Chapter 18 - Mikhail
There is an absence that stains the air even before I open my eyes.
My eyes shoot open, hands creeping into the cold and empty space beside me that has not been warm for several hours.
My whole body freezes for four seconds before I shoot upright.
Zara is gone.
On the kitchen counter lies a note. The paper is from her notebook, handwriting scribbled and direct, the way it is in the margins of her notebook when she is writing for herself.
I know where they are. I’ve narrowed the location from the photographs—the details in the background and the light angle puts it in Greece, likely the islands. I’m going to follow it. This lead is real and I am not waiting for another one.
Do not come after me.
You have already done enough.
I set the paper down on the counter mechanically.
Then I lean over the counter and read it again.
You have already done enough.
This has to be the most precise and least forgiving sentence she has ever said to me since the alley in Dubai.
I switch on the coffee maker.
She is going to Greece.
These photographs that she found in the warehouse—the warehouse that Greger’s secondary detail followed her to and reported back. That report was scrunched between my fingers in the study last night, while I debated whether her self-perceived autonomy was worth her safety.
Those photographs have given her a location. She knows enough to figure out a location that I don’t doubt will be an accurate guess.
She is walking toward something real.
In the context of everything we have uncovered about her parents’ network, the enemies they accumulated, she’s walking into a minefield unknowingly.
The Irish syndicate is still moving; Timur’s allegiances are still unconfirmed and that alone creates an unpleasant vacuum in my chest. The location in Greece, wherever it is, was held secret for years by people with the means and motivation to hold it.
That package was sent by someone I have not identified.
Someone wants her to go to Greece.
The realization stuns my head, like a brick to the skull.
Someone fed her those photographs.
The meeting in the empty warehouse, the package she found personally—all of it carefully constructed to feel like an authentic discovery rather than something handed to her, or a directed push by someone.
She may be walking toward her parents, or she may have been altogether baited by the idea of reaching them.
She told me not to follow her and that I had already done enough. This doesn’t mean she wants space to do her own shit, but rather a clean and unambiguous assessment of what my choices have cost.
If I send a team to Greece and she discovers it, which she will, I lose her completely. We have already been walking a very thin thread since that confrontation in Dubai, and now…
The steam from the coffee curls. She is somewhere in the air between New York and Greece and I have no control over whatever is waiting for her there, standing in my kitchen all alone.
I put the cup down.
The wrong decision and the only decision are not always different things.
I leave the coffee on the counter to review the security infrastructure for the eastern bloc contacts and redirect two operational updates. I reply to Nikolai about the Zurich accounts, all of it done mindlessly.
At half past nine, Timur comes in, composed.
He sets a folder on the edge of the desk and begins his briefing professionally.
Then he pauses in the middle of a sentence about warehouse rotation schedules, finally registering the elephant in the room.
“Where is she?” he asks.
I do not look up from the document in front of me.
“Following a lead,” I tell him. “She’ll return.”
“Alone?” he continues after a deliberate pause.
“Yes.”
“That seems like an unnecessary risk given the current threats.” He clears his throat. “I could send someone after her. She would never know the detail was there.”
I put the document down, directing the full weight of my gaze at him.
My gaze is the same as it has been since the afternoon of Zara’s attack, with the accumulated and unresolved weight of everything I have filed under his name.
There is nothing in his face that gives him away.
“No,” I tell him.
“Boss—”
“No one follows her,” I state finally, leaving no room for argument. “No detail, no contact, no communication in her direction from anyone in this organization. She moves on her own terms until she chooses otherwise.”
Timur holds my gaze for a moment that is one second longer than he usually would.
“Understood.”
He picks up the folder from the edge of the desk and closes the briefing, making his way back toward the door. He doesn’t look back before the door closes.
The air in the room settles.
She ordered me not to follow her. Not a request, not just the instruction of a woman who needed physical distance because shit became suffocating. She meant every word.
I told her I would help her find them while keeping the truth from her. It’s a betrayal that leaves me no solid ground to stand on and make demands.
She is building her own ground to stand on, in Greece, with forty-three photographs and fifteen years of work, fueled by the relentless purpose that this time no one else gets to decide what she is allowed to reach.
My fists clench on the table.
I am letting her go. Forcing control now would confirm every version of me she thinks I am, would erase the distance between who I have been and who I have been trying to become because of her.