Bad Influence

POV: Maya

“You’re smaller than the voice on the phone.”

The accent landed before the words did — Russian, low, dangerous.

Maya looked up from the file she’d set on the table.

“And you’re dumber than the headlines,” she said.

Roman Volkov — Boston Bulldogs enforcer, current tabloid favourite, man who had apparently decided that getting arrested two weeks before playoffs was a reasonable life choice — stared at her from across a metal table in a holding room that smelled like bad decisions and worse coffee.

He hadn’t stood when she walked in. She hadn’t expected him to.

He looked exactly like his press photos, except worse, which was impressive considering his press photos from tonight were already doing a lot of heavy lifting on his behalf.

His dress shirt was torn, one button open too far. His jacket was gone. Knuckles split on his right hand in a way that suggested the other guy had not come out ahead. Dark blond curls, shoved back. Repeatedly, by the look of it.

She pulled out the chair across from him and sat down.

His pale blue eyes that tracked her from the door to the chair without blinking once.

His gaze travelled — not crudely, that was the maddening part, there was nothing she could have flagged for it — but slowly, taking in her face the way you take in a coastline you weren’t expecting to find at the end of a long drive.

By the time he finished and met her eyes again, Maya had a distinct, irritated awareness of her own pulse.

She had gotten the call at 1:47 a.m., which would have been deeply inconvenient if she’d been asleep. She hadn’t been. She’d been sitting at her kitchen counter with a glass of whiskey, going over depositions for a case that wasn’t this one, and doing a very good job of not thinking about the fact that she might have chronic insomnia. Gerald Fitch’s name on her screen had been, if she was honest, a relief. Something to actually do.

Gerald had given her exactly four sentences of context: Roman Volkov, Seventh District holding room, Steven Thermage, league morality clause. Then he’d eaten something on the phone — she’d heard it distinctly — and hung up.

She’d grabbed her blazer, her bag, and the case file she’d pulled together in the twelve minutes it took to get from her apartment to her car, because she was Maya Theroux and that was simply how things worked.

The duty officer had given her five minutes with the arrest report. She’d used three.

Now she opened the file on the table between them and looked at him.

He looked back. Unhurried. Like he had nowhere else to be, which was technically accurate, but most people in holding rooms at two in the morning had the decency to seem at least mildly inconvenienced by it.

“I’m Maya Theroux,” she said. “From Gerald Fitch’s office. I need you to walk me through what happened tonight.”

Roman Volkov said nothing.

“Mr. Volkov.”

“I heard you.” That accent again.

“Then walk me through it.”

He leaned back in his chair. The shirt did something across his shoulders when he did it that she chose, professionally, not to follow up on.

“I’d like to speak to my lawyer.”

“Your lawyer is Gerald Fitch. Gerald Fitch sent me.”

“Then I’d like to speak to Gerald Fitch.”

“Mr. Fitch,” Maya said, keeping her voice completely even, “is seventy-one years old and my boss. You’ll speak to me.”

His jaw clenched. A jaw one could cut themselves on, Maya noted.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Roman said.

This was technically true. Maya had met enough athletes to know that the ones who said this were either guilty of something specific or had a pathological aversion to anyone telling them what to do, and she had about thirty seconds to figure out which category this was before she decided how to play it.

She looked at his hands. At the way he was sitting. At the complete absence of any readable emotion on his face, which was, she’d noticed, doing absolutely nothing to disguise the very readable attention with which he was watching her.

“You’re right,” she said pleasantly. “You don’t. You can also sit here until the league finds out about this at seven a.m., which they will, at which point you’ll be managing this without any preparation whatsoever and the first person to control the narrative will be Steven Thermage’s lawyers, who I promise you are significantly less pleasant to deal with than I am.” She folded her hands on the table. “So. Walk me through it.”

He looked at her.

She looked back.

She was good at this — the waiting. She’d trained herself out of the urge to fill silences a long time ago. Most people couldn’t stand it. Most people caved in under twenty seconds. She’d once sat across from a sports director who’d held out for forty-five before telling her everything she needed to know and a fair amount she hadn’t asked for.

Roman Volkov sat in the silence like he’d built a house in it.

He was also, she noted with something between professional admiration and personal grievance, sitting in it while continuing to look at her — quietly, steadily, in the way that an extremely focused predator looks at something it has not yet decided whether to consume or simply observe — and the silence was not on his side of the table the way it usually was on hers. The silence had switched teams.

“There was an altercation,” he said finally.

Maya waited.

“Thermage started it.”

She waited some more.

That was apparently all he had.

“That’s it?” she said.

“That’s it.”

She looked at him. He looked back at her with the same dark, attentive expression he’d worn since she walked in, which was frankly remarkable given the circumstances.

Most people, faced with a league suspension and a press cycle that was already going to be catastrophic, managed at least some anxiety. A furrowed brow. Something.

“There was an altercation,” she repeated slowly, “and Thermage started it.”

“Yes.”

“That’s your account of the evening.”

“Yes.”

“You understand,” Maya said, “that I’m trying to help you.”

“Yes.”

She stared at him.

He stared back.

“You’re Russian,” she said, before her better judgement had a chance to catch up.

The corner of his mouth did something. Not a smile. A consideration.

“I am.”

“Just confirming.”

“Was it the accent?”

“It was the accent.”

“You like it.” Not a question. Not a brag, either. He said it the way a man might confirm the weather — flat, observational, slightly inconvenient.

Maya, who had successfully cross-examined hostile witnesses, mediated three divorces in one weekend, and once made a federal prosecutor cry in a deposition without raising her voice, opened her mouth and discovered that nothing she had prepared for the practice of law covered this.

“I’m going to need you to focus,” she said.

“I am focused.”

He absolutely was. That was the problem. He was focused like a sniper. He was focused like she was the only thing in the room that had moved in a long time.

She closed the file.

The thing about Roman Volkov, she was quickly discovering, was that he was not going to do what she expected. She’d walked in here with a read on him — built from a file, from press clippings, from the particular way men like this behaved when they were in trouble and needed someone to fix it. Defensive. Angry. Performing for her. Saying a lot to say nothing.

He was not doing any of that. He was just sitting there, giving her practically nothing, and doing it with the absolute calm of a man who had decided she could have two sentences or she could have nothing and either outcome was genuinely fine with him.

It was, objectively, maddening.

“Okay,” Maya said. “I need to lay out what happens next whether you tell me anything or not, because that’s my job and I’m going to do it regardless.”

He made a slight gesture with one hand that she interpreted as go ahead.

She watched the hand do it. She did not need to watch the hand do it. The hand was not relevant. She was tired. She had been awake for nineteen hours.

“You’re two weeks out from playoffs. The league has a morality clause in your contract. An arrest — not a conviction, an arrest — is enough for them to open a suspension review. You’re also the leading scorer on a team that has not made the postseason in four years, which means the Bulldogs have a significant financial and PR interest in how this plays out.” She paused. “Steven Thermage is a minority owner of the Bulldogs. You punched a minority owner of the Bulldogs.”

Something shifted, very slightly, in his expression.

“So I’m aware,” he said.

“The footage from the club exists. We don’t have it, but it exists, and Thermage’s lawyers will move to control it faster than we can move to contextualize it.” She leaned forward slightly. He registered it. Of course he did. “Which is why what actually happened tonight matters. What you tell me changes what I do next. If he started it in a way that’s documented, if there’s a witness, if there’s any context that makes this something other than what it currently looks like — I need to know.”

Roman looked at her for a long moment.

“I’ve told you what I know,” he said.

That was, she noted, technically not a lie. It was also technically nothing. He’d answered every question she’d asked and given her absolutely no information. In any other circumstance she’d have admired it.

He knew something. She’d done this long enough to know when someone was sitting on information, and he was sitting on it with the full weight of a man who had made a deliberate choice and was not reconsidering it.

The question was why.

“Fine,” she said, and stood.

He looked up at her.

“I’ll be in touch tomorrow,” she said, slightly more crisply than necessary.

“Okay.”

“You will speak to no one about this in the meantime. Not your agent, not your teammates, not anyone at the club.”

He looked at her like she’d asked him not to run a marathon. “Fine.”

“And I’ll need you to cooperate fully with our office going forward. Someone will post your bail within the hour.”

“I’ll cooperate,” he said, and there was something in the way he said it that made her pause.

She picked up her bag.

“I’ll cooperate,” he said again, “with you.”

Maya stopped.

“I handle the casework with the full team,” she said.

“I understand that.” He held her gaze. “I’ll cooperate with you. Personally.”

She looked at him. He looked back, giving her the same opaque, unhurried, completely unsettling attention he’d given everything else she’d said in the last fifteen minutes.

“That’s not how this works,” she said.

“It can be,” he said.

She opened her mouth.

He waited.

She closed it.

“Mr. Volkov,” she said, finding her footing again, “are you flirting with me from inside a holding cell?”

He considered this.

“No,” he said.

A pause.

“If I were flirting with you, Ms. Theroux, you would know.”