11. Nina
NINA
Three weeks in this house and I have stopped flinching at the sound of the gate.
That bothers me more than the gate does.
I have a routine now. Up at seven, run the loop, shower, write until noon, lunch alone or with Nikolai, depending on his schedule, write again until dinner.
It’s the routine of a woman who has made peace with something, and I have not made peace with anything; I have simply run out of ways to be visibly at war with it, which is not the same thing but looks identical from the outside.
The Reeves thread is active. I feed it carefully, deliberately, never everything at once, always enough to keep him engaged and not so much that I lose the thread of what I am building.
It’s the most important work I have done in years, and I do it every morning between the run and the shower. Then I close the laptop, go downstairs, and sit across from Nikolai at breakfast like a woman with nothing on her mind.
I’m a very good journalist.
The supply truck started registering two weeks ago.
Not because I went looking for it. Because I was at my window at eleven on a Thursday night, unable to sleep, and I saw it pulling out through the service gate. I watched it go, counted the seconds before the gate closed, and I thought, that is a gap.
Thursdays. Kitchen supplies in, same truck, different driver each week, which means the driver is not the point, the truck is the point. Leaves between ten forty-five and eleven fifteen, depending on how long unloading takes.
The service gate stays open for the turn, then closes, and the overnight shift doesn’t fully settle into its rotation until eleven thirty, which means there’s a window between the truck leaving and the shift locking down when the east side of the estate is the quietest it gets all week.
Two weeks of watching. Two weeks of being patient, which I’m getting better at against my will.
Thursday night, I put on dark clothes, and I go downstairs at ten thirty. I tell Marta I can’t sleep and I’m going to sit in the kitchen for a while, which I have done twice before. Marta makes me tea and goes to bed. I sit in the kitchen, and I wait.
At ten fifty, the truck pulls up to the service entrance.
I give it fifteen minutes to load. Then I go out through the kitchen door into the cold, and I move along the wall to the service entrance, and the truck is there, back doors open, one man moving boxes inside.
I wait until he goes back in for another load, and I climb into the back. I pull the doors as close to closed as I can without latching them and lie down in the dark between two crates that smell like olive oil.
The doors close from the outside two minutes later.
The truck moves.
I count. Ten minutes. Fifteen. I’m further than I have ever been. The road noise is loud, and I keep my breathing even because even breathing is something I can control right now, and I’m going to control everything I can.
Twenty minutes.
The truck slows and stops, and my whole body goes cold before I understand why.
Boots hit gravel outside, two sets, and then the back doors rattle, and the latch turns, and I have maybe one second before whoever is out there sees me.
I grab the nearest crate and drag it toward me and press myself behind it, and the door swings open and cold air floods in. I’m flat on the floor with my cheek against the metal and my heart so loud in my ears I can’t hear anything else.
Nina. Do not move.
A flashlight beam sweeps the interior. It passes over the top of the crate, skims the wall above my head, and moves away.
I don’t breathe. I don’t blink. If either of the men outside takes one step up into this truck, I have nowhere to go, and nothing that explains why I’m here, and the thought of that finishes every sentence it starts.
Then I hear his voice.
The floor drops out of my chest.
Nikolai.
Why the fuck is he here?
Right there, just outside the doors, ten feet away at most, talking to someone in Russian, which I understand well enough from eighteen months of field work out of Warsaw to follow without a translator.
Every muscle in my body locks. There’s no telling what he’ll do to me if he finds me here.
“The Tuesday consignment,” he says. “Where is it.”
“North warehouse.” The other voice is older, gravel worn into it. “Buyer pushed collection two days.”
“The other one.”
“Guns and product both cleared this morning. Marchetti’s people took delivery at four.”
I stop forming thoughts.
There’s only listening now, only the words coming through the metal and landing one by one, and I hold each one the way you hold something fragile, carefully, making sure nothing breaks before I understand the full shape of it.
Guns. Product. Marchetti. The east side shipment moving Thursday. Volkov confirming pickup.
Fuck.
I know what this is.
Not adjacent to it, not at arm’s length, not the way half the legitimate money in this city keeps itself one careful degree away from the things it would rather not name. Him. All of it him.
The private equity firm and the portfolio and the galas and the man at the breakfast table reading the morning brief with his coffee going cold beside him, all of it sitting on top of something the press profiles never got within a country mile of.
A phone rings outside. Nikolai answers it, listens, and when he speaks again something in his voice has changed, pulled tighter.
“Don’t touch anything. I’m coming now.”
Fast boots on gravel. The man at the door calls something toward the front of the truck. The doors swing shut. The latch drops. Dark.
The engine turns over, and we move, and I stay exactly where I am on the floor, and I breathe for the first time in what feels like several minutes.
You didn’t get out.
The truck slows. The gate. Gravel under the wheels. Engine off. The driver’s door opens, and his footsteps cross the ground and fade into the house, and then there’s nothing but silence and the sound of my own pulse.
I lie there until I’m certain.
Then I push the crate aside, and my arms shake slightly as I climb out. The cold hits me all at once, and I stand on the gravel for a moment because my legs have not decided yet whether they’re going to cooperate.
I close the doors behind me. I walk to the kitchen entrance. Inside, I run the tap and hold my wrists under the cold water and look at the wall in front of me, and I stay there for a long time.
I wasn’t able to escape today, but I found information that was more valuable than running away.
I turn the tap off, dry my hands, and go upstairs.
My room is exactly as I left it.
I sit on the edge of the bed, and I don’t open the laptop or contact Reeves. I don’t write a single word because tonight I need to sit with what I know alone before I decide what to do with it.
This is the biggest story I have ever had my hands on.