Aleksei Volkov had noticed this about people over the years — that fear, real fear, the kind that strips a person down to something raw and animal, made them eloquent. Men who had never prayed found religion. Men who had never wept found tears. Men who had stolen and lied and cheated for decades found, in their final minutes, an extraordinary capacity for honesty.
It was almost touching.
Almost.
He crouched in front of the man — Rykov, his name was, a mid-level distributor who had been skimming from the Bratva's southern shipments for eight months — and studied him the way a surgeon studies an x-ray. Clinically. Without heat.
"You took from me," Aleksei said. His voice was quiet. It was always quiet. Men who needed to raise their voices to be feared hadn't earned the fear yet.
"Pakhan, I swear — it was a mistake, a clerical error, I would never —"
"The first month," Aleksei said, "I was willing to believe it was an error. The second month, I assumed incompetence." He tilted his head. "By the eighth month, Rykov, I was simply curious how long you thought I wasn't watching."
The warehouse was cold. November had come early to the city, and the damp came up through the concrete floor and settled into the bones. Two of Aleksei's men stood at the exits. Dmitri stood to his left, expression somewhere between bored and mildly entertained, turning a coin over his knuckles.
"Please." Rykov's voice broke. "I have a daughter —"
"I know." Aleksei stood. Straightened his jacket. "She'll receive the money you stole, returned in full, deposited anonymously to her university account. She has nothing to do with what you did." He paused. "She's innocent. That matters."
It was the last mercy he offered.
He nodded to Dmitri.
It was done quickly. That was one of Aleksei's rules — efficiency was a form of respect. He did not enjoy this. He had never enjoyed this. He simply understood it as the cost of the world he had inherited and chosen and sharpened himself against until he no longer felt the cuts.
He was walking toward the exit — hands clean, jacket straight, mind already on the three meetings he had before dawn — when he heard it.
A sound.
Soft. A scrape of shoe on gravel. Outside, at the side entrance where no one should be.
He stopped.
One of his men was already moving. Dmitri's head came up, coin disappearing into his palm.
They found her thirty seconds later, pressed into the shadow of the exterior wall, eyes too wide and chest moving too fast — a girl, young, university age, still holding a coffee cup in one hand like she'd been walking somewhere ordinary and the night had turned wrong around her without warning.
She had dark eyes. Dark hair escaping a braid. She was wearing an oversized jacket with Università printed across the chest and she was staring at him like she couldn't decide whether to run or stop breathing entirely.
She'd heard enough. Possibly seen enough through the gap in the side door.
Aleksei looked at her.
She looked at him.
And then — to his genuine surprise, for the first time in longer than he could remember — she spoke first.
"I'm going to be honest with you," she said, voice only slightly unsteady, "because I have a feeling lying would be the wrong move here." A breath. "I was taking a shortcut. I heard — I didn't see — I mean I might have seen, a little —" She stopped. Swallowed. "I'm terrible at this. What I mean is: I would very much like to not die tonight. I have an essay due Thursday."
Dmitri made a sound that might have been a laugh, quickly killed.
Aleksei said nothing for a long moment.
He should have given the order immediately. It was protocol. A witness was a liability and a liability was a threat and threats were resolved. He knew this. He had lived by this for fifteen years.
He looked at her — this girl with her coffee cup and her university jacket and her essay due Thursday — and something moved in his chest that he did not have a name for.
