Page 16 of Ruthless Bond

I haven’t stopped asking questions. I’ve just gotten quieter about it.

That’s the nighttime version. The one nobody sees except the ceiling of my apartment and the pages of my father’s notebook.

Every evening I come home, lock the door, change into sweats, and sit on my bed with the notebook and my legal pad and I translate my father’s cipher into English and learn more about his life.

My father spent fifteen years working with the Voronov family.

It started with the restaurant. The records finally answer one question Dad never did: he needed capital, and Viktor supplied it. Then somewhere along the way, Viktor apparently discovered that Marco Marchelli was better with numbers than most of the accountants he employed.

The restaurant became financially tied to the Voronovs, one legitimate investment among many.

Then Dad started handling payments for another business. Then reviewing books. Then sitting in on meetings. By the time I was old enough to understand that the men at the best table weren’t simply wealthy businessmen, my father was overseeing finances for several of their legitimate operations.

He wasn’t family. He wasn’t Russian. And whatever else the Voronovs were, he certainly wasn’t that.

But he was trusted.

He was valuable.

He was, as Dominic put it, an associate.

And for the last fourteen months of his life, he was watching them.

The notebook’s middle section is the most detailed. He organized his observations by individual, using initials and physical descriptions rather than names. D.V. is Dominic. R.V. is Roman. There’s a K. who I’m certain is Katya, described as “tall, military bearing, always near D.V.” There’s an A.V. who must be Lex, described more carefully than the others, with a note in the margin that reads: *A.V. is different from the rest. Bears watching.*

My father watched them the way I watch financial statements. With patience, with rigor, with the knowledge that the truth is always in the details if you look at enough of them.

The details he found don’t make sense.

He documented body temperatures taken with the infrared thermometer he kept in the restaurant kitchen. Every member of the inner circle ran between 100.8 and 101.6 degrees. Every time. Not fluctuating as a fever does, spiking and dropping. Steady.

He documented reaction times. A glass dropped in the restaurant. A car backfiring on the street outside. A server tripping and nearly falling with a tray of food. In each case, the Voronov people reacted when the event fully occurred, turning toward the sound before it finished, catching the tray before the server had lost her balance, moving with a speed that my father’s notes describe as “not fast” but “early,” as though they were operating on a timeline slightly ahead of everyone else in the room.

He described an incident where Roman left a meeting abruptly and my father followed him to the alley behind the restaurant and found him standing in the cold with his eyes closed, breathing deeply, his face turned toward the wind. When my father asked if everything was alright, Roman opened his eyes and they caught the light from the kitchen window and his irises looked gold.

“Not a reflection,” my father wrote. “The light was behind me. The gold was coming from him.”

I close the notebook and press my palms against my eyes.

I’ve been building a theory. I don’t want to name it yet because naming it makes it real, and real means I’m either losing my mind or my father discovered something that got him killed. Neither option is comforting.

What I do know: the Voronov inner circle operates at a biological baseline that isn’t human. Their body temperature, their reflexes, their sensory awareness, all of it sits outside the range of normal human physiology. They move differently. They communicate differently. They respond to stimuli that other people can’t perceive.

And whatever they are, it’s connected to what I feel when Dominic is near me.

Katya and I have lunch together most days now. She doesn’t call it lunch. She calls it “stepping out,” as though we just happen to be leaving the building at the same time and heading in the same direction. The pretense that she’s anything other than my assigned guard has worn thin, but neither of us says so. It’s become a comfortable fiction, the kind that lets a friendship grow inside a structure that isn’t supposed to allow one.

She’s careful about what she shares. Personal details come in fragments, offered without context, like pieces of a puzzle she’s letting me assemble at my own speed. She grew up in the organization. Her family has been connected to the Voronovs for generations, though she doesn’t specify how many generations or what “connected” means in this context. She doesn’t have a husband or a boyfriend and she doesn’t seem to want one either. She reads Russian literature in the original language and thinks Tolstoy is overrated and Bulgakov is underappreciated. She can eat an entire Italian beef sandwich in under four minutes, which I know because I timed her once and she caught me doing it and the look she gave me was the closest I’ve seen her come to genuine laughter.

I like her. More than I expected to, which makes me feel guilty. Because the more I like her the harder it gets to reconcile that affection with the growing certainty that she’s part of whatever my father discovered. Whatever the Voronovs are, Katya is one of them. I can see it in the way she moves, the same fluid efficiency, the same sense of a body operating at a higher frequency than the space around it. She runs hot, too. Last week she handed me her coffee to hold while she tied her shoe, and the paper cup was almost too warm to touch even though she’d been carrying it in the October wind for five minutes.

I didn’t mention it. I’ve learned to collect these observations silently, following my father’s example, storing them alongside the notebook entries and the patterns I’m mapping in the company files. The picture is getting clearer every day. I just don’t know yet what I’m looking at.

Because that’s the other thing I can’t explain. The pull. It’s getting worse, not better, and the rate of acceleration doesn’t match anything I understand about attraction.

I’ve been attracted to people before. In college, in my two years at the accounting firm, during my MBA. Normal attraction. A guy catches your eye, you think about him, you flirt, you date, you sleep together, and either it builds into something or it doesn’t. It follows a curve. It responds to input. It makes sense.

This doesn’t make sense.