Page 26 of The Pakhan's Captive
He looks at me for a moment. The warmth in his expression doesn’t leave but something sadder moves underneath it. “I pity you,” he says simply. “I don’t think you deserve this.”
My eyes go hot. Instantly, treacherously hot, and I look down at the tray and blink hard and take another bite of bread that I can barely taste anymore.
“But revenge has to be had,” he says quietly. Like he’s apologizing and explaining at the same time and knows neither one is enough.
The cell is very quiet.
“Am I really going to die?” My voice comes out small. Smaller than I’ve let it be since Moscow, smaller than I’ve allowed myself to sound in front of any of them. I’m not even looking at him when I ask it. I’m looking at the crumbs on the plate.
He doesn’t answer.
I look up. He’s watching me with something in his face that is honest enough to be its own kind of answer, and he holds my gaze for a moment then he stands, takes the tray, and walks to the door.
I want to ask him to stay.
The want is immediate and embarrassing and real, this sudden desperate pull toward the only person in this building who haslooked at me like I’m a person, and I swallow it down because wanting him to stay is stupid.
He’s not safe.
His kindness is just a softer version of the same thing the rest of them are doing.
He’s one of Razvan’s men and Razvan wants me dead and nothing about this man staying in this cell changes that.
The door closes.
The lock clicks.
I sit in the chair with the empty tray gone and the light still humming, the quiet pressing in from all four walls, and something behind my sternum gives way slowly, like a seam coming apart, and I cry.
Not the ugly heaving sobs from my father’s living room floor, not the hysterical running tears in the Vienna alley. Just quiet and steady, sitting in a chair in a room underground, grieving the life I hadn’t finished living yet.
The years I hadn’t gotten to.
The things I never told Papa.
The drive sitting somewhere in this compound that he died to protect and that I couldn’t even keep hold of.
I’m sorry, Papa.I press the back of my wrist to my mouth.I’m so sorry.
The light hums.
I cry softly.
And somewhere above me, a man named Razvan is deciding how much time I have left.
6
RAZVAN
Twelve characters. I’ve tried twelve thousand combinations of twelve characters and the drive sits there like a locked jaw and gives me nothing.
I push back from the desk so hard the chair scrapes.
I stand up pacing the length of my office because if I sit still for one more minute I’m going to put my fist through the monitor and that won’t help anyone.
Three days.
The drive has been in my possession for three days and Dmitri, who can pull financial thread from organizations that don’t want to be found, who once reconstructed an entire shell company network from a single routing number, has tried everything short of physically destroying it and the file won’t open.
