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My fingers freeze over the page. The numbers stop being numbers and turn heavy with lives I can’t see. He’s not joking. Not even slightly.

“Don’t wonder where the money goes,” he says. “Don’t commit the symbols to memory.”

“What if somebody asks me about them?”

“No one will.”

“How can you possibly be so sure?”

The cold that comes into his eyes answers before his mouth does. “Everyone who knows these ledgers exist also knows to stay quiet about them.”

A chill slides down my spine.

I stare at the open book and feel as though I’m holding one thread of a wide black web, and every other thread runs somewhere I don’t want to follow. Until this moment his world was a rumor I could keep at arm’s length, a set of stories Maksim told to sound dangerous. Now it sits open on my desk in a fountain pen and a column of red strike-throughs, and I understand that a person becomes one of those crossed-out lines. I’m the one copying the ink that decides it.

“Are you warning me?” I ask.

“I’m teaching you to work without getting hurt,” he says, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world.

I want to shove the ledgers back at him. Then the number on my paycheck rises in my mind, and behind it, Milo’s face, and neither the rent nor the bills care in the slightest how dangerous the ink is. I hesitate a long moment, and then I pick up the pen.

“Understood, sir,” I say.

His gaze drops to my hand around the pen, and the hard corner of his mouth may or may not move—I can’t tell. “A smart choice,” he says.

I keep my true, filthy opinion behind my teeth. Only the pay could ever make me copy lines that might get a stranger killed. I would never gamble my life on anything less than that.

After that, I copy ledgers into the small hours of nearly every night. The endless work grinds me down to the bone.

At two eighteen in the morning my eyelids keep dropping and my wrist throbs, and three full ledgers still wait untouched. I joke to myself about marching in to demand a raise, and then I remember exactly who I would be demanding it from.

As I finish a line, the office door opens and Lev walks in. His steps land heavier than usual. His sleeves are shoved back, black ink crawling up both thick forearms, and the smell of whiskey rolls into the room ahead of him.

“Are you here to check the accounts?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer. He only watches me, quiet in a way I haven’t seen from him before.

The hard lines of his face have gone soft, worn down by exhaustion or by a raw, drunken tenderness I can’t name. The ice that keeps the whole world at arm’s length has thawed just a little.

“Lena,” he says, his voice rough with drink and unexpectedly warm. “You have been working so hard.”

My pen drags a long black streak across the page. I go completely still.

Nobody has called me anything so soft since my parents were alive. It’s not Laney, the small name they used at the dinner table and nowhere else, buried with them for years—but it’s close enough to land in a place I keep locked, and for one traitorous second my eyes sting.

For all the ways his body has known mine, the distance between us has always been enormous. There’s his power, his age, and the whole dark world he moves through, and every one of those gulfs has always felt uncrossable. And now, with a single word, that distance shrinks just enough to send my heart racing when it has no right to at all.

Then I remember every cruel thing he’s done to me, and the ache turns uncertain. What am I to him, really, when I strip away the wishful thinking? A convenient warm body, an assistant, a good fuck he’ll set down the moment he grows bored with it. I’ve watched men look at me and see a problem or a punchline, and I don’t know yet which one he sees.

He watches me with his pupils gone loose and unfocused, as though he is looking straight through me at someone else entirely.

I wave a hand slowly in front of his eyes. “What’s wrong with you?”

He catches my wrist, and awareness snaps back into him. Something moves behind his eyes, there and gone before I can read it.

I test my wrist in his grip. “Lev, it’s late.”

His fingertips rest on my pulse a beat longer than they need to, and then he lets me go.