Bound By Blood

Chapter 8: A Game For Two

She had been staring at the photograph for so long that the faces in it had stopped looking real.

Her parents. Young and smiling. Standing beside a man she still couldn't identify — comfortable in his presence, trusting, completely unaware of what that trust would eventually cost them. And in the background, barely visible, the teenage boy with grey eyes who would one day be given the order to end their lives.

Reina set the photograph down and pressed her fingers against her eyes.

She had been approaching this wrong. She had been so focused on Viktor — on what he did, on who he was — that she had never stopped to fully ask the question that mattered most. Why were her parents connected to his world at all? What had they been involved in? What was the debt and where did it come from?

She had been eight years old when they died. She had never thought to ask.

But someone would know.

The thought arrived quietly and then refused to leave.

Her father's brother — her Uncle Dmitri — had been the one constant after the fire. The one who had taken her in, made sure she was safe, asked no questions and expected no explanations in return. He had always known more about her father's life than he let on. She had felt that as a child without being able to name it.

She reached for her phone.

He answered on the third ring.

"Reina." His voice was warm and careful at the same time — the way it always was, like a man who had spent years choosing his words around her. "Is everything alright?"

"I need to ask you some questions," she said. "About my parents. About what they were involved in before they died."

A silence on his end that lasted exactly one second too long.

"I'll be in Russia next weekend," he said finally. "Business meetings. Come and find me before I leave. We'll talk."

It was not a yes. But it was not a no either.

And from Dmitri — that was everything.

---

She met him at a coffee shop near his hotel the morning after he arrived.

He looked older than she remembered. Quieter. Like a man who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time and was finally — reluctantly — ready to set it down.

Reina didn't waste time.

"Tell me what they were involved in," she said. "All of it. I'm not a child anymore and I need to know the truth."

Dmitri looked at her for a long moment then nodded slowly.

What he told her over the next hour was hard to absorb.

Her parents had not stumbled into danger by accident. They had been part of a network — careful, quiet, operating in the grey spaces between legitimate business and the criminal underworld. They had worked for a man whose name Dmitri spoke only in a whisper — a man who had spent decades building an empire entirely from the shadows. A man whose real face had never been photographed. A man who controlled people like Viktor Volkov the way a puppeteer controlled strings.

Viktor had not chosen to kill her parents.

He had been ordered to.

By the same man her parents had worked for.

Reina sat very still while Dmitri talked. She did not cry. She did not react. She simply listened — the way she had trained herself to listen — taking everything in and processing none of it until she was alone.

"Who is he?" she asked when Dmitri finished.

Her uncle shook his head slowly. "That is the question everyone asks and nobody answers. Not safely."

"I'm asking," Reina said.

Dmitri looked at her — really looked at her — and she saw something move through his expression. Recognition. The understanding that the little girl he had protected for eighteen years was gone and something far more dangerous had taken her place.

"His name," Dmitri said quietly, "is Sokolov."

Reina filed the name away in the locked part of her mind where she kept everything that mattered.

Sokolov.

The man in the photograph. The man behind the order. The man who had used Viktor as a weapon and her parents as a lesson.

The real target.

She walked back to her apartment in the cold Moscow afternoon with her jaw set and her mind completely clear for the first time in weeks.

She still needed information that only one person could give her.

And that person was Viktor Volkov.

The question was no longer whether she could get close enough to him.

The question was whether she could get the truth from him without destroying the one thing neither of them had planned for.

---

Viktor had been staring at his phone for the better part of an hour before he finally called.

He was not a man who hesitated. Hesitation was a luxury that his world had never permitted him. And yet he had picked up his phone and set it back down more times than he would ever admit — turning the words over, trying to find the right ones, knowing that what he was about to do had no precedent in his life.

He called her at 8pm.

Reina answered before the second ring.

He noticed that.

"Come to the mansion tonight," he said. "If you can."

A pause on her end — brief, controlled.

"I'll be there," she said.

She arrived at nine. The mansion was quieter than she had ever seen it — the guards were at their posts but the warmth that Katya brought to every room she occupied was entirely absent. Viktor met her at the door himself, which he had never done before, and led her through the corridor without speaking.

Not to the living room.

To his office.

The same room she had broken into days ago. She kept her face completely still as she stepped inside and took the seat across from his desk — the same chair she had sat in the first time he summoned her. Everything looked exactly as she had left it. The locked drawer was closed. Nothing was out of place.

Viktor sat down across from her and for a long moment said nothing.

This was different from his usual silences. This one had weight — the specific weight of a man preparing to say something he had been carrying alone for too long.

"I need to tell you something," he said finally.

"I'm listening," she said.

He looked at her directly — those grey eyes steady and open in a way that made her chest tighten.

"I know who your parents were," he said.

The room went completely silent.

Reina did not move. Did not breathe. Did not allow a single thing to cross her face.

"I knew them," Viktor continued quietly. "A long time ago. When I was very young. They were — they were good people, Reina. I want you to know that. Whatever you have heard, whatever you believe about how they died — I want you to know that they were good people who were placed in an impossible situation by someone far more powerful than either of them."

He paused.

"I was placed in an impossible situation too."

Reina's hands were completely still in her lap.

Inside she was coming apart at the seams.

He knew. He had always known. And now he was sitting across from her — calm, guilty, choosing his words with the kind of care that only a man with a conscience would bother with — and telling her that her parents were good people.

As if she needed him to tell her that.

As if she had not spent eighteen years knowing exactly what they were.

She wanted to scream.

She wanted to reach across the desk and demand every answer he was carefully not giving her.

Instead she said — "What impossible situation?"

Viktor looked down at his hands.

"I was given an order," he said. "I was nineteen years old and I was given an order by someone I could not refuse. I have carried what I did every single day since then." He looked back up. "I am not telling you this to ask for your forgiveness. I don't deserve that. I am telling you because you deserve the truth — or at least as much of it as I can give you tonight."

As much of it as I can give you tonight.

He was holding something back. She could hear it in that single sentence — the careful boundary he had drawn around what he was willing to reveal. He had not mentioned Sokolov. He had not mentioned the name her uncle had whispered across a coffee shop table just days ago.

He was protecting someone.

Or protecting her.

She didn't yet know which.

"Why are you telling me this now?" she asked.

Viktor was quiet for a long moment.

"Because I have feelings for you," he said simply. "And I cannot have feelings for you while carrying this between us. It isn't right."

The silence that followed was the most complicated one they had ever shared.

Reina looked at the man across from her — the man who had destroyed her life and was now dismantling her mission with nothing but honesty and guilt — and felt something shift inside her that she could not take back.

"I need some air," she said.

Viktor nodded. He didn't follow her.

She stood on the mansion steps in the cold Moscow night and pressed her hand flat against the stone railing.

He had confessed.

Not everything. But enough.

And the worst part — the part she had no defence against — was that he had done it not to manipulate her, not to protect himself, but because he thought she deserved the truth.

Because he had feelings for her.

Reina closed her eyes.

Sokolov was still out there.

Viktor was still the man who had carried out the order.

And she was standing on his doorstep feeling something she had no name for and no room for and absolutely no way of stopping.