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“Look at me,” he orders again.

I look at him, and he drives forward. I come a second time, clenching around him, my whole body locking up, and he fucks me through all of it without slowing down, every stroke drawing it out, until I’m shaking and wrecked and can barely hold a thought.

He flips me onto my stomach, pulls my hips up, and drives back in from behind, deep on the first stroke. I grab the pillow and press my face into it. He gets his fist in my hair, pulling my head back, his other hand locked on my hip. He goes hard, each thrust driving me forward an inch, and I stop pretending any of this is controlled or dignified or anything other than exactly what it is.

“Fuck,” I say into the pillow, and I mean it as a general statement about my life, my choices, and what is currently happening to me.

He fucks me even harder, and I push back against him and take everything and make sounds that would horrify the version of me who walked into his compound in a charcoal suit. But I don’t care because I just need this to keep going.

He comes inside me with both hands locked on my hips, pulling me back against him, filling me up in pulses. I feel every one of them, and my body clenches around him through all of it, drawing him out completely. He stays, doesn’t pull out, his weight coming down against my back, neither of us saying anything.

After a while he pulls out slowly and rolls onto his back beside me. I stay on my stomach with my face turned to the wall, breathing.

It meant nothing.

I remind myself as clearly and directly as I can. A physiological response to proximity. It’s physics. Nothing about my father, nothing about the drive, nothing about the way he looks at me when he doesn’t let anger cloud his vision.

I still don’t have the gate key, but I’ll think about all of it tomorrow when I’m dressed, have had coffee, and am better equipped to lie to myself properly.

14

Volkov

“Talk,” I say, and Dmitri talks.

He’s been sitting on this for two days, I can tell by how fast he gets to it, like he rehearsed it on the drive over. Someone has been making inquiries about Berezin’s financial records through channels that have nothing to do with the Bratva. Not our people. Not Crown. Someone outside our organization asking questions about a dead man’s money, and the questions are targeted enough that whoever’s asking knows exactly what they’re looking for.

“How targeted?” I ask.

“Shell company level,” Dmitri says. “Not the surface accounts. Whoever it is knows there’s a second layer.”

“When did this start?”

“Three, four weeks ago. We picked it up because one of the firms they approached has a standing arrangement with us.”

Three weeks ago. Right around the time Berezin’s daughter walked into my compound with a proposal and a face that gave me nothing and something she’d hidden under both.

I don’t say that. “Find out who’s asking,” I tell Dmitri. “Not what they know. Who they are. Name first, everything else after.”

He nods and gets out. I sit at the table after he goes and let it run. Someone else pulling at the same thread my wife is pulling at. Don’t know yet if they’re connected. Don’t know yet if she sent them, if they’re working against her, or if this is a third problem I haven’t figured out yet.

Probably trouble. Most things are.

The morning is the same as every morning. Supplier who’s been skimming and thinks I haven’t caught it, which I’ve known about for two weeks and let run because a man who thinks he’s getting away with something is a man I can use. A dispute in Queens that’s been simmering and needs me to stand in a room and be the thing that ends it without anyone having to say they lost. Accountant meeting. Phone calls. Straight through all of it, no wasted motion.

It doesn’t feel right.

Usually the work is enough. By the time the day is done, I’m tired enough that the thing sitting under everything goes quiet for a while. Ten weeks of that. This morning it isn’t working.

I keep thinking about last night.

Not the argument. The argument I can deal with, it’s the same one we have every few days, her pushing for more room and me not giving it, both of us knowing the real fight is underneath the one we’re having. What I can’t shake is the rest of it. The sounds she made. The way she pushed back against me and took everything and stopped caring about the noise. The fact that her composure was completely gone and she let it be gone, and I could see all of it on her face.

I’ve had plenty of women. None of them looked like that.

She’s Berezin’s daughter. I killed her father. She walked into my house with a plan, but last night wasn’t a part of it. It happened. I need to remember who she is and what she’s doing here, because the moment I forget about that is the moment she gets somewhere I don’t want her to get.

The problem is she’s already inside my house, inside my bed, and I knew that was a risk when I let her in, but I let her in anyway because I needed a lead to follow. She has one, so I’m sticking with my plan.