Page 40 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
“You are safe.”
“I know,” she answered coolly. “I want her to know it directly. From me.”
I thought about the investigation. The interior leak, the coordinates still assembling themselves in the audit data, the timeline of information provision that Dmitri’s records were slowly making legible. I thought about the security implications of introducing an outside contact into the manor’s current configuration, the standard risk assessment I would apply to any such request.
I thought about Elena in the library talking about the woman on the staircase landing who explained how to count the distance of a storm and moved away in the spring.
“Okay,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said.
I looked at her in the dark of the room. At the face I had been watching for weeks, assembling its vocabulary, learning to read the things it didn’t perform. She was looking at me with something I had no clean operational name for and which I had stopped trying to name with operational language some time ago.
“Sleep,” I said.
“You’re always telling me to sleep.”
“You’re always awake when you shouldn’t be.”
“Alright,” she said, and turned toward the window, and I watched the shape of her settle into the evening’s accumulated quiet.
But I lay still for a while longer, in the dark, in the specific and unfamiliar warmth of something I had no prior experience of and could not now imagine being without. I lay still and looked at the ceiling and I let it be what it was.
Chapter Thirteen–Elena
I put my seatbelt on and looked out the window and counted the minutes.
The security arrangements for the visit had been Viktor’s production entirely. He had spent forty minutes with me the previous morning covering what he called parameters, which was a word that in his usage meant rules, which in the context of my current life meantthe conditions under which you are permitted to approximate freedom.Sofia would meet me at a location Viktor had selected. The location was a bar three blocks from the Golovin casino, which Viktor had presumably selected because it was within the perimeter of spaces he could securewith existing infrastructure and minimal additional personnel. I would have two hours. Gregor and a second man named Pavel would be within visual range at all times. I would not take alternate routes, make additional stops, or engage with anyone outside of the approved meeting.
I had agreed to all of it with attentiveness.
I had also, in the week since Mikhail had given me permission to arrange the visit, spent three days memorizing a different set of routes entirely.
This was the part I was not thinking about directly. I had found, over the course of the last several weeks, that the things I could not afford to think about directly were better managed in the oblique register–approached from the side, kept in the peripheral vision rather than the center, acknowledged as existing without being fully examined. If I examined the thing I was about to do, I would not be able to do it, and the thing I was about to do was the only remaining option I had for ending this with anything intact.
Stop cooperating.
That had been the decision on the bathroom floor, and I had kept it.
Gregor parked on the approved block. I got out and did not look at him and walked into the bar.
***************
Sofia was already there.
She was in the corner booth, which she would have chosen deliberately because Sofia always chose corners and always faced the door, a habit she had developed over three years of working the Vegas hospitality circuit and encountering enoughsituations that required rapid assessment of exits. She looked up when I came in and was on her feet before I could blink.
She crossed the bar and held me for a long time without saying anything, which was how I knew she had been frightened. Sofia processed fear by not showing it until it was over, and then she showed it in reverse–the relief arriving after the fact as all the emotion that hadn’t been expressed during. I felt her exhale against my hair. I held her back.
“You’re okay,” she said. It was not entirely a question.
“I’m okay.”
She pulled back and looked at me with specific attention. I held her gaze and let her look and did not manage my expression because managing my expression with Sofia was a project I had never successfully completed and was not going to start now.
She looked at me for a long moment.
“You’re not okay,” she said.
