Page 47 of The Pakhan’s Debt by Leona White

“Where are they?”

Her eyes are wide in the emergency light. “Kitchen passage. I think. I don’t know. They cut the comms and Mr. Hale, one of the guards, is down and they said stay in place but the doors unlocked and then men came through with codes and I ran and I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I catch her by the shoulders. “Listen to me. Did they come from outside?”

She shakes her head too fast. “No. West service side. They knew the codes.”

I let her go. “Get to the chapel if you can. If you can’t, lock yourself in a linen closet and don’t move.”

“What about you?”

I step back already moving. “I’m making a terrible decision.”

She almost laughs, which is insane, and then she bolts the other way.

I hit the back run and the house changes around me. The nice wood gives way to tighter walls, service sconces, painted trim, practical doors. This side of the house always smells faintly of soap, starch, coffee, and heat from the pipes. Tonight it smells like dead circuits and fear.

Two shots crack from the kitchen side. Not suppressed. Somebody in the house is still fighting with whatever he grabbed first. A man yells, “Move, move, move.”

Another answers in Russian, “Package first.”

Package.

I freeze behind the service stair door.

Me. They mean me. My dress feels thin all of a sudden, absurd on my skin in the middle of men talking routes and packages and collateral. My heart starts slamming hard enough to hurt.

Then boots pound across the corridor ahead. I flatten myself into the dark beside a pantry alcove just as three men cut across the intersection. Two I don’t know. The third is one of the estate drivers. I know his face because I’ve seen him in daylight with coffee in his hand and keys on one finger, talking to security like a bored professional. He’s carrying a rifle now.

He points toward the side passage. “Her floor is clear. If she moved, she moved down. Check kitchen access and lock the chapel wing.”

One of the others says, “Volkov?”

The driver spits onto the tile. “Occupied.”

Occupied can mean alive. It can mean fighting. It can also mean dead men around him and not enough bullets left for elegance.

I don’t let myself stop on it.

The driver keeps going. “Moretti wants eyes on her. Alive. Face intact.”

The other man gives a short laugh. “Listed continuity.”

The driver answers with one I haven’t heard before. “Volkov bridge.”

They move on.

I stay where I am for three full breaths because if I move too soon, they’ll hear the panic in my feet. They keep changing the word. Package. Collateral. Continuity. Bridge. It all means the same thing in their mouths. I’m something they can’t afford to lose.

I slip through the pantry door toward the kitchen, staying low beside the counter. My shoulder hits the edge of the prep table hard enough to throw sparks across my vision, and before I can get my balance back, a hand fists in the back of my robe and yanks me off my feet.

I go down on one knee. Cold tile. Bare skin. My palm skids through water and something slicker than water, and then somebody drives me flat between the shoulder blades and pins me there. Bleach and metal hit my tongue, and panic turns sour in my mouth.

“Hold her.”

The voice is Russian. House-calm, not the bark of an outside gunman guessing his way through a rich man’s kitchen. It’s the man with the tablet. A second man grabs my wrists and jerks them behind my back so hard my shoulder burns. Plastic bites down. One tie, then another over it, drawn so tight my fingers flash numb. I twist anyway. It gets me nowhere except a palm shoved against the side of my face, grinding my cheek into tile. One of the men laughs under his breath like I’m making the evening more interesting.

“Still lively,” he says in accented Russian. A boot nudges my thigh.