9. Nina
NINA
Callum Reeves’ encrypted channel has not changed in three years.
I check it at five forty-seven in the morning, sitting cross-legged on my bed with the laptop screen the only light in the room, and my coffee going cold on the nightstand.
The channel is exactly where I left it and exactly as I left it.
I sit with the cursor blinking for longer than I need to.
Then I type.
Short, precise, nothing that costs me anything if the channel is not as clean as it looks.
I tell him I’m in a situation. That I have access to something I didn’t anticipate.
That I need to know the line is secure before I move anything through it.
I read it back, and then I send it, close the laptop, and go downstairs for coffee.
Marta is in the kitchen. Nikolai has already eaten and is in his study with the door closed, which is his default state before nine in the morning and one of the few things about his routine I have found genuinely useful.
I pour my coffee and stand at the window.
Two days ago, I ended up in his bed. I’ve been thinking about it in the spaces between everything else ever since. How well he used me, filled me—I close my eyes and the scene from that night comes flashing in my mind.
I push away from the window because this is exactly the kind of distraction I can’t afford right now.
Upstairs, I open a new document.
Not the Nikolai material. I’ve been building this for six weeks before any of this happened, a piece about financial routing through three Eastern European shell networks that I’ve been sitting on because the sourcing needed one more layer of confirmation that I finally got two days before the wedding.
I write for four hours without stopping, and by noon, I have a full draft that I read twice and then send to my editor with a note that says only: Here it is. I know I’m late.
He replies in seven minutes.
It’s good. Where have you been?
I close his message and sit back, look at the ceiling, and breathe.
That’s the thing about the work. It doesn’t care what else is happening. It doesn’t care that I’m in a house I did not choose, married to a man I did not choose, or doing things I haven’t fully let myself name yet.
It just sits there and waits for me to show up, and when I do, it’s exactly what it always was, and that steadiness is the most valuable thing I own. I’ve been terrified since the wedding that this house was going to take it from me.
It has not.
I’m still here.
Reeves replies at two in the afternoon. The channel is clean. He wants to know what I have and how quickly I can move it. I read the message three times and then I write back.
I give him the shape of it, the name Vasin, the business structure, and the gap between the legitimate empire and what I’ve seen inside this house that does not fit inside a legitimate empire.
I don’t give him everything, though. Just enough that he knows I’m serious and not so much that I have no leverage if this goes sideways.
I send it, close the laptop, and sit on the edge of the bed.
I have a framework for what I just did. I built it over the past week.
Nikolai Vasin is not a man who exists outside the reach of accountability simply because he has money and walls and a rotating gate schedule.
I’m an investigative journalist. This is what I do. The fact that I’m sleeping in his house, with him, and wearing his name does not change what he is or what I am.
Also, the fact that the work I’m doing happens to also be my only leverage if this situation goes wrong is simply good fortune and not something I need to examine too closely.
The framework holds.
I don’t look at it too directly.
At dinner, he’s quieter than usual. I eat my food and answer when he speaks and look out the window when he doesn’t. The evening passes without incident. I go to bed early and sleep better than I have since I arrived, which I decide not to think about.
In the morning, I come downstairs, and Nikolai is already at the breakfast table, coffee in front of him, phone in his hand. He doesn’t look up when I walk in.
Marta has left eggs and toast on the sideboard. I fix a plate and sit across from him and eat. He keeps reading whatever he’s reading. Outside the window, the grounds are gray and still, and somewhere in the house, a door closes quietly.
He sets the phone down.
Picks up his coffee.
Looks out the window for a moment, like he’s deciding something, and I’m halfway through preparing to be ignored entirely when he looks at me. “Why did you pull back in the third section?” he says.
“What? You were reading my work? How did?—”
“The sourcing was there,” he interjects. “You had it. Anyone who knows your work can see where it was going, and then you redirected.” He picks up his cup. “Why?”
The third section. The structural decision I made during the final bits of writing, when I looked at what I had and made a call that I thought was clean and invisible.
I want to pick up the table and throw it at him.
“Source protection,” I say.
He breathes a sigh of disappointment, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it before. Then he goes back to his coffee, and that is somehow worse than if he had pushed back.
I finish my meal and go upstairs.
I sit at my desk, and I look at the Reeves thread, and I think about the third section and whether the decision was really about source protection.
How did Nikolai find my publication so fast? I wonder what else he sees when he looks at the work that I think is invisible.