“Then tell me what it is. Clearly. No strategy, no deflection.” I stepped forward. “What is this?”
Viktor looked at me for a long moment. The quiet he moved through—that pervasive, deliberate quiet—felt different in here. More present. Like something with weight.
“You witnessed a murder,” he said. “The man you watched me kill was embedded in a rival operation that is currently destabilized and therefore dangerous. Destabilized operations make impulsive choices. An impulsive choice in your direction would take approximately—” he paused, fractionally— “four minutes to execute from the moment they located you. At the pace they are currently moving, that is not a hypothetical.”
“So I’m collateral risk in your war.”
“Yes.”
“And the solution is to have me followed.”
“The solution is to ensure that anyone considering you as a target understands that you are not undefended.” He said it plainly, no softening on it. “You are alive right now because I chose it. That choice has implications.”
“I am alive right now becauseIchose it,” I corrected. “I chose not to scream. I chose to walk away. I chose to come back to work and keep my mouth shut. My survival has been mine, every step of it.”
His jaw tightened. It was the first seemingly involuntary thing I had seen from him tonight.
“You’re not wrong,” he said.
The agreement disarmed me slightly, which I resented. “Then stop acting like I’m yours to manage.”
“I’m not managing you. I’m managing the situation.”
“The situation is my life.”
He took a slow, controlled breath. Which was interesting, because Viktor Golovin did not appear to need to regulate himself. He appeared to exist in a state of permanent regulation, like a machine set to a particular calibration. When I could watch him doing it consciously, it told me something about the effort required.
“You’re a liability and an asset,” he said. “Liabilities that cannot be neutralized become assets. Assets are protected.”
“I am a person.”
“Yes.” Something in his voice changed—not much. “You are.”
He stepped forward, and I had to tilt my head back to keep my eyes on his, which I did, because I was not going to look away from Viktor Golovin in a dim corridor and give him the satisfaction of watching me shrink.
“This isn’t fear,” he said. “What I have around you. You can call it whatever allows you to be comfortable with it. But it is not designed to frighten you.”
“It doesn’t frighten me,” I said. “It infuriates me.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that. Stop knowing everything I’m about to say before I say it.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile—Viktor Golovin did not smile, I was increasingly certain—but a movement in that direction, a suggestion. “Then say something I don’t expect.”
I pushed him with my palm flat against his chest.
The action was not planned or the product of rational thinking about likely outcomes. It barely moved him, but it was contact. My palm against his sternum, the heat of him coming through the fabric of his shirt in the second before I pulled my hand back, the solid reality of him, physical and undeniable.
He stopped.
He didn’t step away or move away. He just went… still. Every line of him went still in a way that was different from his ordinary stillness, which was the stillness of a man with nothing pressing on him.
I stared at him.
He stared at me.
His eyes had done something—darkened, I thought, though the light was too low for me to be certain. But something in the depths of them had changed, some quality that made my breath shorten.
