Page 85 of You Can Run

“She doesn't know anything that can hurt you.”

“That is not for you to decide.” Borya unfolded his hands and placed them flat on the table. “And it is not for Sofia to decide, either. Yet here we are. You, sitting in my booth, and the girl—where? On a bus? In a motel? Do you even know?”

“I don't. That was the point.”

“The point,” Borya said, tasting the word. “The point was that Sofia, my Sofia, made an arrangement that directly contradicted my instructions, without consulting me, and delivered to me the lesser half of what I required.” He looked at Dante with those pale eyes. “Tell me, Daniel—if you were in my position, how would you interpret that?”

Dante said nothing. He didn't need to answer the question. Borya wasn't asking—he was thinking out loud, and the thinking was headed somewhere that would have made Dante's blood run cold if he'd had any investment in Sofia's wellbeing beyond the next twenty minutes.

But right now, the only thing that mattered was the twenty minutes. And Borya, for all his fury about Jessica, was sitting in this booth instead of upstairs. He was talking instead of moving. The anger had actually worked in their favor, it had given Borya something to chew on, a new problem to process.

Keep him here. Keep him chewing.

He shrugged. “She came to me with the terms. I accepted them. Jessica walked free, and I turn myself in. That's the deal, and I'm here, and it's done.”

“It is not done,” Borya said, and for the first time the softness in his voice slipped, revealing something underneath that had edges. “It is not done until I say it is done. You are half a payment. I do not accept half payments.”

The building was exactly what the Yelp photos had shown and nothing like what they'd prepared Jessica for. Black facade, no windows, a flat awning over the entrance with THE DOLLHOUSE in pink neon script. A line of men waited at the door—maybe fifteen, shuffling forward in the resigned, slightly embarrassed way of men who wanted to be inside and didn't want to be seen wanting it. Bass leaked through the walls, a low, rhythmic pulse she could feel from fifty feet away.

Dante was in there. That was all that mattered.

She checked the Ruger in her pocket one more time. It wasn't enough. But she was going in anyway. She crossed the street.

The line moved faster than she'd expected. The men didn't pay her much attention—a woman approaching a strip club alone registered as staff, not customer, and the assumption bought her a kind of invisibility that she leaned into. She kept her head down, the denim jacket zipped to her throat, her hair tucked under a black cap she'd bought at a truck stop in Virginia. She looked like a waitress arriving for a late shift. That was the idea.

A huge man was on the door. She knew his type—big, wide, stuffed into a suit that barely contained him. He had face of a man who'd been standing in doorways long enough to have seen everything and decided most of it wasn't worth reacting to. He was checking IDs with the mechanical efficiency of someone who'd done it ten thousand times, waving men through without looking up.

Jessica fell in behind a group of three, loud, already half-drunk, the kind of Friday-night cluster that drew attention awayfrom whatever was behind them. She kept close, matching their pace.

The bouncer waved the first two through. The third fumbled for his wallet. Jessica sidestepped him and moved toward the door, her eyes down, her body language sayingstaff entrance, I'm late, don't bother.

The big man's hand came up. It was an aggressive gesture, but it filled the space between her and the door with a palm the size of a dinner plate.

“Cover's twenty,” he said.

“I'm meeting someone inside,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt.

The man looked at her for the first time. His eyes moved over her face and she felt the assessment happen in real time, the bouncer's calculus of threat and trouble and whether this was worth the effort.

She pulled a twenty from her jacket pocket and held it out.

He took it. His gaze lingered a half-second longer than it should have—on the jacket, on the way she was holding it close to her body—and then he stepped aside.

Jessica walked through the door and the Dollhouse swallowed her whole.

The noise hit first, a loud bass, then heat and perfume that pressed against her like a physical thing. Pink light everywhere, turning the room into something underwater, making faces soft and distances uncertain. Stages to the left, a long bar along the back, tables scattered through the middle where men sat in clusters, their attention fixed on the dancers moving through the light.

She pushed through the crowd, keeping to the edges, letting the room absorb her. The cap helped. The jacket helped. She was one of dozens of women in the building, and as long as she kept moving and didn't stare at anything too long, she was furniture.

She scanned the main floor, looking for Dante, and didn't find him.

The room was too big, too crowded, the pink light flattening everything into shapes she couldn't resolve. She moved along the bar, using the mirror behind it, checking angles without turning her head. Stages, tables, the illuminated staircase leading up to a mezzanine level that was roped off and guarded by a man who looked like he'd been grown specifically for the purpose of standing at the bottom of staircases.

Then she saw the booth.

Back of the main floor, recessed into an alcove. Two men sitting across from each other, one with his back to the wall. The one facing her was in a beige shirt, leaning slightly forward, talking. Older, lean, composed. She didn't recognize him, but her body did—something in her chest contracted, a physical flinch that arrived before the identification, the animal response to a predator she'd never seen but whose presence she'd felt.

Borya Sokolov.