Page 34 of Beautiful Ruin

Men like me should know better than to trust the timeframe between detonations, the inhale before the gun comes out and the bullets start flying. Still, I let myself believe in it for the first half of the morning because exhaustion has made me stupid, and because even men who know better sometimes crave a few hours where the world behaves as expected.

Ivan is behind his desk for the first time since the hospital. That alone should be enough to settle me.

His study has looked wrong without him in it, a throne room with its king removed and the ghosts in the corners growing bolder as the days stretch on. Ivan Kuznetsov does not belong in bed while his empire turns without him. He belongs here, behind this desk, with one hand on a pen and the other wrapped around Moscow’s throat.

Paperwork is spread out before him in neat stacks. At a glance, most of them are financial briefings and a few political notes taken from the latest televised state briefing. The slow grind of running a kingdom from a leather chair. One I do not, and will never, envy.

He looks better. There is still a grayness beneath his skin no amount of shaving or expensive tailoring can erase. His movements remain measured, the slightest hesitation appearing whenever he reaches too far for something or twists too quickly, but his eyes are sharp again. The old heat is returning behind them, banked beneath patience and calculation.

He barely looks up when I enter, one hand moving across a document with a black fountain pen. His handwriting is elegant as it stretches across the paper, each line flowing into the next with the patience of a man who has never had to rush unless he chose to. There is something almost obscene about seeing that kind of refinement attached to the work on his desk. Ink gliding smoothly over paper while orders beneath it shift money, move men, alter lives, and bury threats.

Ivan has always made violence look civilized.

“You’re leaving the estate.” It isn’t a question.

“No longer than two hours,” I say.

“Where?”

“The coroner’s office.”

His pen pauses.

His mouth curves faintly, though not enough to be called a smile. The expression carries a trace of old approval, the kind he used to give me when I was younger and found the loose thread in something he’d deliberately left tangled to see whether I would notice it.

Once, that look would have warmed something in me. Now it makes Nikolai’s warning stir in the back of my skull once again.

Ivan’s pen taps once against the document, the sound soft against the quiet. “The bodies have already been examined.”

“Not by me.”

His gaze holds mine for a long moment, waiting for me to go on.

I keep my face blank. “They were thorough in the way the reports sent to us usually are. But to me I sensed they were written in a way that seemed like they were interested in closing the file rather than opening up a further investigation.”

The room seems to quiet further around us. This study has always felt like the center of Ivan’s world because it is where he makes decisions no one else gets to question. Men have been promoted in this room and condemned within the same breath. I have stood where I stand now and received orders that have upheaved people’s lives before dawn.

I know the man behind the desk. Which is why his silence on the matter bothers me more than it should.

He leans back slightly. “Dead men rarely offer new testimony.”

There’s no real anger behind the sentiment, nothing to suggest he believes I am questioning his judgment regarding the handling of this investigation. Ivan knows how I work. He made me this way, or at least he molded what was already there. I don’t trust other men’s eyes when my own can still be useful. Reports are only as unbiased as the men writing them, and Moscow politsiya has never been a temple of unilateral competence.

Even the bought ones can be lazy.

“Perhaps. But there is no harm in double checking.”

Something in the air between us shifts then. I can’t tell if I’ve said too much or if the last week has made me hear danger in places it isn’t. There is uncertainty in the new and I hate it.

Ivan sets the pen down at last. The gesture draws my attention against my will. His hands look steadier than they did three days ago. The nails are clean, the knuckles faintly scarred beneath the polish of age. Those same hands that signed tuition forms for Sofia’s schools have also ordered men tortured. Ones that once rested on my shoulder when I was tired and bruised and too proud to admit I was hungry.

Hands that made me.

“Tell me exactly what you expect to find,” he says.

I need to see the bodies of the assassins to take my mind off the spiraling it's been cycling through over the past few days. Moscow politsiya have already run ballistics, prints, digital traces, but nothing has come back so far. Something tells me they missed a detail the night we rushed Ivan to the hospital. There had been too much chaos, too much adrenaline rushing through me for me to think straight enough to gather any intel while at the scene.

I hesitate before answering. “I’m not sure yet.”