Page 84 of Marrying the Pakhan

Pavel’s alone when we find him, standing in what was once presumably a study, surrounded by boxes half packed, a man clearly planning to disappear again rather than execute whatever personal violence Dimitri’s informant overheard him planning.

He doesn’t reach for a weapon when I step through the doorway. He simply straightens, studying me with the same unnerving stillness I remember from the courtroom, eleven years compressed into a single, silent moment before either of us speaks.

“Viktor Markov.” He says my name like he’s tasting it, testing its weight after all this time. “We finally meet properly. I confess I expected this conversation years ago.”

“You’ve had eleven years to arrange it yourself. You chose silence instead.”

“I chose survival. There’s a difference, though I don’t expect a man your age to fully understand it yet.” His eyes flick past me, taking in the men filling the doorway behind me, understanding arriving visibly across his face. “You didn’t come alone.”

“No.”

“Ambitious of you, bringing help to face a dying old man.”

“You’re not dying. You’re desperate, which is considerably more dangerous.” I keep my voice level, refusing him the satisfaction of watching me lose composure the way he clearly hoped to provoke. “You tried to take my daughter twice. You called my wife expendable while she carries a child you’ll never meet. I’m done treating you like a ghost from my past, Pavel. Tonight, you become someone else’s problem entirely.”

“You speak of family as though I don’t understand the concept myself.” His voice sharpens for the first time, real emotion cutting through the composure. “My son is dead, Markov. My bloodline ends with a girl who now calls another man her father. Everything I have done, I have done because grief leaves a man with very few options he can still call his own.”

“Grief doesn’t excuse pointing a gun at a six-year-old’s face.”

“No,” he admits, quieter now. “Perhaps it doesn’t. I stopped examining that particular distinction a long time ago.”

Understanding crosses his face slowly, followed by something close to genuine fear for the first time since I’ve known him existed.

“Volkov.”

“Volkov,” I confirm. “He’s been looking for you considerably longer than I have. Eleven years of borrowed resources tends to accumulate interest.”

“I can offer you something better than whatever debt you think settling this repays.” Pavel’s composure cracks fully now, calculation replacing the earlier stillness. “Information. Resources. Things Volkov doesn’t know I still possess.”

“I don’t need anything you have left to offer. I have everything that actually matters already, safe, alive, waiting for me at home.” I step aside, and Volkov’s men move past me into the room, efficient, unhurried, the particular calm of men who’ve waited a long time for exactly this moment. “This isn’t about what you can give me anymore, Pavel. This is about eleven years finally catching up to a man who thought he’d outrun them.”

Volkov himself appears in the doorway a moment later, studying Pavel with an expression I don’t fully want to interpret, cold satisfaction layered beneath something considerably darker.

“Hello, old friend,” he says, voice quiet, almost gentle, which somehow makes it worse. “We have a great deal to discuss. Privately, I think, don’t you?”

Pavel doesn’t struggle as Volkov’s men take him, some final calculation apparently convincing him resistance serves no purpose here.

He looks back at me once as they lead him out, and whatever he intends that look to communicate, I feel nothing in response beyond the simple, exhausted relief of watching a threat finally leave my life for good.

“That’s the last of it,” Dimitri says quietly, appearing at my shoulder once the room’s finally empty. “Eleven years, over in about ten minutes.”

“Feels like it should have taken longer.”

“Most endings do, in the moment. They rarely match the buildup.” He claps a hand on my shoulder, something like relief finally breaking across his own face. “Let’s go home, Viktor. Tell Harper it’s actually over this time.”

I drive home in a silence that feels different from every other silence these last few months, lighter somehow, the specific weight of Pavel Ivanov finally lifted from a place in my chest I’d stopped noticing was carrying it.

The threat that shaped every single day since that courtroom is finally, actually closed.

42

HARPER

I find the folder while cleaning out the study, tucked behind a row of books that have never once looked like they belonged to a man with Viktor’s actual life.

I almost don’t open it. Almost.

But my hands are already pulling it free, and once it’s open there’s no putting it back unread, not with my own name appearing on the very first page, followed by pages and pages of things I never knew he was tracking so closely.