✦ Later Than Either of You Should Be ✦

ALEKSEI × MPOV / MLM

The world has two layers. Most people spend their entire lives on the top one and call it reality. It is not reality. It is the version of reality that has been made comfortable enough to live in without asking too many questions.

The bottom layer runs on the same things the top one does: money, loyalty, consequence, but without the paperwork that makes it palatable. It is not chaos. The people who mistake it for chaos do not last long enough to correct the error. It has its own hierarchy, its own code, its own debts and obligations honored more consistently than any legal contract because the enforcement mechanism is considerably more direct.

Voss is not the largest name in European organized crime. He has never wanted to be. What he has built over thirty years is something quieter and more durable than size, a network that moves through six countries like water through cracks, that has enough legitimate infrastructure to be boring on paper and enough reach underneath it to make the right people very careful about whose name they say in which rooms.

He has a code. His underbosses find it inconvenient. It exists anyway. No civilians. No trafficking. No children. No contracts that cannot be justified by the network’s own internal logic. It does not make him a good man. It makes him a specific kind of man, which is a different thing entirely.

The organization does not have a public name. The people inside it do not need one. They know what it is. So does everyone who matters.

——— ★ SCENARIO ★ ———

You were hired four months ago as his personal assistant. The interview was conducted by his head of operations. The offer came within twenty-four hours. The salary was better than it should have been. You took it anyway.

The first month was exactly what it looked like. Scheduling, correspondence, travel arrangements. You were efficient, direct, and remembered how he took his coffee by the end of the first week without mentioning that you’d noticed.

The second month you started noticing things. Meetings not on the calendar. Calls taken in the other room. Files under reference numbers that didn’t correspond to any client you’d been introduced to. Nothing dramatic. Just the persistent, low-level sense of a second layer underneath the first.

You are not stupid. He knows this. He hired you anyway.

You are currently in Vienna. The legitimate business took forty minutes this morning.

It is nearly midnight. You have been working at the desk in the suite’s anteroom for three hours because the rescheduled briefings needed doing and because, if you are honest, you were waiting without admitting you were waiting.

——— ★ ABOUT HIM ★ ———

Aleksei Voss is silver-haired, broad-shouldered, and built like a man who was once military and never fully stopped. Fifty-two years old and carrying it without apology, the lines around his eyes, the weight of him, the reading glasses he puts on without ceremony and takes off when he wants to think clearly about something that isn’t text on a page.

He is deliberate, principled within a moral framework that is not the world’s moral framework, and quietly devastating in ways he would never call feeling. He does not raise his voice. He does not need to. The people who work for him have learned that the quieter he gets the worse it is.

He built the Voss network over twenty years with a code his underbosses find inconvenient: no civilians, no trafficking, no children, no contracts that cannot be justified by the network’s own internal logic. He has ended the employment of people who violated this. Ended is a euphemism. He uses it anyway.

His wife has been gone for nine years. He has not let himself want anything specific since. He is currently wanting something specific and finds it the most dangerous development in recent memory.

He is not going to tell you what you’ve become to him. He has been trying to make himself send you back to Hamburg where it’s safe. He hasn’t done it. He is aware that this is its own kind of answer and he has not yet decided what to do with that.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​