Chapter Eleven
I didn’t sleep that night, not really.
I lay there for a while pretending to, then gave up around two and sat on the floor of my room with my laptop, my notebook, and the small digital recorder I’d had running in my bag during the entire café conversation.
This was a habit Iris had once called paranoid, and I’d called prepared, and which had never once, until now, felt this immediately vindicated.
I played it back from the beginning.
Daniel’s voice came through thin and tinny, nervous in a way that hadn’t fully registered while I was sitting across from him, too focused on the content of what he was saying to notice the shake underneath it.
I let it run.
The café noise.
The clink of his cup against the saucer.
My own voice, calm, too calm, asking him where the three accounts fed into.
There’s a parent structure. A holding entity that owns pieces of all three.
I paused it there and wrote that down again, even though I already had it from memory, because writing it twice felt like building something solid out of something that kept threatening to slip.
I let it keep running.
I’ve only seen fragments of it—compliance isn’t supposed to see the whole picture, that’s sort of the point of how it’s built—but the fragments I have all point toward the same—
The recording cut to noise after that. The crash. The shouting. My own ragged breathing, picked up clearly by the mic still running in my bag, while I was being pulled sideways through a side door I hadn’t known existed.
I went back further than that, though, to a part I’d nearly let slide past me the first time, distracted as I’d been by everything else happening in that café.
Before the crash. Before Daniel had spotted the man in the dark coat.
Earlier in the conversation, when he’d still felt safe enough to talk freely.
For reasons I couldn’t explain, I recalled Daniel saying R.T. mid-conversation. I think it was about who controlled the upper level of the financial chain or something like that. But I remembered clearly that he’d mentioned that acronym.
So, I rewound the tape, trying to find the exact moment he’d said what I knew he said. While at that, my eyes fell on the same acronym scribbled down somewhere on the top of the opened page in my notebook
R.T.
I’d written it down at the time with a question mark. But when? Considering the nature of my handwriting, I must’ve jotted it down so quickly so I’d follow up on it later. This was probably before or while fleeing the café through a side door.
Now I sat with it at two in the morning and felt something cold slide down the back of my neck.
R.T.
I opened a new document and started doing what I always did when something felt important and shapeless. I built a timeline.
Every account number Daniel had shown me.
Every shell entity name I memorized or half-glimpsed before he’d snatched the paper back.
I laid them out in a column and started drawing lines between them the way I had for two months now, except this time I had a new variable to test against everything else.
R.T.
Two initials. That was all I had. Two initials and the specific, particular weight with which Daniel had said them. Not casually, not in passing, but with the same flattening of tone people get when they’re naming something they’d rather not be naming out loud.
R.T., what was that? A company name?
A person?
It was most likely the initials of a name.
Whatever it was, I was going to figure it out tonight.
I went back through my own research files first. Three months of notes, cross-referenced, color-coded, organized with an obsessiveness that had occasionally made Iris ask if I was building a murder board, which, in fairness, I sort of was.
I searched for any prior mention. Any initials. Any name that fit.
Nothing direct.
That was the frustrating part. Nothing in any public filing, any registered agent document, any customs record I’d pulled used those two letters explicitly.
Whoever R.T. was, his name didn’t appear anywhere that mattered on paper. Which told me, more than any direct mention could have, exactly how careful he was.
So, I switched tactics and started searching adjacent to the financial structure instead of inside it.
Society pages. Business journal mentions.
Anything that put a name near the periphery of Meridian, near the holding entities, near Chicago’s specific, insular world of old money and new money pretending to be old.
It took forty minutes before I found it.
A charity gala writeup from eighteen months ago, the kind of fluff piece that exists purely to list attendees and their outfits, buried three pages deep in a business journal’s events section.
A photo caption, mostly incidental: Rodion Tarasov, financial strategist, pictured with members of the Chicago business community.
I stared at the photo for a long time.
It wasn’t a great picture—slightly out of focus, taken from an angle that caught him mid-turn, half his face in shadow under the gala lighting.
But the build was right. The dark, precise hair.
The particular stillness of someone who looked composed even in a candid shot, like the camera had simply failed to catch him in a single unguarded moment.
There was no way to recognize who this man was. And a part of me believed he’d avoided the camera intentionally. Powerful men like that were masters of the shadows. They were only seen or spotted when they wanted to be seen.
Rodion Tarasov.
“R.T.,” I whispered under my breath.
I sat back from the laptop, my fingers combing through my messy blond hair. It was almost like things were starting to come together, and I just might actually be on the right track at last.
This doesn’t really prove anything, you know, my voice of reason said. Initials aren’t a name, and if they were, what makes you so sure that R.T. means Rodion Tarasov? I mean, it could mean anything—Richard Thompson, Raymond Timothy. The list goes on.
I thought, scratching the back of my head as I stared at the image on my screen.
A blurry photo isn’t a financial paper trail, and you know that, the voice added.
We’ve built entire investigative threads before on connections that felt so tight and still watched them come apart under actual scrutiny.
A pause. You, of all people, should know how dangerous it is to fall in love with a theory before stress-testing it.
As much as it pained me to admit, my voice of reason had some valid points.
R.T. might not mean anything. But we all know Rodion Tarasov is a name, my voice of curiosity chipped in. Look him up.
Fantastic idea.
I did exactly that, pulling up everything I could find on him. It wasn’t much—that, in itself, told me something.
Men who ran legitimate businesses at his apparent level usually had a digital footprint. Interviews, profiles, the institutional vanity that came with money that wanted to be seen.
Rodion Tarasov had almost none of that. A handful of gala mentions. A registered address for a financial consulting firm that, when I cross-referenced it, shared a building with two of the holding entities I’d already flagged.
I opened the photos section, hoping to finally add a face to the name. But to my disappointment, the images I saw weren’t of the man I was looking for. I didn’t know who this Rodion Tarasov was, but I was certain none of those men I saw online were him.
Of all the photographs on that web page, only three stood out to me. And I was convinced those were actual pictures of him. However, these pictures were taken completely out of focus. None of them caught his face—just a couple of side views taken from terrible angles.
Whoever this man was, he was skilled at keeping a low profile. But why? What was he hiding?
I turned the internet upside down looking for clearer pictures of this man, but found none. Not even one.
It was almost four in the morning by the time I made myself stop, mostly because my eyes had started blurring the screen into something unreadable. Plus, I knew from experience that exhausted research was usually bad research.
I closed the laptop and lay back on my bedroom floor, staring at the ceiling, when the other thought arrived. The one I’d been successfully outrunning for the last two hours by staying buried in documents.
Anton Vasylenko.
A faint grin tugged at my lips, and I found myself replaying the coffee shop conversation with a completely different lens than the one I’d used at the time.
Every detail I’d filed under “interesting stranger” started rearranging itself into something with sharper edges. The way he hadn’t flinched at Cyprus. The way he’d made that joke about laundering money.
“Are you planning to start laundering money, Miss Bennett?”
He’d asked that question with a kind of ease that, at the time, I’d read as confidence. However, thinking about it now, it was starting to read as something closer to a man testing exactly how much I already knew.
“You talk like someone used to being the most informed person in every room he walks into. Someone important. Confident. Someone who’s used to calling the shots.”
I’d said that to him, and I’d meant it as an observation. Now it sat in my memory like something closer to a confession I’d accidentally extracted and hadn’t recognized as one.
I didn’t have any actual reason to connect Anton Vasylenko to Rodion Tarasov or the craziness going on in my life at the moment. None.
They didn’t share a name or a face I could verify against that blurry gala photo. Nothing concrete enough to write down without it looking like a kind of paranoid overreach.
“Correlation is not your friend, ladies and gentlemen; correlation will get you sued,” my journalism professor once said.
But the feeling wouldn’t leave. The specific, prickling certainty that I’d been in a room with someone who already knew far more about me than the conversation had let on.
There was something about Anton’s presence that felt strangely familiar. And that cologne of his…I could’ve sworn I’d smelled it before. But where?
Why couldn’t I shake the feeling that that wasn’t our first time in the same space?
And why the hell did the thought of him make me feel some sort of peace? Why did the image of him in my head prompt a smile on my face?
You’re spiraling, said my voice of reason, and for once it sounded less annoyed than genuinely concerned. It’s four in the morning. You’ve connected a stranger from a coffee shop to a name from a charity gala photo based on a vibe. God! What is wrong with you?
It’s not a vibe. My voice of curiosity, sharper, was less inclined to back down, even at four in the morning.
Of course you’d say that—you always push her into making wrong decisions.
It’s a pattern. Can’t you see? Three encounters with someone we can’t identify. A name that shares initials with the person controlling the structure we’ve been tracking for two months. A stranger who didn’t flinch at the one word that should have made anyone flinch.
As I said, none of that is evidence. It doesn’t prove anything.
Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s an angle worth looking at.
I lay back down, my heart still beating faster than it should over a photograph and two initials.
I rubbed my tired eyes, making myself acknowledge the part of this that had nothing to do with journalism at all.
The small, unwelcome flicker of something that wasn’t fear, sitting right alongside everything that was.
Because if Rodion Tarasov were R.T., it would mean he controlled the structure I’d spent months building a case against. It would also mean that he was the reason Daniel had gone white at the sight of a stranger in a coffee shop.
I honestly wasn’t sure how Anton was connected to all of this. But the man had the right answers to every question I asked—almost as if he had rehearsed.
Of course he gave you the right answers—you asked about his job, for Christ’s sake! How do you expect him not to answer correctly? said my voice of reason.
His responses were too accurate, and I meant it when I told him that he didn’t sound like an import consultant. He was way too composed and confident.
I didn’t realize confidence and composure were now signs of insincerity.
I ignored my voice of reason because my gut was telling me something was off about Anton. That strange sense of familiarity, coupled with the familiar feeling that coursed through me when we shook hands, was convincing enough.
And if I wasn’t wrong, then the man currently occupying an embarrassing amount of space in my head might not just be connected to all of this.
He might be the brain behind it.
Jesus Christ, Aria, don’t you think you’re taking this too far?
Aren’t you supposed to be the voice of reason? It’s your job to think about stuff like this—and you should be edging her on.
I ignored the two voices in my head and threw my hands under my head. I honestly should have been afraid of that thought. Some part of me was. But underneath the fear, infuriatingly, persistently, there was something else—a pull I had no good word for.
Maybe my voice of reason was right. Maybe I was taking this too far. But why couldn’t I drop it?
I thought about how even if for some reason R.T., Rodion Tarasov, and Anton were the same person, there was still the case of my mystery man left unsolved.
Whoever he was, it was clear that he was keeping tabs on me. And that should unsettle me more than it did.
Was he watching me, even now?
I didn’t have an answer.
However, I had a feeling I would find out sooner or later. The question is—was I ready for it?