The silence stretching across the Red Lion Pub felt thicker than the frozen mud clinging to the harbor wharves outside.
Beneath the linen knot, Aliyah felt the steady, hard throb of her torn flesh. The handkerchief—softened by more than a decade of handling, smelling faintly of dried lavender and stale tobacco—drank the crimson welling from her palm. The tiny blue letter E was already half-submerged in a dark, spreading stain.
Victor Malenkov did not blink. His hand remained wrapped around hers, his grip neither cruel nor gentle, but unyielding as an iron clamp. His breath ghosted across her temple, warm against the chill of the drafts howling through the cracked door frame.
“It has my blood on it,” Aliyah repeated, her voice catching on the rough edge of exhaustion. “Let me clean it. It’s… it belongs to someone you loved.”
Victor leaned down. The movement was so slow, so deliberate, that Aliyah couldn’t bring herself to pull away. His lips hovered an inch from the curve of her ear. When he spoke, his voice was not the gravelly bark he used with the pub manager, nor the clipped tone of an untouchable kingpin. It was a raw, low rumble that seemed to reverberate directly inside her chest.
“Keep it,” Victor whispered. “Because after tonight, you will never bleed for another man in this city.”
Aliyah’s breath hitched. A shiver tore straight down her spine, not from fear, but from the terrifying gravity of his words.
He released her hand. The sudden absence of his heat made the cold air of the room sting twice as hard.
Victor stood up. Towering well over six feet, he seemed to swallow the dim light of the tavern. His tailored slate-gray overcoat fell into place without a single wrinkle, save for the dark speck of her blood marking the edge of his left cuff.
From the shadows of the vestibule, a second man stepped forward. Broad-shouldered, with a boxer’s flattened nose and hair cropped close to a scarred scalp, he carried himself with the lethal patience of a seasoned wolf. He held an umbrella in one gloved hand and a heavy leather briefcase in the other.
“Car is at the curb, Boss,” the man said in a flat Russian accent. “The street is clear.”
“Lev,” Victor said without looking back. “Clean this mess. Pay the owner five times the damages. Ensure no one speaks of what occurred at table nine.”
“Understood.”
Aliyah scrambled to steady herself against the edge of a nearby booth, her boots sliding slightly on the spilled beer and slick floorboards. “Wait—Mr. Malenkov. You can’t just pay off the bar and walk away like you own the place. I tripped over a chair. It was an accident.”
Victor stopped just before the brass latch of the exit. He turned slowly, his pale gray eyes cutting through the gloom, fixing on her face with an intensity that made her throat close up.
“Nothing in Boston is an accident, Miss Brooks,” he said softly.
Aliyah froze. He knows my name.
She had never worn a name tag. She had only worked the Thursday night shift at the Red Lion for three weeks, filling in for a girl who had abruptly moved out of state.
Before she could demand how he knew, the heavy oak door opened, swallowed Victor into the freezing rain, and clicked shut with the heavy finality of a cell door.
“Miss,” Lev grunted, pulling a thick envelope of hundred-dollar bills from his coat and tossing it onto the bar counter. “Take your coat. Go out the kitchen exit. My driver will take you to Massachusetts General.”
“I’m not going to Mass General,” Aliyah snapped, cradling her wrapped palm against her apron. Her stubbornness, the only armor she had possessed since her parents died four years ago, kicked in with a vengeance. “I’m a fourth-year nursing student. I have sterile gauze, betadine, and suture thread in my locker. I can patch my own hand.”
Lev studied her for a long moment. A faint, humorless smirk touched the corner of his mouth.
“You have a big mouth for a girl who makes seven dollars an hour plus tips,” he muttered. “The Boss gave an order.”
“Then tell your boss that patients who can walk don’t need an ambulance,” Aliyah shot back. She untied her grease-stained apron, threw it over the back of a barstool, and marched toward the employee locker room behind the kitchen.
Her knees were trembling. Her pulse was racing so violently that she could hear it drumming against her eardrums.
Inside the narrow, flickering bathroom, she leaned against the stained porcelain sink and stared at the mirror.
