The Target List

The apartment smelled like her sister before Katya had even shut the door behind her, sandalwood and jasmine clinging to her own skin in a way that had stopped feeling strange only because she’d made herself stop noticing it, a discipline she’d built the same way she’d built everything else useful about herself. She dropped onto the couch without ceremony, its cushions worn thin and gray in the shape of every body that had ever sat there, and let her head fall back against the wall, staring up at the water stain on the ceiling that neither of them had ever mentioned to the landlord.

Neither of them wore makeup tonight. Illiana’s face, bare under the single bare bulb hanging from its cord, looked younger this way, the cheekbones less sculpted without the contouring she applied like architecture every morning, and Katya knew her own face looked the same, because it was the same face, down to the pore.

The corkboard took up most of the far wall, four feet by six, the kind of thing you bought at a hardware store and never expected to use for anything but a child’s school photos. Instead it held Victor Hale’s face, three separate photographs of him at three separate events, his jaw angled the same confident way in each one. Beside him, Derek Voss, caught mid-laugh at some rooftop bar, his shaved head catching the flash. Solomon Vance in profile, a grainy telephoto shot, his hand on a car door. Margaret Chen, unsmiling, walking into a building. Beneath the photographs, layered in overlapping sheets, org charts and access-tier diagrams, printed and annotated in two different hands, Illiana’s small and precise, Katya’s looser, slanted, the letters running into each other when she wrote fast. At the far right edge, almost falling off the board’s border, a newspaper clipping had yellowed at its folds: a Moscow car accident, a byline circled twice in red pen, and beside it, in Illiana’s handwriting, a subsidiary company name followed by a question mark that had been pressed hard enough to tear the paper slightly.

The vodka bottle sat on the kitchen counter, cap still on, condensation not even started, exactly where it had sat the last three nights running.

Illiana stood at the board with a marker uncapped in her hand, writing Voss’s confirmed access tier into the diagram in the space she’d clearly left for it, her letters small and even. She did not look up when Katya came in.

“Your husband,” Katya said, “is in love with you.” She let the word sit a beat, testing its weight in her own mouth. “Deeply. Pathetically.” A small, private smile crossed her face, gone as quickly as it came. “It’s kind of beautiful.”

Illiana capped the marker with a soft click. “Good,” she said, and did not turn around.

Katya’s foot began to tap against the couch cushion, a small restless rhythm she wasn’t aware she was doing until she noticed the springs answering it. “That’s it? Good?”

“What else would you like me to say.” It wasn’t a question. Illiana set the marker down on the narrow shelf beneath the board and finally turned, arms crossing loosely over her chest, patient in the specific way that had always, since they were girls sharing a single mattress in a room with four other beds, read to Katya as something closer to dismissal than patience.

“I got his access hierarchy. I got the rotation schedule on the badge. I got him talking about Voss’s ego like it’s a critical update.” Katya sat forward, elbows on her knees. “I want you to actually hear it. He’s not stupid. He’s not even really the mark you keep describing to me. He’s sweet, Illi. It’s not nothing, getting a man like that to hand you everything and thank you for taking it.”

“I hear it.” Illiana’s voice stayed even. “I heard the text you sent this morning, too.”

Katya’s jaw tightened. She said nothing.

“So.” Illiana turned back to the board before Katya could recover her footing, tapping one finger against the space beside Voss’s photograph. “We slow the approach. You’ve confirmed the tier, that’s enough for now. Give it two weeks before the next contact, let him think the last one was just a good night rather than a plan.”

“Two weeks.” Katya was on her feet before she’d decided to stand, crossing to the board, close enough that her shoulder nearly brushed her sister’s. “His ego is already hooked, Illi, I felt it, I know what hooked feels like on a man like that. You wait two weeks, he starts filling the silence with his own doubts, he starts wondering why the beautiful bored wife hasn’t called, and men like that don’t sit quietly in doubt, they go looking for reassurance somewhere else. The window is now.”

“The window is whenever I say it is.”

“That’s not a plan, that’s you needing to say it out loud.” Katya’s voice rose, sharpened at the edges, old ground under both their feet now, worn as smooth and familiar as the couch cushions. “I’m not the girl you have to manage into position anymore. I found the byline. I found the subsidiary name before you did, actually, I just let you write it on the board because you like writing things on the board. I am not your intern in this, I built half of it standing right next to you.”

“I am not treating you like an intern, I am protecting the timeline, there is a difference between the two things you refuse to see.”

“There’s no difference, not the way you do it.” Katya’s hands came up, not quite a gesture of surrender, closer to something thrown down onto a table. “You slow me down every single time it’s my read against yours, and you call it strategy, and you never once slow down when it’s the other way around.”

“Because my read is usually correct.”

“Your read on the *company* is correct.” Katya’s voice dropped, and that was worse, quieter and more exact than the shouting had been. “Your read on people, lately, I’m not so sure.”

Illiana’s mouth opened, the beginning of something clipped and final forming behind her teeth, and Katya, before she could stop herself, before she’d fully decided to say it, said the thing underneath all of it, the thing she’d been carrying up the stairs and through the door and into the smell of her own perfume worn wrong.

“He’s not just an asset, Illi.” Her voice had gone quiet enough that the refrigerator’s hum filled in around it. “He’s a person.”

Illiana went still. Not the stillness she wore for Wallace, not the composed pause she deployed in boardrooms and kitchens alike, calibrated to read as thoughtfulness or patience or whatever the moment required. This was different, and Katya, who had spent her whole life learning to read the two stillnesses apart, saw the difference immediately: something had gotten past the wall this time, slipped through whatever checkpoint Illiana kept manned at all hours, and for a moment her sister simply stood there with her back half turned, marker forgotten in her hand.

She turned around slowly. Her eyes went not to Katya but past her, to the middle distance, the particular unfocused look of someone watching something that had happened a long time ago and very far away.

“I don’t remember the sound,” Illiana said. Her voice had lost its usual precision, gone slower, each word set down like something breakable. “People always assume that’s the part you remember. The sound. I don’t have it. What I have is the six hours after.”

She crossed to the board without seeming to decide to, until she was close enough to touch the yellowed clipping at its edge, though she didn’t, not yet.

“A government office in Moscow. Fluorescent light, the kind that hums. We were eight, sitting on a bench that was too tall for our feet to reach the floor, and I remember that specifically, my feet not reaching, because it gave me something to look at besides the door.” Her fingertip finally found the edge of the clipping, tracing along its torn seam, not the circled byline yet, just the border of the page. “Your hand in mine the whole time. You don’t remember that part?”

“I remember that part,” Katya said, quiet.

“We were waiting for someone from the company to call. Our parents worked for them. Our parents died in a car that belonged, in some paperwork trail nobody wanted us to see, to that company’s business, and the men who ran the company knew our names. They had our names on a form somewhere. And they chose not to bother.” Her fingertip reached the circled byline now, and stopped there, pressing lightly against the red ink as though she could still feel the ballpoint’s groove pressed into the newsprint. “We believe it wasn’t an accident. We intend to prove it wasn’t. Solomon Vance’s name wasn’t in this article. Nobody thought to put it there. It took me four years to find it myself, in a subsidiary filing nobody was ever supposed to read closely, a name buried three shell companies deep, and when I found it I thought, there you are. I have been waiting a long time to say that to somebody.”

The refrigerator hummed. Neither of them moved for a moment.

“I remember the sound,” Katya said. Her voice had gone very quiet, stripped of the sharpness it carried a minute ago in the argument, stripped of almost everything. “I’ve never told you that. I remember it and the silence after it, how much worse the silence was than the sound itself, how long it lasted before anyone came.” She swallowed. “I let you think I didn’t have it either. I don’t know why. I think I wanted to be the one who carried that specific piece, since you carried everything else.”

Illiana looked at her sister for a long moment, something moving behind her eyes that she didn’t try to name out loud.

“I don’t actually care about the money,” she said finally. “I want you to understand that, since I don’t think I’ve said it plainly before. The money is a door. The exposure of the firm is a door. What I want,” and here her voice thinned to something almost private, almost embarrassed, “is for the men who decided we weren’t worth a phone call, the man I am sure is responsible for the deaths… I want him to feel it. Really feel it. The way we felt it, waiting on that bench.”

Katya nodded, once.

The quiet stretched a moment longer before Illiana’s mouth twisted, faintly, at something she clearly hadn’t planned to admit and was admitting anyway, the way a person confesses to a minor crime because a larger one has already been spoken aloud and made the smaller one feel almost safe by comparison. “His decency irritates me,” she said. “Wallace’s. It shouldn’t. It’s not a complication for the plan, the plan doesn’t care whether he’s decent or not, decent men are actually easier, they don’t check the math. But it irritates me anyway. Like he’s, without knowing it, without meaning to, holding up something I don’t want held up. I don’t enjoy being reproached by a man who doesn’t even know he’s doing it.”

Katya was quiet for a beat. Then, because the door had been opened and she had never in her life been good at leaving a door open without walking through it, she said, “I think I’m starting to feel something for him. Real. Outside the plan.” She didn’t dress it up, didn’t soften it with a joke the way she might have an hour ago. “I’m not going to pretend that’s nothing.”

The confession sat between them in the small room, under the one bare bulb, beside the untouched vodka and the board full of other people’s faces.

Illiana’s jaw tightened, a small hard motion at the hinge of it.

Katya’s eyes had gone slightly wide, as if she’d surprised even herself by saying it out loud, as if the sentence had existed somewhere quiet inside her for weeks and only just now found the exit.

Neither of them said anything else for a long moment. Neither of them knew, yet, what there was to say.

Words ran out. The feeling didn’t. Illiana crossed the small distance from the board to the couch and sat, letting her shoulder press into Katya’s. Neither moved away. It was a language they’d learned before words, in the shared cold of an orphanage bed, a silent pact made of warmth and whispered secrets. Tonight it was not just comfort but a shedding of armor. Here, for one hour, Illiana could set down her composure and Katya her sharpness. They could be only what they were to each other: a mirror, a history, a place to rest. They could cry if they needed to. Knowing they could was enough.

For a moment they simply sat like that, breathing in the same small room, under the same single bulb. Illiana’s hair had come loose from whatever order she’d forced it into that morning and fell now past her shoulders, parting on the left the way it always had, the way it had parted since she was a child learning to braid it herself in an orphanage bathroom with no mirror worth trusting. Katya’s fell the same length, same color, same weight, but parted on the right, the one dependable seam in an otherwise perfect symmetry. It was strange, still, after everything, to look at a face that was her own and not her own, the same high cheekbones, the same pale eyes, and to feel, instead of the vertigo a stranger might feel, something closer to relief. Nothing here required navigation. Her hand knew the shape of Katya’s knee before she’d decided to place it there.

Katya turned her head first and kissed her, unhurried, her mouth soft where an hour ago her voice had been sharp, and Illiana let herself be kissed, let herself, for once, not be the one setting the pace.

They undressed each other without ceremony. No slow reveal, no staging for an audience that didn’t exist. Katya dragged her shirt over her head and let it fall to the floor beside the couch, her hair spilling loose over her shoulders, parted on the right the way it always was when there was no one left to fool.

Underneath was the black lace bra Illiana had bought for them both. The demi cups, cut low, lifted Katya’s breasts, presenting them. Through the sheer, embroidered panels, her dark areolas were stark shadows, the nipples already hard points pressing against the fabric. Illiana watched her sister’s chest rise and fall, her own breath catching, before reaching for the clasp. Her fingers knew its hooks intimately from a thousand mornings spent on her own skin, the muscle memory absolute. With one efficient twist, the band went slack. Katya’s breasts spilled free, heavy and warm in the low light, their pale weight a perfect, mirrored match to her own. The cool apartment air found her nipples at once, puckering them into tight, pink buds.

Katya returned the favor without thinking about it. She tugged the strap from her sister’s shoulder, then the other, and let the silk fall away. She looked. Of course she looked. It was like catching her reflection off guard.

“You’re staring,” Illiana said.

“Actually, I’m checking my work.” Katya’s mouth curved. “Still good.”

They stripped the rest between them, jeans shoved down over hips that flared to the same width. Katya’s panties were black lace to match, cut high on the hip. A damp shadow darkened the gusset, a testament to the heat between her legs. Illiana hooked her thumbs in the delicate waistband, feeling the warmth of her sister’s skin beneath the fabric. She drew them down slowly, the lace peeling away from Katya’s mound with a soft whisper, revealing the neat, pale curls trimmed short above her clit. The lips beneath were flushed, swollen, and wet, glistening in the bare light.

Then they were bare together on the worn cushions, nothing between them but skin. The naked bulb overhead threw no flattering shadow and made no promises. It offered only the plain fact of two identical bodies, warm and known.

Katya touched first. Two fingers along Illiana’s collarbone, tracing the ridge of it, unhurried, the way she might trace her own in a mirror. Her mouth followed the same path. Her lips were warm and slightly parted, and the skin beneath them felt exactly like her own and nothing like it at all.

Illiana’s breath caught. A small sound escaped her, involuntary, and her eyes drifted shut. For once her mind didn’t reach ahead. No next task. No next contact. No next line on the board. There was nowhere else to be.

Her own hands moved over the familiar terrain of her sister’s body. The same hip bone under the same span of fingers. The same soft give at the inside of the thigh, where the skin went thin and hot. She cupped Katya’s breast and felt the nipple harden against her palm, rolled it lightly between thumb and finger, and Katya arched into it. Illiana pressed her mouth to the side of her sister’s throat and tasted salt, and underneath it the ghost of her own perfume, worn a shade too heavy. Katya always wore it too heavy.

Katya made a sound low in her chest. Unguarded. None of the theater she layered over everything with anyone else. Just want, plainly offered.

The sound alone loosened something in Illiana’s spine. They shifted together slowly, finding the couch’s narrow width without argument. Katya stretched out on her back and Illiana settled half over her, their legs tangling, Katya’s knee hooking up over her hip to draw her closer. Their breasts pressed together, nipples sliding against each other with every breath, and Illiana could feel her sister’s heartbeat where their chests met. Quick. Quicker than she’d have admitted.

Illiana’s fingers traced the mirrored dip of matching hips, the identical curve where waist gave way to thigh. Then lower. She brushed through the soft curls and found her sister slick and hot, so wet her fingertips slid through without resistance, parting the swollen folds, gathering that wetness up and over the tight little bud of her clit.

Katya’s breath went ragged against her ear. There was nothing careful in it.

“Illi,” she said.

Only her name. Said the way Katya had always said it, for as long as either of them could remember, a word that belonged to no one else on earth. Illiana answered with her mouth against her sister’s throat. Her fingers moved in slow, deliberate circles, and she didn’t have to guess at the pressure or the pace. She knew. She knew her own body, and this was near enough to the same thing that guessing had never been required.

She eased two fingers inside and felt Katya clench around them, velvet and grasping, then curled them forward while her thumb kept circling. Katya’s thighs fell open wider. Shameless. Her hips began to rock against Illiana’s hand, lazy at first, a slow grind, and then less lazy, chasing it.

“Don’t you dare slow down,” Katya breathed. “I know that face.”

“You have the same face.”

“Yes. So I know it.”

Illiana smiled against her skin and didn’t slow down.

Katya’s fingers dug into Illiana’s shoulder. Her head tipped back against the couch’s worn arm, throat bared, hair fanned across the cushion. The sounds she made now came without editing. Small broken gasps that built on each other, climbing, honest in a way she never let them be with anyone who might use them against her later. Illiana could feel it coming before it arrived. The flutter deep inside. The thighs starting to shake. The wet, soft clutch around her fingers going tight and urgent.

When she came it took her whole body. A shudder started somewhere low and moved up through her spine and out through her shoulders. She clenched hard around Illiana’s fingers, pulsing, her hips jerking once, twice, and she didn’t cover it. She didn’t reach for the performed moan she’d use in any other bed in the city. It was just hers. Raw and unguarded, her whole frame trembling against Illiana’s, her nails biting deep enough to leave marks neither of them would mention later.

Illiana held her through it. Kept her fingers where they were until the last aftershock faded and Katya’s breath came back in long uneven pulls.

Katya didn’t give her long to feel pleased with herself. She rolled them, clumsy on the narrow couch, laughing once under her breath when Illiana’s elbow nearly went off the edge, and then she was on top. Her hair fell in a curtain around both their faces. Her hand slid down Illiana’s stomach and between her legs, familiar and sure, and found her soaked.

“Look at that,” Katya murmured. “And you were so calm.”

“Katya.”

“Mm. That’s what I thought.”

Her fingers moved exactly right. Of course they did. Circling, then pressing, then sliding inside while the heel of her palm ground slow against Illiana’s clit, and Illiana felt her own composure simply leave her. It didn’t crack. It set itself down. No eyes staying open past the moment. No part of her mind still cataloguing the room, the door, the exits, the time.

Her hips lifted into her sister’s hand. Her breath shortened. The heat coiled tight and low and then broke, and she came with her forehead pressed hard to Katya’s shoulder, her thighs clamping around her sister’s wrist, her breath breaking apart into pieces against warm skin. Every carefully managed part of herself, set aside for the moment.

Afterward they lay tangled together on the narrow couch, foreheads touching, breath slowing into the same rhythm, the vodka still sitting capped and untouched on the counter behind them, condensation finally beginning to bead along its glass in the warm room. Neither of them spoke. There was nothing that needed saying in that particular silence, which was its own kind of rare thing between them.

Illiana’s gaze drifted, eventually, past Katya’s shoulder to the corkboard on the far wall, to the loose grid of faces pinned there, and settled, as it always seemed to, on the yellowed clipping at the far edge, the Moscow byline circled twice in red, the subsidiary name beside it with its question mark pressed hard enough to tear the paper. Katya followed her sister’s eyes there without needing to be told where to look, and for a moment they both simply regarded it, two women with the same face lying together in the same bare light.

Neither of them said anything about Wallace. The question of what he was to each of them had been asked, and left open, and that, more than anything else that had happened in the small apartment that night, was the truest thing either of them had managed to say all evening.