Page 43 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
I turned toward the staircase.
The feeling arrived before the thought did.
Not a sound–nothing specific, nothing I could have pointed to and named. The atmospheric change that preceded identified threat, the particular quality of air in a space where attention was being directed at you from a source you couldn’t locate. My body had learned this frequency in an alley two months ago and had not forgotten it.
I was being watched.
I stood at the top of the staircase and let my eyes move without moving my head, the slow peripheral scan that processed information without the giveaway of deliberate searching. The second level was largely empty–three cars, no visible people. The level above, accessed by the ramp on the far side, was out of my sightline. The staircase below was a closed space; if someone was on it I would hear them.
Nothing visible.
But the frequency was not diminishing. It was, if anything, growing more specific–the sense of a focused attention narrowing, of being not merely in the vicinity of observation butits object. I had felt this before, in the weeks before the alley when Petrov’s men had been learning my routes, and I trusted it the way I trusted all the knowledge my body had accumulated from experience rather than study.
Someone was here.
Mikhail’s people. That was the thought that arrived first, and it was not reassurance–it was its own species of cold, because Mikhail’s people here meant the deviation from the route had been tracked.
Or Bykov’s people, confirming I had left without being followed, running their own counter-surveillance.
Or something else entirely that I did not have the information to name.
I descended the staircase quickly, not running, the walking pace of someone who had somewhere to be rather than something to flee. The alley, the three blocks north, the turn west toward the bar’s street where Gregor would be either waiting with the controlled professional patience of a man doing his job or already making a call that was going to determine the shape of the next several hours.
I walked.
The feeling did not leave. It followed me or I was carrying it–I couldn’t tell which, and in the moment it didn’t matter.
What mattered was getting back to the car. Getting back to the manor. Getting to Mikhail before anyone else did, before the investigation completed its final assembly, before the shape of the conclusion was fully legible to a man who did not let things remain illegible once he had looked at them long enough.
I turned onto the bar’s street and saw Gregor at the car, leaning against the door with the posture of someone who had beenthere a while and had made a series of observations during that while and would be communicating them to Viktor within the hour. He looked at me when I appeared without the visible relief of someone who had been worried, which meant he had tracked me–somehow, the gap in the route coverage that I had thought I understood apparently not as complete as I had calculated.
Or he had simply been patient.
I got in the car.
“Ready,” I said.
He got in without comment. Pavel materialized from somewhere to my left and took the front passenger seat. The car pulled out into the afternoon traffic and the casino’s familiar skyline came up through the windshield.
I looked at my hands in my lap. They were steady, which surprised me.
I had stopped cooperating. I had faced the person I was cooperating with and said so to his face. I had done the things that could be done from my side of this.
The manor came into view through the windshield.
The car slowed for the gate.
I looked at my steady hands and I gathered what I had, which was not much and would have to be enough.
Chapter Fourteen–Mikhail
Pavel’s report arrived quite early.
He delivered it in person, which was the protocol for information that should not exist in written form.
He stood in my office and told me that Elena had deviated from the approved route by approximately twelve minutes, that the deviation had taken her through the service alley behind the Meridian hotel complex–a gap in the standard camera coverage that someone with operational knowledge of the area’s security infrastructure would know to use–and that she had returned to the meeting point on schedule, showing no visible distress.
He waited.
