I wanted to punish her for making me want her. The thoughts knot together, violence and desire, fury and need.
The arousal that has become my unwelcome companionover the past month reasserts itself with familiar, maddening persistence. I disregard it.
I am not going to be made vulnerable by a woman who wears cartoon pajamas and refuses to smile at me.
I resume walking toward my office.
Her vanilla scent follows me.
The phone rings at 4:17 p.m.
I’m behind the desk, reviewing the territorial maps Alexei updated this morning, when the screen lights up with his name.
I answer. “Talk.”
Two seconds of silence.
“Sergei is gone.”
The phone stays pressed to my ear, and I stare at the maps spread across the desk, and the lines and borders blur into meaningless ink.
Fuck.
Sergei. One of the few men who ever taught me anything worth learning.
“How?”
“He was shot during the warehouse operation this morning. The body was found two hours ago. We confirmed through?—”
I hang up.
The maps are still in front of me. The pen is still in my hand.
Sergei was fifty-four years old with hands the size of dinner plates. He had a laugh that could travel through concrete. He served as my father’s third-in-command, just below Mikhail, before I inherited the position. The man who taught me at sixteen how to hold a weapon properly, how to read a room before speaking, how to stand behind a mangiving orders and make the orders unnecessary through presence alone.
Bile rises in my throat.
He showed me where to strike so the pain instructs without destroying, and where to strike so the lesson becomes permanent.
My hand closes around the pen until the plastic cracks.
These things happen, I forcefully remind myself. They are the cost of the life I chose — or the life that chose me, depending on how generous I’m feeling with the narrative. Men die. Good men, sometimes. The organization absorbs the loss and continues. Sentiment is not a resource. Grief is not a strategy.
I believe this. I’ve built my entire operational philosophy on it.
Tonight, I don’t feel it.
It’s past ten, the staff has retired for the night, and Anya is asleep. The corridors belong to ghosts and insomniacs and men who should be pouring vodka in their offices instead of opening security feeds.
I open the feed on camera twelve.
Elizabeth’s door is open.
I scan. She’s not in the hallway, not in the sunroom. Not in the living room. Camera fourteen, the private kitchen.
There she is.
Standing at the counter in the light, barefoot on the marble — of course barefoot, as if shoes are an inconvenience she refuses to participate in after dark.
