Roman Kozlov was the kind of name people lowered their voices to say. He owned restaurants no one could afford, warehouses no one asked about, and half the politicians who smiled on local television. He donated to hospitals and youth centers. He sent flowers to funerals. He had been photographed once beside the mayor, both of them wearing black suits and polite expressions.
People said he was a businessman.
People also said never to cross him unless you had already made peace with God.
And I, Ivy Callahan, florist, rent-late, cat-owning, chronically unlucky woman, had broken into his house and hidden under his bed.
“I didn’t know it was your house,” I whispered.
Roman crouched in front of me. He was tall even when he folded himself down, broad-shouldered, pale-haired, sharply dressed in a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Tattoos climbed his forearms and disappeared beneath the fabric, black ink over scarred skin. His face was hard enough to look carved, but it was his eyes that made it difficult to breathe.
They were not cruel exactly.
Cruel would have been easier.
They were controlled.
“Who sent you?” he asked.
“No one.”
“Try again.”
“No one,” I said, louder this time, though my voice cracked. “I was running.”
“From whom?”
“I don’t know their names.”
“Then describe them.”
I swallowed. My throat hurt from running. My lungs still felt scraped raw. “Three men. Maybe four. One had a scar down his cheek. Dark hair. Red shirt. A tattoo on his right hand. A snake, I think.”
Roman went still.
Until that moment, he had looked dangerous. After I said the word snake, he looked interested, and somehow that was worse.
“Where did you see him?”
“A warehouse near Fifty-Third. Sunset Park. I was taking a shortcut to reach my supplier before they closed.” I pressed my shaking hands into the carpet to keep from falling forward. “The side door was open. I heard arguing. Then a gunshot.”
Roman’s eyes did not move from my face.
“What did you see?”
“A man got shot,” I said. “He dropped so fast. I thought—God, I thought he tripped at first, but then there was blood on the floor. The man with the snake tattoo turned around and saw me.”
“And you ran.”
“What else was I supposed to do?”
“For most people? Die quietly.”
My stomach turned cold.
Roman stood. The bedroom seemed to shrink around him. Behind him, the curtains were drawn over tall windows, and a lamp on the nightstand threw golden light across the dark wood floor. Everything in the room looked expensive and untouched, as if no one actually slept there. I noticed then that the bedspread smelled faintly of cedar and smoke, not laundry detergent. It was not a guest room.
It was his room.
I had not hidden in some spare bedroom.
I had crawled under Roman Kozlov’s bed.
He pulled a phone from his pocket and said, “Dima. Lock down the property. No one leaves. Check the fence on the east side. We have a guest.”
A voice answered through the phone, too low for me to catch.
Roman looked at me while he listened.
“No,” he said. “Not Volkov’s. If she were Volkov’s, she would be better dressed.”
I looked down at myself.
My flower-shop apron was tied over my cream sweater, now torn at one shoulder and streaked with dirt. My jeans were soaked at the knees. One shoe was missing. My hair had fallen out of its clip, and there were probably twigs in it.
I would have been offended if I had not been so close to vomiting from fear.
Roman ended the call.
“Get up,” he said.
“I’ll leave,” I said quickly. “I swear, I’ll leave right now. I didn’t take anything. I won’t tell anyone I was here. I won’t tell anyone what I saw.”
“You already told me.”
“I won’t tell the police.”
“That would be disappointing.”
I stared at him. “What?”
Instead, at 9:13 p.m., I was crawling out from under a stranger’s bed with blood on my sleeve
Part 2: Roman held out his hand. It was large, pale, and scarred across the knuckles. “You witnessed a murder committed by Alexei Volkov’s organization. Volkov cannot allow you to breathe. I cannot allow him to kill you before I learn why his man shot someone in my territory.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“You know a face. You know a location. You know a time. That is enough to make you useful.” His gaze dropped to my trembling fingers. “And enough to make you dead if you walk out of here alone.”
I did not take his hand.
“My phone died,” I said, because panic makes people say useless things. “My purse is gone. I lost it when I fell near Atlantic Avenue. I can’t call anyone.”
“Good,” Roman said.
I blinked. “Good?”
“If you had called someone, Volkov might already know where you are.”
The words landed like ice water.
I had been thinking like a normal person. Police. Friends. Help. Roman was thinking like a predator inside a world where every call left a trail and every person you loved became leverage.
“I’m just a florist,” I said.
Roman’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “There is no such thing as just anything.”
He turned toward the door. “Come with me, Ms. Callahan.”
“How do you know my name?”
He looked over his shoulder at my apron.
Ivy’s Blooms.
The stitched green letters looked painfully childish in that room, like something from a life that had ended two hours ago.
Roman waited.
I had two choices. Stay on the floor until he dragged me out, or stand and follow a man everyone feared because the men hunting me feared him too.
So I got up.
The hallway outside his bedroom was wide and dimly lit, lined with oil paintings and security cameras tucked discreetly into corners. Somewhere downstairs, men were speaking in Russian. Their voices stopped when Roman appeared with me behind him.
I counted four of them in the main hall. All big. All armed. All looking at me like I was a math problem with an unpleasant answer.
One of them, a blond man with a broken nose and a suit jacket that did not hide the gun under his arm, stepped forward.
“She came through the east fence,” he said. “Cut herself on the wire. There’s blood near the hedges.”
Roman glanced at my sleeve.
Until then, I thought the blood had come from scratches. But the fabric near my forearm was wet and dark. A thin line of red ran down toward my wrist.
I swayed.
The blond man reached for me, but Roman moved first. His hand closed around my elbow, steadying me without gentleness but without letting me fall.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
“I’ve had worse,” I lied.
Roman looked at me as if the lie bored him.
“Dima, get Dr. Bell.”
“At this hour?”
“Did I ask for the time?”
