The minutes accumulate.
I reread Maren’s message, drafting responses and deleting them. I look at the objects on his desk — the folders, the pen, the glass paperweight that ended up on the floor the afternoon he swept everything off it. I weigh how much this is going to hurt if my plan doesn’t work out as I expect.
The door opens.
Rolan stops.
His eyes move from the empty chair across the desk to the chair behind it, where I am sitting, and for a fraction of a second, I detect a new glint in his eyes. Is that... pride?
He changed his shirt. His hands are clean. Whatever happened in the basement has been removed from his personwith the same efficiency that removed the evidence from the foyer weeks ago.
I stand and come around the desk, stopping in the center of the room, right in front of him. I hold his gaze and take a deep breath, bracing for a truth I need to hear.
“Who are you, Rolan Belov?”
32
ROLAN
Who are you, Rolan Belov?
The question sits in the space between us. I turn it over once before I answer.
The honest response is that I stopped knowing the answer to that question a few weeks ago. Maybe even months.
She saw me in the basement tonight. She doesn’t know that the man in the chair sent three people into my home to kill my daughter, along with everyone else in the building. She saw the end of it.
And she’s still here.
Not gone. Here, in the center of my office, standing at her full height with her eyes burning and her hands steady.
I move to the chair across from the desk and sit. I lean forward. I put my hands on my knees and redirect my gaze to her.
“Sit down, Elizabeth.”
The silence stretches for a moment.
“Sit down,” I repeat.
“I’ll stand.”
I nod.Have it your way.
“I’m the Pakhan of the Chicago Bratva. Head of the Russian mafia,” I explain. “Do you know what that means?”
A spasm crosses her face, quickly controlled.
“Yes, I think,” she gulps. “And you were—” She stops. Starts again. “What you were doing to that man. Is that?—”
“Yes.”
“Do you do that often?”
“When it’s necessary.”
She puts one hand on the back of the chair across from me. Her knuckles are white against the leather. “And the night of the attack. In the foyer. All that blood?—”
“Mine and theirs. Mostly theirs.”
