Page 38 of Ruthless Bond

We look at each other. Katya is the closest thing I have to a friend in this building, and the friendship is real, built on weeks of shared coffee and quiet conversations and the slow accumulation of trust between two women who are both operating inside a system they didn’t design. But she’s also part of whatever the Voronovs are. She’s one of them. And the line she’s walking right now, between telling me enough to protect me and telling me so much that she betrays the family, is the narrowest line I’ve ever watched anyone walk.

“Katya,” I say. “What happened to my father?”

Her face doesn’t change. Not a muscle. But I’ve spent enough time with her to read the smaller signals, the slight tightening around her eyes, the way her breathing pauses for a fraction of a second.

“You were told he had a heart attack, right?”

My eyes narrow. “That’s not what I asked.”

“I’ve told you what I know.” She stands. “I’m going to get coffee. You want some?”

“Katya. Wait.”

She stops. She doesn’t sit back down, but she stops, and she turns to face me, and the expression on her face is the most open I’ve ever seen it. She’s in pain. Whatever she’s holding back is costing her, and I can see the price of it in the lines around her mouth and the way her hands are pressed flat against her thighs, fingers spread, like she’s bracing against something.

“I know you can’t tell me everything,” I say. “I’m not asking you to. But there are things I’ve noticed about this family, things my father noticed too, and I need to know if I’m crazy or if I’m right.”

“You’re not crazy.”

The words are so quiet I almost miss them. She says them looking straight at me, without blinking, and then she takes a breath and her face closes again, the wound sealed, the professional mask sliding back into place.

“That’s all I can give you,” she says. “For now. There are things about this family that you need to hear from someone who has the authority to tell you. I’m not that person.”

“Who is?”

She looks at me for a long moment. The answer is obvious to both of us.

“I’m getting coffee,” she says. “You want some or not?”

“Black.”

“I know how you take your coffee, Sophia. I’ve been buying it for you for a month.”

Her mouth twitches when she says it, and the expression is so familiar that it reinforces something I’ve been noticing for weeks: the Voronov inner circle shares expressions the way families share features. Not identical, but patterned. A vocabulary of micro-expressions that they’ve developed over what I’m beginning to understand is a very long time.

I let her go. She’s given me what she can, and pushing harder will cost me the alliance without getting me the answer.

That night, I work on the notebook. I’ve been saving the final pages, rationing them the way you ration water when you don’t know how far you have to walk. Each entry is denser than the last, more urgent, the handwriting getting tighter as my father ran out of time without knowing it.

I decode two entries. The first is observational: my father documenting a meeting that ran until midnight and then the key participants disappearing for hours. He followed at a distance. They drove to a property outside the city, fenced acreage that he couldn’t access. He parked on the road and waited. He heard sounds from inside the property that he describes with a precision that makes the hair on my arms stand up.

Howling. Not dogs. I know what dogs sound like. This was different. Deeper. More structured. Like voices, but not human voices. A communication I couldn’t decode. Multiple sources, at least four, maybe five, spread across what sounded like several acres. It lasted approximately forty minutes. When they came back to the cars, they were different. Looser. Wilder. D.V.’s shirt was torn and there was dirt on his hands and his face and his eyes were wrong. Not the color. The expression. Like he was looking at the world through a different lens. Like the man had stepped aside and something else was wearing his face.

I close the notebook. I press my fingers against my eyelids until I see patterns.

Something else was wearing his face.

My father heard howling on a property owned by the Voronovs. Multiple sources, structured, not dogs. And when they came back, they were different.

The word I’ve been holding at arm’s length is getting harder to hold.

I think about Dominic. About the heat, the speed, the gold in his eyes. About the growl in his chest when he kissed me, the vibration I felt against my mouth that came from somewhere deeper than vocal cords.

I think about the dinner on Friday. About sitting across a table from him, close enough to touch, and pretending I don’t suspect what I suspect.

I open the second entry. It’s shorter. Just two lines, written in a hand that’s shakier than the others, the letters uneven, as though my father was writing in low light or under emotional duress.

They change. That’s the only word for it. They change.