not to, which is either trust or the end of a long day, and she says she’ll see me tomorrow, picks up her coat, and turns to go.
“Molly.”
She turns back, one hand on the doorframe.
I look at her across the office. I think about how I said I would send her away if I had to, and I’m no longer certain that is true. My gut twists, and an oily ribbon slithers through me.
