Page 4 of His Contract Queen

I’ve dealt with criminals my entire life. I’ve made peace with violence and corruption and the necessary ugliness that comes with ruling the kind of world I inhabit. Death doesn’t bother me. Neither do threats, betrayal, or greed. Those are honest vices. They announce themselves plainly.

This is something else.

The depth of Ramil Borchin’s moral decay unsettles me in a way I don’t like. It’s not his debt or his lies that bother me most. It’s how easily he justified them to not only himself, but to me too. How neatly he’s wrapped exploitation of duty and called it “necessary”. How convinced he was that what he offered me was entirely reasonable and something I would be interested in.

I tap ash into the tray next to me and stare at the closed door, a cold certainty forming in my chest.

Whatever decision I make next won’t be about money.

And it won’t be about mercy.

It will be about a rot that goes far deeper than unpaid debts and whether I’m willing to let it continue.

2

ALEKSANDR

Idon’t like unanswered questions.

Especially the kind that linger, scratching at the back of my skull long after a man has left the room. Ramil Borchin is that kind of problem. Men like that don’t rot like that overnight. They corrode slowly from the inside out. Something is always ignored first, a weakness indulged or some kind of compromise justifying the root of it until it becomes a character flaw.

And I refuse to believe this decay appeared in a vacuum.

So I do something I rarely bother with unless instinct tells me something is deeply off.

I make a call.

Sasha Sokolov is one of the few people whose reach extends far enough, and deep enough, to explain this kind of transformation. If there’s leverage buried under medals and ceremony, if there’s a scandal scrubbed clean before it ever reached the daylight to affect an otherwise spotless political career, he’d know.

He always does.

I expect rumors at the very least. Quiet affairs hushed with money or a body buried somewhere with a cover-up attached so thorough, it required favors that still haven’t been paid off yet. Men like Ramil don’t become monsters in private without leaving fingerprints somewhere.

The phone rings twice before he answers.

“Volkov,” he says, voice neutral.

“Sokolov,” I answer right back. I don’t bother with a greeting. There’s no point in pretending with him. We’ve never been the type for performative niceties, and today is no exception.

A beat of silence stretches across the line

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asks, the faintest thread of dry annoyance woven through it.

I don’t bite.

I let the silence sit another second longer just to remind him I’m not the one who needs to fill empty air. My thumb traces the edge of the phone pressed to my ear while I decide how much truth I’m prepared to hand over.

This isn’t usual. I dig for information all the time. Cross-referencing contacts, sniffing out double-dealers. That’s routine. Expected. That kind of information exchange happens at regular intervals depending on whatever dealings we’re each working.

But this… this is different.

This is personal.

“I need information,” I finally say.

“On?”

“A man named Ramil Borchin. Do you know him?”