Page 42 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
He was close.
He was not going to let me get to him before the investigation got to me.
The meeting location was a parking structure three blocks east of the service alley. Second level, northeast corner. I had been given it in a message before the phone went dead, passed through the channel I hadn’t fully closed, delivered with theparticular efficiency of people who understood that operational communications should not require memory aids.
I went up the staircase.
He was waiting.
Bykov, in person, for the first time.
I had constructed a version of him from his voice–the flat, patient delivery, the specific register of controlled menace–and the physical reality was consistent with the construction in the way that things were occasionally consistent when you had been paying close enough attention. He was perhaps fifty, compact, the particular kind of stillness that communicated experience rather than temperament. He was not alone; two men flanked him at the appropriate distance, the arrangement of people who expected the conversation to be unpleasant and had positioned themselves accordingly.
He looked at me.
“You’ve been quiet,” he said. “I wouldn’t have expected your presence here.”
“I’ve been trying to stay alive,” I said. “The household went into lockdown after the attack. Security doubled. Everything went through Viktor’s direct clearance.” I said it evenly. “There was nothing to pass that wasn’t already known.”
His expression did not change. “You could have found a way.”
“I found a way to meet you now,” I said. “Which cost me more than you understand and which I will not be able to repeat.” I held his gaze. “I’m out. I’m telling you directly so there’s no ambiguity about the message. The arrangement is finished.”
The quiet that followed was the specific quality of quiet that existed in spaces where men with controlled menace were deciding whether to apply it.
“The debt—” he began.
“I’ll continue to service it. I accept.
“Volkov is not finished with Golovin,” he said.
“I know.”
“The next move will require access that only someone inside the household can provide.”
“I know,” I said. “And I can’t provide it. I won’t provide it.” I met his eyes. “Whatever you decide to do about that, I accept. But I am not going to help you put another man in front of a convoy.”
Something crossed his face. Not anger–he was past anger, I thought, or had never been in it; men like this did not operate from the volatile level. Something colder. The recalculation of a man who had built an asset and was now assessing the cost of demolishing it versus the cost of leaving it standing.
“You understand what you’re saying,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Volkov’s patience has limits.”
“So does mine,” I said. “I’ve reached mine.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded–once, slowly, the nod of a man closing a file rather than a man concluding a conversation. “We’ll be in touch,” he said.
“I won’t respond,” I said.
He chuckled without humor and turned. The two men adjusted their positions smoothly, the practiced movement of a formation departing. I watched them go–down the ramp, out of my line of sight, the sound of their footsteps on the concrete fading into the structure’s ambient quiet.
I stood in the northeast corner of the second level of a parking structure and I breathed.
It was done.
Whatever it cost, whatever Bykov communicated to Volkov, whatever came from this direction–the arrangement was finished. I had said it out loud to the person it needed to be said to, and I had been heard, and I had walked away standing, and now I needed to get back to Gregor before the deviation from the route became a problem requiring explanations I wasn’t yet ready to provide.
