With a sigh, I hang the outfit on the back of my bedroom door and sit on the bed.
I don’t know who this family is. I don’t know if I’m qualified. But Idoknow I’m running out of moves. The walls are closing in from every side. There’s one door left, and it’s the only one I haven’t tried yet.
Whatever’s on the other side can’t be worse than what’s behind me, right?
4
ROLAN
The car is waiting, ready to leave the warehouse and Viktor behind. I remove my jacket, fold it, and place it in the garment bag hanging from the door hook. The shirt is clean — I don’t get close enough for mess, and Alexei’s work is precise — but I change anyway. There’s a fresh shirt in the bag, pressed this morning.
I button it in the rearview mirror. My hands are steady. My father’s hands used to shake in the car after these… unpleasant necessities. He tried to hide it, but I saw.
Children of dangerous men learn to read hands the way other children learn to read books.
The car glides through the city with Dmitri at the wheel. The route from the warehouse district to my estate usually takes forty minutes. That is, if traffic cooperates. It rarely does. But Dmitri has a way of bending time and space to his will.
Red lights seem to change as we approach. Lanes open. It’s not supernatural. It’s just that the city has learned to get out of Dmitri’s way.
My phone buzzes. Mikhail.
MIKHAIL
The final candidates are prepared. Three dossiers on your desk. Interview schedule for tomorrow confirmed.
I type back.
I’ll review them tonight.
Then I open the security feed on my phone. Camera six, the sunroom. Anya is there. She’s sitting on the window seat with her sketchbook and Mr. Whiskers, the stuffed rabbit she’s had since she was two. Her legs are tucked under her. Her hair, even darker than mine, falls across her face as she draws.
She’s alone. Since Marina left to marry her fiancé in Moscow, everything has fallen apart. She was the one person who had cracked the code. She was patient, creative, and stubborn in the right ways.
Marina gave us five years. When she came to my office in tears and told me she’d fallen in love and wanted to go home to Moscow, I considered how much she had done for my daughter and decided to repay her. “Go,” I said. “Quickly. Before I change my mind.”
Not a day has passed without questioning my decision.
I close the feed and put the phone away.
There’s a smear on my cuff. I look closer. It turns out to be nothing, only a shadow, a crease in the fabric. But for a moment, in the gray light of the car, it resembled blood.
That world is not allowed to follow me home.
To be Pakhan, I’m forced to carry two people in the same body. One of them orders executions. The other watches his six-year-old on a camera feed and worries that she’s lonely.
Both are real. Neither is enough.
The estate gradually appears through the trees, then all at once.
The gates open as the car approaches, cleared by the biometric scan on the vehicle, license plate recognition, and visual confirmation from the guard station. Three layers of security before the tires touch the gravel drive.
I built this.
Not the house, that was my father’s, and his father’s before him. But the security, the systems, the protocols that turn a home into a fortress.
I built it after Anya was born. When I held her for the first time, I understood with a deep, unflinching clarity that I would burn civilizations to keep her safe.
A sneer curls my lips as I think of her mother.
