Bound By Blood

Chapter 2: The Devil's Attention

The moment the door closed behind Reina, Viktor turned.

"Katya."

Just her name. That was all he ever needed to say to get her full attention. His sister turned from the window, her expression already shifting from warm to cautious — she knew that tone.

"Who is she?" he asked quietly.

"I told you — she saved me. Those men would have—"

"I heard what you told me." His voice didn't rise. It never did. "I'm asking who she is. Where she's from. How you met her. Why she is the first person you have ever brought into this house."

Katya hesitated.

That hesitation told Viktor everything.

"She's just a friend," Katya said finally. "A good person. You don't need to—"

"I'll decide what I need." He straightened his cufflinks — a habit, something he did when his mind was already working through a problem. "Find out more about her."

Katya frowned. "She saved my life Viktor."

"I know." He turned toward the door. "That's exactly what concerns me."

---

Reina walked until the Volkov mansion was completely out of sight. Then she stopped.

Her hands were shaking.

She stared at them like they belonged to someone else — these hands that had trained for years, that had never trembled in a fight, that had held a gun without flinching. Shaking.

She hadn't expected him to be handsome.

That was the part that disturbed her most. She had built a monster in her mind for eighteen years — something cold and ugly and easy to hate. But Viktor Volkov stood in that doorway like he owned the air in the room, dark and devastatingly composed, and for one terrible second her mind had gone completely blank.

Then he spoke.

"Reina."

One word. And her whole body had turned to ice.

Because she knew that voice.

She had been eight years old, hiding behind a burning door, when she first heard it. Low and unhurried. The voice of a man who had never once panicked in his life. The voice that had given the order that destroyed everything.

She would never forget it. Not in eighteen years. Not in a hundred.

Reina leaned against the cold brick wall and closed her eyes.

Was this the right time? She was inside his world faster than she had ever planned. Katya trusted her completely. Viktor had seen her face.

That last thought sent a different kind of chill through her.

Viktor had seen her face. And the way those grey eyes had stayed on her — quiet and calculating — told her that he was not a man who forgot faces either.

She pushed off the wall and started walking.

Too late to turn back now. Too late to disappear.

She had one choice — go deeper.

---

Her phone buzzed at 9am.

Reina stared at Katya's name on the screen for three full seconds before answering.

"Good morning!" Katya's voice was warm and completely unbothered — the voice of someone who had slept perfectly and had no idea her new friend had spent the entire night sitting on the floor of her apartment staring at the wall.

"Morning," Reina said carefully.

"So — Viktor wants to see you."

The silence that followed lasted exactly one second. Reina made sure of that.

"See me?" she repeated.

"He wants to thank you properly. For saving me." Katya paused. "And I think he wants to know who you are. He doesn't — he's not good with people. He doesn't usually do this. So honestly you should feel special."

Reina almost laughed. Special.

"When?" she asked.

"Today. This afternoon. I'll be there too so don't panic — it won't be weird. Viktor is just — he's Viktor. He's intense but he means well."

Reina walked to her window and looked out at the grey Moscow skyline. Her jaw was tight. Her mind was already moving three steps ahead.

He wanted to know who she was.

Good. Because the woman she was about to show him didn't exist.

"I'll be there," she said.

---

The guards were expecting her this time.

That alone told Reina everything — Viktor had given instructions. He had thought about this. Planned it. The realisation sat uncomfortably in her chest as she followed a silent, broad shouldered man through the mansion's corridors.

Not toward the living room where she had met Katya.

Deeper.

The guard stopped at a heavy dark wood door and knocked twice.

"Come in."

That voice.

Reina steadied herself — one breath, silent and controlled — and walked through the door.

Viktor's office was exactly what she expected from a man like him. Dark, immaculate and deliberately intimidating. Floor to ceiling bookshelves. A desk that cost more than most people's apartments. The kind of room designed to make visitors feel small.

Viktor was standing at the window when she entered, his back partially turned, hands clasped behind him. He turned when he heard her footsteps.

His eyes moved over her once. Unhurried. The way a man looks when he has trained himself never to show what he is thinking.

But Reina caught it — the briefest shift in his expression. Something that wasn't suspicion.

Something quieter than that.

"Miss Reina." He gestured toward the chair across from his desk. "Please. Sit."

His voice was courteous. Controlled. And it sent ice straight through her spine.

She sat. She crossed her ankles. She smiled.

And she made absolutely sure her hands were perfectly still.

---

"She is the only family I have left."

Viktor said it simply. No performance. No emotion. Just fact — the kind of statement a man makes when he has long since accepted a painful truth.

Something moved through Reina's chest that she immediately shut down.

"Then I'm glad I was there," she said.

Viktor studied her for a moment then leaned back in his chair — the first relaxed movement he had made since she entered the room.

"Tell me about yourself," he said. "Where are you from?"

And so it began.

He asked quietly and she answered clearly — her fabricated life rolling off her tongue like a story she had been rehearsing for years. Because she had. Where she lived. Where she grew up. What she did.

Then he asked about her family.

Reina held his gaze without blinking.

"My parents died when I was very young," she said. "I grew up alone."

Every word was the truth.

Viktor was quiet for a moment. Those grey eyes moved across her face — reading, calculating, searching for something he couldn't name.

He found nothing. Because she gave him nothing.

"I'm sorry," he said finally. And somehow — impossibly — it sounded like he meant it.

Reina almost broke right there.

The man who had ordered the deaths of everyone she loved was sitting across from her offering condolences for their murders. She smiled instead — soft and practiced.

"It was a long time ago," she said.

Viktor nodded slowly. Then something shifted in his expression — barely noticeable, like a door opening just a c***k.

"Would you like to get coffee sometime?" he asked.

Reina blinked. Of all the things she had prepared for — interrogation, suspicion, being thrown out — she had not prepared for this.

"Coffee," she repeated.

"Yes." The corner of his mouth moved — not quite a smile but the ghost of one. "You saved my sister's life. The least I can do is buy you a coffee."

Reina looked at him for a long moment.

Viktor Volkov — Russia's most feared man — was asking her out for coffee. And she was going to say yes. Not because she wanted to.

Because this was exactly the kind of opportunity she had been waiting eighteen years for.

"Sure," she said simply. "Coffee sounds good."

Viktor nodded once and reached for his phone — already moving on, already in control of the situation the way he was in control of everything.

Reina stood, smoothed her jacket and walked toward the door.

She didn't let herself breathe properly until she was back in the corridor.

He had apologised for her parents' deaths.

And she had smiled.

God help her — she had smiled.