13
ROLAN
My blood turns to ice, locking inside my veins and making my entire body go still. Every muscle, every nerve, every synapse is firing the same message:danger.
Elizabeth Calloway is standing in the archway of my dining room.
She’s in socks. That’s the first thing I register — absurdly, irrationally, as if the absence of shoes is the problem and not the fact that the most dangerous men in Chicago are currently looking at her. She’s in jeans and a sweater, and her hair is loose. She’s staring at me knowing full well she made a mistake. But she doesn’t understand the magnitude.
She can’t understand the magnitude. Because she thinks this is a business dinner. She thinks the man at the other end of my table is a client, a partner, a contact in the import business.
She doesn’t know who Besnik Dushku is, or that Marku, the man to Dushku’s left, runs a trafficking operation through the Balkans that moves human beings like livestock, or that the guards flanking them have done things that would make her unable to sleep for the rest of her life. And that every person inthis room is currently assessing her, cataloging her face, her build, her relationship to me, her potential utility as leverage.
She is standing in a room full of wolves in socks and a sweater, and she has no fucking idea.
I stand. The motion is controlled because if I move the way my body wants to move, I will flip this table and put a bullet in every man who turned his head to look at her.
Every. Single. One.
The urge is so acute that I have to press my fingers against the wood to keep them from reaching for the gun holstered beneath my jacket. It’s not rational. It’s primal.
They’re looking at her.
Dushku turns in his chair with languid ease. His eyes travel over Elizabeth with an unhurried thoroughness that makes my vision narrow to a single, bright point.
“Well,” he says. “Who is this?”
I’ll kill him. The thought is clean and certain. I want to walk around this table and put my hands on his throat and squeeze until the smile stops.
I don’t.
I can’t act on impulse in front of my enemies. Not when every twitch of my body is being cataloged for weakness. Not when weakness is the one currency I cannot spend.
Elizabeth speaks first. Her voice is shaky but present, explaining about Anya, the fever, and the medicine.
She’s apologizing for interrupting dinner to help my sick daughter, and the apology hits me like a blade.
“Go,” I command. Mikhail moves to guide her through the archway.
She disappears.
I sit.
The conversation resumes. Dushku is studying me. He hasn’t stopped since she appeared. His features are pleasant.Neutral. But his eyes are filing, assigning value to what he witnessed.
He says nothing about her. That’s worse than if he had. Dushku’s silence is never empty — it’s storage. He’ll use what he saw when the time is right, and not a moment before.
But his associate has no such discipline.
Marku, who is not a bodyguard but a business partner, and who has spent the entire evening talking about women like commodities and cocaine like cuisine, leans back in his chair with a grin that shows too many teeth.
“Nowthat,” Marku says, “is something I wouldn’t mind seeing at the negotiating table.”
The table goes quiet.
Marku doesn’t register it. He’s too drunk on wine and his own voice, too impressed with himself, too fundamentally stupid to read the temperature of a room that has dropped twenty degrees.
“Did you see her ass in those jeans?” He turns to one of Dushku’s guards, soliciting agreement like a comedian working a crowd. “I’d close the deal right now if she comes back and serves dessert. Hell, she can be the dessert?—”
