I went to sleep at four in the morning.
***
I spent the next two days alone.
This was not unusual in itself. I’d always operated well in solitude, had never needed the kind of constant proximity that some men required to feel like themselves. The others had their rhythms, their noise, their way of filling space with presence. I’d always been better in the gaps. Cleaner. More myself.
But these two days had a different quality.
I ran in the mornings for longer than I needed to, pushing past the point where the body finds its rhythm and into the territory where it starts arguing, because physical argument had always been more manageable than the mental kind. I cleaned my weapons, which didn’t need cleaning. I read the file on Tomas three more times and came away with the same conclusions and zero new clarity.
I sat in my kitchen at midnight on the second night with a glass of water—not whiskey, I was done with the whiskey experiment, it had produced no useful results—and I thought about the problem the way I thought about all problems.
Clinically. Structurally. What was the issue, what was causing it, what was the solution.
The issue: I was distracted. Specifically, I was distracted by a woman I’d spoken to for approximately four minutes at a fundraiser and would need to speak to again as a functional component of an active mission. The distraction was operational interference. Operational interference had one solution.
Remove the interference.
I’d done this before—once, years ago, early in my time with the Bratva, when a woman at a bar had gotten further under my skin than was acceptable and I’d handled it the way men handle things they don’t know what to do with, which was to find someone else and redirect the energy until the original interference lost its signal.
It had worked then.
It would work now.
The logic was sound. The execution was simple. I knew exactly where to go.
I stood up. Put on my jacket—the leather one, not the suit, because the suit had complicated things and I was done with the suit for the foreseeable future. Picked up my keys.
And drove to Volkov.
***
The club was exactly what I needed it to be.
Loud. Smoky. Operating according to rules I understood—the simple, transactional rules of a place where people came for specific things and left with what they’d come for, and nobody asked questions about the in-between. The bass lived in the floor, the way it always did. The air smelled like every other night I’d survived there.
I sat at the bar and ordered vodka and didn’t drink it and scanned the room with the automatic attention of a man who had spent enough time in spaces like this that the scan happened without requiring conscious direction.
There were women. There were always women at Volkov—some Bratva-adjacent, some simply drawn to the particular energy of a place that operated outside normal social architecture, some looking for exactly what I was looking for, which was the specific, uncomplicated comfort of someone else’s warmth for a few hours and then the clean, simple relief of returning to your own life afterward.
I’d done this many times.
It had always been enough.
I looked at the nearest woman—dark-haired, confident, returning my look with the direct ease of someone who knew what they wanted and wasn’t performing uncertainty about it.
She was attractive. Objectively, measurably. She smiled, and it reached her eyes, which were—
Brown.
Not dark chestnut. Not large and expressive and doing the work of a full conversation before a word was spoken. Not the specific warm shade that had looked up at me from a collision and gone completely unguarded for exactly one second before the composure slid back into place.
Just brown.
I picked up my vodka, drank it in one movement, and set the glass back down.
The woman’s smile tilted, reading my expression with the accurate instinct of someone practiced at this—and she looked away, correctly, toward easier ground.