Bound By Blood

Chapter 7: Nothing Is What It Seems

His message arrived at midnight — three words.

I am back.

Reina stared at her phone screen in the dark of Katya's guest room and felt her stomach drop.

Even Katya had no idea he was returning that night. She had said nothing about it — had gone to bed talking about plans for the weekend as though Viktor was still days away. Reina had stayed over at the mansion three times since his departure, keeping Katya company the way a good friend would, telling herself it had nothing to do with the access it gave her.

She told herself a lot of things these days.

They were both in the kitchen early that Friday morning — Katya in her robe, Reina with her coffee — when the front door opened.

Katya spun around. "Viktor?"

He looked exactly the same. Dark coat. Composed expression. The kind of man who could travel across the world and return without a single hair out of place. His eyes moved around the kitchen quickly — taking inventory the way he always did — and landed on Reina with an expression she couldn't immediately read.

"You're here," he said.

Not a question. Not a greeting. Just an observation delivered in a tone that could have meant anything.

"She's been keeping me company," Katya said, already moving to hug him. "You didn't tell anyone you were coming back. You never tell anyone anything."

Viktor accepted the hug briefly then stepped back. He answered Katya's questions about the trip in short, measured sentences — polite but minimal, like a man whose mind was somewhere else entirely.

Reina watched him carefully over the rim of her coffee cup.

Something was different.

She couldn't name it precisely. He looked the same. He sounded the same. But there was a quality to his stillness that morning that felt less like composure and more like calculation — the difference between a man who was calm and a man who was waiting.

Then he turned to her.

"How have you been, Reina?"

Four words. Simple. Ordinary.

And yet the way he said them — quiet, deliberate, his grey eyes holding hers just a fraction of a second longer than necessary — sent a cold current straight through her chest.

"Fine," she said.

The word came out wrong. Slightly too fast. Slightly too flat. She heard it herself the moment it left her mouth.

Viktor said nothing. He simply looked at her with that unreadable expression and reached for the coffee pot.

But the corner of his mouth moved.

Almost a smile.

Almost.

---

It was Viktor who created the opportunity.

"Katya." He didn't look up from the table when he said it. "Can you get me a coffee?"

Katya gave him a look that said she knew exactly what he was doing then disappeared toward the kitchen anyway — because she was Katya, and she always believed the best of her brother.

The moment she was gone the atmosphere in the room changed completely.

Viktor leaned back in his chair and looked at Reina with that steady, unhurried gaze of his.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"You usually do," she replied.

The ghost of a smile. "Have you ever wanted to ask me about my work? About how my business operates?"

Reina kept her expression neutral. The question landed strangely — too casual, too specific — and she felt the familiar tightening in her chest that she had learned to breathe through.

"Why are you asking me that?" she said.

"Curiosity," he said simply. "Most people who spend time around me eventually want to know. They just never ask."

Reina held his gaze for a moment then set down her coffee cup.

"Katya told me early on that you don't talk about your business," she said carefully. "So I decided not to bring it up. I was curious — I won't pretend I wasn't. But my parents raised me to never involve myself in other people's personal affairs." She paused. "Some lessons stay with you."

Viktor was quiet for a long moment.

His eyes moved across her face — slow, deliberate, reading something she couldn't see. And then his expression shifted into something she hadn't expected.

Not suspicion.

Something heavier than that.

"They sound like they were good people," he said quietly.

"They were," Reina said.

Another silence. This one longer.

Viktor looked down at the table — just briefly, just for a second — and in that second Reina saw something move through him that he didn't manage to fully hide.

Guilt.

The same guilt she had heard in his voice at the coffee shop. But deeper now. More specific. Like a man who was not thinking about his past in general — but about one particular thing he had done.

He looked back up.

"I'm glad you're here, Reina," he said. And the way he said it — quiet and heavy with something unspoken — made it sound less like a compliment and more like an apology.

Reina smiled.

"I'm glad I'm here too," she said.

It was the biggest lie she had told him yet.

Or at least that was what she told herself.

---

Reina left the mansion that evening without looking back.

She walked the first ten minutes rather than taking a cab — she needed the cold air, needed the space between herself and that house before she could think clearly. By the time she reached her apartment her jaw was tight and her mind was running at full speed.

She locked the door, sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the wall.

Her instincts had never failed her. Not once in eighteen years. And every single one of them was telling her the same thing right now — Viktor knew. Not everything perhaps. But enough. The way he had looked at her that morning when she stammered her reply. The careful questions about his business. The guilt in his eyes when she mentioned her parents.

He was playing the same game she was.

Two people sitting across from each other at the same table, both holding cards they refused to show, both pretending the game was something else entirely.

The realisation should have made her afraid.

Instead it made her more focused.

She crossed the room and opened the locked drawer. Spread her files across the desk the way she had done a hundred times before — photographs, documents, dates, names. The evidence of eighteen years. But this time something was different. This time she wasn't looking at Viktor's crimes.

She was looking at the unknown man in the photograph.

The one standing beside her parents. The one whose face she still couldn't place. The one who had given Viktor the order.

If Viktor had been a weapon — who had pulled the trigger?

She thought about the question mark beside her name in his handwriting. She thought about the guilt on his face when she mentioned her parents. She thought about the way he had said — I am glad you are here — like a man apologising for something he couldn't name out loud.

Viktor Volkov had feelings for her.

She had known it for weeks and refused to acknowledge it. But sitting alone in her apartment with his guilt still fresh in her mind she could no longer pretend otherwise.

He had feelings for her.

And she could not afford to have feelings for him.

She pushed everything back into the drawer, turned off the light and lay down in the dark.

Her mission had not changed. But her understanding of it had.

It was no longer enough to destroy Viktor Volkov.

She needed to know the entire truth first — about her parents, about the debt, about the man in the photograph, about the question mark beside her name.

Only then would she know exactly who deserved to pay.