Chapter 16 - Mikhail
“Mikhail, what does this mean?”
Zara stands three feet from me with her phone held between us, her eye twitching as she glares at me, her temper rising like a storm that hasn’t broken yet.
I have stood exactly like this before—before operations and confrontations.
It’s fucking over is what my brain yells at me.
There is no way I can put this off for any longer. I can see it in the set of her jaw, in the tremors that are racing through her.
The message on her screen was sent by someone knowing exactly what it would do. I put the burner phone down on top of the documents.
“You might wanna sit down,” I say as calmly as possible.
She obviously doesn’t sit, only raising an impatient brow. I didn’t genuinely expect her to.
“Twelve years ago, there was a financial network operating across six criminal organizations. It moved capital through three continents using offshore accounts that made it functionally invisible to anyone who didn’t have intimate knowledge of its internal logic,” I start.
“Your parents built a significant portion of that network. Your father designed the routing system while your mother managed the encryption layer that kept it sealed.”
“Thanks, Mr. Obvious. What does that have to do with this fucking text?”
“I was part of the operation that dismantled it,” I exhale in one breath.
Whatever she had expected me to say was not this.
I expected tears and anger and fury, a screaming match, maybe even a few hits to the face. Instead, she’s stunned into silence.
“You knew,” she pushes out, hollow.
“I knew who they were,” I clarify. “I knew their names the night you told me. In the penthouse, when you said them across the room.”
The sheer shock that renders her speechless freezes me into my spot as well.
I can’t approach her, can’t hold her, and it’s all my own doing.
Her face tells me she’s replaying the night she broke, the candles, the boat, her hand finding her mother’s earrings in the hollow beneath the shelf, all of it.
All of it.
All of it with this knowledge burning deep in my chest for weeks, doing its damage like a parasite eating away at me.
“You stood there,” she growls, slamming the phone down on the counter harshly. “You stood in that boat cabin and you watched me find those earrings. You watched me hold them. You knew what they meant and you said nothing.”
Both her hands tear into her hair. She turns away from me and for three seconds her back is to me. Her shoulders rise and fall as she fights to gain control over herself.
“I told you about being eight years old.” The words come out broken at the edges as her volume rises.
“I sat in that room and I told you about the foster homes and the notebooks and never belonging anywhere and y-you fucking held me. You held me while I talked about the wound of my parents’ absence I had been carrying my whole life and you already fucking knew.
You already knew what happened to them and you said nothing! "
Her voice has gone shrill, fingers pulling into her hair again.
“Dubai.” She laughs brokenly, the sound like glass against ceramic.
“You got on a plane with me. You fucking searched that boat. You were standing right there when I found her earrings.” Her voice fractures on the last word, a clean break that she does not try to hide—the most devastating sound I have heard in a very long time.
“You watched me hold them. You watched me understand that she was alive and you stood there and you said nothing. Fucking nothing, Korovin.”
“Zara—”
“Do not say my fucking name,” she seethes poisonously, eyes blazing wetly.
Her body shakes, fury and devastation alike running through her.
“Do not say my name like that right now. Don’t give me the quiet voice.
Don’t give me more of the bullshit you have been giving me while you were sitting on this. ”
She crosses the room toward me and stops three feet away; the distance is both nothing and enormous, a space that contains everything that has been built between us and everything that has just been detonated inside it.
“I trusted you,” she spits at me. “I don’t trust people.
I built my entire life around not trusting people because every person I trusted when I was a child left, or was taken, or decided I wasn’t worth the permanence.
And I trusted you. I don’t know when I decided to trust you, I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I did, and you were standing there the entire time with your hands full of the one thing I have been looking for my whole life, and you chose—you fucking chose—to keep it. ”
I cannot give her a justification that holds.
“Why?” she nearly screams at me. It is just the raw, open wound of someone who wants to understand.
“Because I didn’t know what it would do to you,” I manage hoarsely. “The investigation was already drawing fire and I didn’t trust that giving you the full picture would allow you to make safe decisions. Because—because I was afraid of what it would do to us.”
In those eyes that I have grown so familiar with, I see that beyond the fury, there is something that is much worse: a kind of grief that comes with constant disappointments and let-downs.
“Do you know where they are?” She asks, her teeth gritted.
“No,” I admit honestly.
She closes her eyes for one second before opening them. “Did you look?”
“After the operation, there were efforts to trace them. Considerable resources were used to locate any evidence of where they had gone or what had happened. We found nothing. No trace or physical evidence. There were powerful people looking and they found nothing either.” I hold her gaze and I force out these words: “In my world, that means one thing. I believed your parents were dead. I have believed that for twelve years.”
The room sits in absolute silence for a long moment.
Zara collapses under the weight of the grief of what was lost and the anger from what I lied to her about, and the impossible, persisting hope of the earrings she found.
Her fingers curl around the burner phone I had kept on the counter and she hurls it against the wall with a loud wail. Her nails tear documents into pieces. I don’t stop her. I can’t.
The truth is finally in the room and it has done exactly what I knew it would do. I am standing in the aftermath of it, and it turns out that knowing something will destroy someone does not, when it arrives, feel any different from not having known.
It still takes everything apart.
“You said you believed it,” she heaves, standing in the destruction. “Past tense. Do you still?”
I debate on giving her the easier answer. I know what the easier answer would cost me and what it would buy. I do not make it.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “To some extent, I still do.”
That gets her to pause. Whatever was holding her together finishes coming apart now, and what replaces it is not grief anymore—grief has a softness to it somewhere, even at its worst, a quality of mourning that bends rather than cuts.
Her words are delivered with the most poison she can muster.
“To some extent.” She repeats it mockingly.
“Twelve years of silence, a dead boat in the middle of nowhere, my mother’s earrings sitting in the next room, and you still think they’re dead.
So what was today? What was any of it? Was I just—” Her voice cracks but she refuses to let the break stop her.
“Was I just some stupid bitch you were managing while you waited to see how much more you could lie to me before it became a problem?”
“Zara, I—no, that is not what this is.”
“Then tell me what the fuck it is!” She crosses the distance between us in two sharp steps, all up in my face, nothing of the woman who turned her hand over beneath mine at a candlelit table four nights ago.
“Because from where I am standing, I grieved a closed door for fifteen years, and then you let me believe for one single day that the door might be open, knowing the entire time that you don’t actually believe it is.
You gave me hope with one hand while you were already telling yourself it was a lie with the other. ”
“I told you the truth tonight because I didn’t want you finding out from someone else.”
“Aww, how fucking generous of you,” she coos, sugar laced with venom, entirely unlike anything I have heard from her before. “You told me the truth because you were caught. Because that message forced your hand. Don’t stand there and call it generosity.”
She isn’t wrong, and I do not insult either of us by pretending otherwise.
“This is not closure,” she rages, unlike anything I’ve heard coming from her throat—even back when she was my prisoner. “You’ve handed me a maybe wrapped inside a confession, and I am supposed to just fucking stand here and take it, when you’re the fucking root of all my problems.”
“I did not take them from you,” I say carefully.
“You were there,” her voice cracks straight down the middle on the word there, and she does not try to hide it.
“You stood in that room with people who decided my parents’ fate, and then you stood in my life for weeks pretending you were just a man who wanted to protect me, and I let myself believe it.
I’ll never forgive myself for that. Letting you have the power over me to deciding for me, again, what I was allowed to know. ”
She presses the heels of her palms to her eyes, suddenly dropping to the floor in a squat. Her hair falls around her, hiding her face from me completely.
“I want to go back to New York,” she says in a small voice.
“You will, I promise,” I tell her.
She looks at me like the agreement itself is another betrayal. There is nothing I can offer right now that will not be received as exactly the wrong thing as I have learned across the last several minutes.
She disappears into the room and the click of the lock is loud in the silence her wrath has left behind.
She does not come out until it’s time for the flight.
The flight home carries a silence that’s like an open gaping maw.
She sits across the cabin rather than beside me, which she has not done since the first journey from Dubai to New York.
Her notebook is closed in her lap. She looks out the window at the dark Atlantic running beneath us in its slow, indifferent expanse; her arms are crossed, and her spine carries none of the loose, present ease it carried on the terrace yesterday morning.
Again, I find it impossible to tear my eyes away from her but this time, for a far worse reason.
She does not look back at me once across the entire duration of the flight.
Not when the cabin lights dim, not when the turbulence over the Atlantic rattles the glass beside her and her hand finds the armrest instead of finding mine.
I bring her water that she does not drink, because offering anything more right now would be received as another instance of me deciding what she needs without asking her first.
I do not try to close the distance.
That is the part that costs the most, sitting here in the recycled air of a private cabin at thirty-eight thousand feet, watching the woman who turned her hand over beneath mine four nights ago hold herself like a fortress under siege from the inside.
Every instinct I have built across fifteen years of operating in spaces where control is the only currency that matters is telling me to act, to fix, to manage the variable back into alignment.
I do not act.
Because for the first time in longer than I can accurately measure, I understand that the correct move is the absence of one.
She needs the space more than she needs my proximity.
She needs to be furious without my presence pressing against the edges of it, asking her, even silently, to soften it for my comfort.
So I give her the distance.
And it is the hardest fucking thing I have ever done, sitting four feet away from someone and choosing, deliberately, not to close it.
New York receives us in its gray, lame morning light, the skyline rising through the descending plane in its familiar buildings of glass, and none of it carries the warm, golden permission of the city we just left.
Zara is already standing before the plane has fully stopped, her bag over her shoulder, her posture rebuilt into the professional composure she wears like armor when she does not want to be read.
We disembark in silence.
The car is waiting. She gets in first, and I follow; the space between us in the back seat is no greater than it has ever been in measured distance, but it might as well be the width of an ocean for what it currently contains.
She is two feet away from me.
She has never felt farther.