Page 43 of The Pakhan's Captive
Vasik controls four ports on the Black Sea and I need those ports and he knows I need them. So he uses that knowledge the way small men use whatever leverage they have, constantly and without subtlety.
“The numbers are moving exactly as projected,” Dmitri says from his position against the wall. He doesn’t look up from his phone. He sounds bored. “I can show you the projection again if the first three times weren’t sufficient.”
Vasik bristles, his face turning a mottled, ugly purple. “I am not a clerk, boy. I am a partner. I expect?—”
I let him talk. His voice becomes a background drone, like a fly trapped against a windowpane. It’s a peculiar habit of my mind lately; the more someone demands my presence, the further I retreat into the archives of my own failures.
Five years. Five fucking years.
I look at the heavy gold signet ring on my finger and I don’t see the office. I see a rainy night in Moscow. I see a door that should have been locked and a woman who should have been dead.
She doesn’t exist.
That is the official conclusion of five years of hunting. Not a body, not a trail, not a single digital footprint in a world that records everything. She walked out of my compound with a cracked flash drive and a stolen phone and simply…dissolved. Like salt in the tide.
I’ve burned more resources than I will ever admit to my board trying to find her. I’ve had men in Moscow, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Prague. I’ve pulled favors from state intelligence agencies and called in blood-debts from the kind of people who don’t forget.
The answer is always the same.Nothing.
It’s an insult. It’s a glitch in the machine I’ve spent my life building. I can move tons of illicit cargo across three continents without a single customs agent noticing, yet I cannot find one woman who didn’t even have a passport when she ran.
“—Razvan? Are you listening?”
I bring my focus back to the room.
The transition is seamless, the mask sliding back into place before Vasik can see the gap. I look at him, and for a second the contempt I feel is so sharp it’s almost physical. He is a small man playing with large levers. He thinks he’s important because he owns a few docks. He doesn’t realize that in my world, importance is measured by what you can keep—and what you can find.
“I’m listening, Gregor,” I say. My voice is low, a calm contrast to his shrill demands. “I was just wondering if you realized that your left eyelid has been twitching for the last three minutes. You should see a doctor. Stress is a silent killer.”
“So like I said, the numbers are moving exactly as projected,” Dmitri says yet again, his voice scraping against the tension in the room like a dull blade. “I can show you the projection again if the first three times weren’t sufficient.”
Vasik’s jaw tightens, his face darkening to the color of a bruised plum. “I’m not talking to you.”
“Pity,” Dmitri says, and I can hear the smirk in his tone without even looking. “I’m the one with the numbers.”
I let the silence stretch, watching Vasik sweat. I want him to feel the vacuum in the room. I want him to realize that his life depends entirely on my continued boredom. Finally, I speak. “Vasik. What do you want.”
He leans forward, elbows digging into the mahogany of my desk, and his expression shifts into something oily. Greed is such a filthy emotion; it makes men look wet.
“We expand the operation. The ports give us infrastructure nobody else has on that coastline. We’re moving product, we’re moving money, we could be moving—” He pauses, turning his hand over on the desk like he’s revealing a winning card. “People.” He leans in further, his breath smelling of expensive tobacco and rot. “Women and children, I mean.”
The air in the room doesn’t just go still; it dies.
To my left, Mike is a statue. I don’t need to look at him to know the exact millisecond the suggestion lands. I can feel the shift in his breathing, that specific, lethal quality of stillness that moves through him like a high-voltage current finding a ground wire.
Don’t,I think, a cold command directed at the man beside me.Don’t move yet.
“Mike,” I say. Just his name. A leash.
He stays put, but I can feel the vibration of his rage from two feet away. Mike is a man who walked into my world on a single, iron-clad condition: we don’t touch the flesh trade. No slaves. No kids. It’s the one line he refuses to cross, and right now this fat piece of shit is drawing a map across it and asking for directions.
I look at Vasik. My pulse hasn’t moved. “No.”
Vasik blinks, his tiny eyes darting. “You haven’t even heard the?—”
“No.”
The word is a flat, heavy slab of lead.
