Page 185 of Ruthless Sin
He watches me put it on. His mouth moves.
“Nico.”
Not a greeting. A tool. The way he says it, flat and deliberate, like he owns the name.
I do not answer.
I cross to the position Yelena’s schematic called for. Two steps from him. Outside his reach if the restraints go. I look at the maps on the table. Shipping maps. Three of them, weightedat the corners with the original salt-and-pepper set. A satellite phone face-down on a stack of papers.
He was on a call when we breached.
“Ty ne speshil.” You took your time.
I keep my eyes on the maps.
“Ya dumal, ty bol’she ne priyedesh’.” I thought you wouldn’t come. A pause. The temperature in his voice drops the way it dropped in the concrete room before he gave the order. “A long time to carry a dead woman’s name.”
My jaw tightens. I do not speak.
“I left her alive on purpose.” His English is perfect. Unhurried. He uses it because he wants me to feel the threat in my own language. “Did you understand that, in the room? I could have finished it quickly. I chose not to.” The pause is surgical. “I wanted you to watch. I wanted you to sit in that chair and feel every second of what you couldn’t stop.” He tilts his head. “You were supposed to break. Most men do.”
Milochka. Find Milochka. Promise me.
I keep my eyes on the maps.
“My man didn’t check in.” A flat statement. “That’s how I knew you walked out. One guard, one prisoner, and somehow the prisoner left and my man didn’t.” A pause. “I thought about that for a long time. What kind of man does that, in that condition, after what he watched.”
The maps on the table are Yelena’s. The shipping routes she traced through months of fieldwork. The financial threads she documented before she died. Alexei has been making decisions with them for years and never known she sent copies to me before the end. He has been running her intelligence without knowing it belonged to her.
She got him here. Not me. Her.
“Where is she?” Still that tone. Still curious. Still patient. “I have been wondering if she survived what I put her through. Thenetwork is not kind to girls who think too much of themselves. Dmitri’s daughters both had that problem. He raised them to believe they were more than they were.” He tilts his head. “Is she broken?”
I look at the salt-and-pepper set on the maps.
He is trying to crack me before she arrives. He knows what my sending for her means. He is calculating: if he can make this room about Moscow instead of what is about to happen here, he walks out of this with Nico Santoro’s guilt on his hands and Mila’s arrival meaning nothing.
He will not.
“Nichego ne skazat’?” Nothing to say? He leans forward the inch the restraints allow. “You were a different man in Moscow, Nico. You spoke then. You argued. You made promises you couldn’t keep.” The voice drops quieter. “I remember the sound you made when she went down. I’ve kept it. For difficult days.”
The air in the dining room is very still and I am not going to let him see what that sentence did to me.
My hands are at my sides, open, flat, loose. I breathe. I count. I stay in the room and I do not go back to the concrete floor and I do not hear Yelena’s voice and I do not let this man touch the years I have been carrying because they are mine and they do not belong to him and they never did.
“You’re quiet.” Genuinely bemused now. “Interesting. I expected — “ He stops. The earpiece. He heard it. A change in my posture, some fraction of attention moving to the right side of my face, and he caught it before I could control it.
Marco. Earpiece. Quiet.
“Renzo and Mila at the oak alley. Ninety seconds.”
I keep my eyes on the maps.
“Ah.” The voice goes very still. “You brought her.”
He looks at the door for the first time. The first real crack, not the half-second twitch I caught earlier, but a man recalculating,the patience fraying at the single edge he did not account for. He believed she would be too broken. He believed the network would have done to her what it does to most.
He is about to find out that the girl he sold at sixteen is the one who ends him.
