Page 41 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
“I’m—”
“You’re safe. Those are different things.” She sat us both down and put her hands flat on the table in the way she did when she was anchoring herself to the practical facts of a situation. “Tell me what you can tell me.”
I looked at her. At the sharp eyeliner and the red lips and the expressive face that had been one of the first things I had recognized as trustworthy when we met, the face of a person who communicated what they were feeling because concealment didn’t interest them. “The marriage is real,” I said. “He—Mikhail—he’s—” I stopped. How to say it. “He’s not cruel. What I thought he’d be.” A pause. “It’s complicated. But I’m not in danger from him.”
Sofia absorbed this. “The loan sharks?”
“Gone. The debt is—” I paused. “I’m managing it. No pressure anymore.”
“How?”
“Sofia.”
She pressed her lips together. “Right. Right, I know.” She looked at me. “And you? Not the situation. You.”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was the most accurate available answer.
“Are you—” She stopped, reformulating. “Does he know you? Not Elena Golovina, the official marriage. Does he knowyou?”
I thought about the library. The storm outside and the fire inside and his arm around my shoulders without conditions, without agenda, simply because the space between us had needed to be smaller. I thought about the small dining room and Mariya’s borscht and the balcony lovemaking.
“More than anyone has,” I said quietly. “Which is–it’s complicated.”
Sofia looked at me for a long moment. Her expression did something I hadn’t anticipated–not the concern I had expected, or not only that. Something more complicated. Something that looked like it had access to information I hadn’t given her.
“Lena,” she said.
Her tone was worried. Then she sighed.
“Okay, I trust you. Okay, you know him better than I do. Okay, whatever you’ve decided I believe you decided it for the right reason.” She pressed her hands over mine once more and then released them. “But I need you to hear me.” She waited until I was looking at her directly. “If you need out–any kind of out–you call me. Day or night. I don’t care what’s happening. You call me first.”
“Sofia—”
“Promise me.”
I looked at her. I thought about what I was about to do after I left this bar, the meeting I had memorized the location of, and the thought of Sofia knowing about it and being pulled into proximity with it produced something cold in my chest.
“I promise,” I said.
We sat for the remainder of the hour talking about the things we talked about–the show, which Sofia told me had been magnificent in the two weeks since opening and was selling out the second tier without discounts, which made both of us briefly happy. She told me about Daniela, who had been promoted to lead position in my absence, and about a new waitress who reminded her of herself at twenty and who she was therefore aggressively mentoring. She told me about the small disasters of ordinary life–a parking ticket, a leaking kitchen tap, a disagreement with the upstairs neighbor about music volume–and I received every item of this inventory with the specific gratitude of someone being shown evidence that ordinary life continued its operations even when their own had become extraordinary.
When I stood to leave, she held me one more time. Tighter than the first time.
“Tell me it’s going to be okay,” I said into her shoulder.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said, with the voice she used for things she was choosing to believe rather than things she wascertain of. Which was not nothing. Sofia’s choices to believe were not made carelessly.
I walked out of the bar’s back door and turned left. I did not look for Gregor.
*****************
The route I had memorized took twelve minutes at a walking pace.
Three blocks south, two east, through the service alley behind the hotel complex that the casinos used for deliveries and which had therefore the particular invisibility of a space that existed for logistics rather than people–no cameras on the alley itself, the coverage directed at the loading bays rather than the throughway. I had worked this out from the security briefing Viktor had given me about the broader area around the casino, which had been intended to tell me where I should not go and had also, incidentally, told me where I could go without being seen.
I walked quickly. I kept my pace even and my chin up and I did not think about what I was walking toward.
Instead, I thought about what it meant that Mikhail’s people were close enough to the arrangement to have specifics, and what it meant for the timeline of the investigation I had been watching from the inside for two weeks.
