20. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
She doesn’t come down for breakfast.
Marta sets the table for two at eight, the way she always does.
At eight thirty, I sit down alone. I eat and read the morning brief, drink my coffee, and the chair across from me stays empty.
At nine, Marta comes in to clear, and I ask her if Nina has eaten.
Marta says she brought a tray up at eight. I nod and go to my study.
Rico comes in at nine fifteen with the week’s priorities.
“The Reeves situation,” he says, sitting across from me. “His end is clean now. My guys swept the channel; nothing moves through it anymore. But we have a timeline problem.”
“How long did the thread run before we caught it?”
“Six weeks, give or take.”
“What did he do with what she gave him?”
Rico opens the folder on his knee. “He filed two internal reports. Neither of them has acted yet. The second one was flagged for review, but it’s sitting in a queue. Nothing is moving on it.”
“How long before it moves?”
“Sixty days, maybe ninety. These things don’t move fast unless someone pushes them.”
“Make sure nobody pushes them.”
He nods, makes a note. “The Brussels matter closed Thursday. Kovalev signed off.” He turns a page. “The west side acquisition is done. Patterson’s restructure is on schedule for April. The port situation is resolved, Tuesday shipment cleared without incident.”
“Good.” I lean back. “The rival faction. Where are we?”
Rico’s expression doesn’t change, but he takes a half second before he answers, which tells me more than his words will. “Moving. Three of the fronts have been probed in the last two weeks. Nothing that breached, just probing, feeling for weak points.”
“They’re building to something.”
“Yes.”
“Timeline.”
“My best guess, sixty days. Maybe less.”
I look at the window. The city is flat and gray this morning, the kind of day that doesn’t commit to anything. “Tighten the rotation on all three fronts. I want daily reports, not weekly. And I want to know the moment the probing stops.”
“Because when it stops?—”
“They’ve found what they were looking for.” I pick up my coffee. “That’s all.”
He closes the folder and leaves.
I work through until noon. Contracts, calls, and two decisions that needed to be made last week.
At one thirty, I go to the kitchen for lunch.
Nina is already there, standing at the counter with a glass of water, still in the clothes she slept in, her hair up in the loose way it gets when she hasn’t thought about it.
She looks at me when I walk in, and then she sets the glass in the sink and walks out.
I stand in the kitchen and look at the empty doorway.
Then I open the refrigerator and take out what I need for lunch.
At dinner, she comes down.
She sits. She eats. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t look at me, doesn’t perform the silence either—she’s not making a point of it or angling it in my direction.
She’s simply somewhere else, inside her own head, and I’m furniture.
I eat and let her be furniture too. Marta clears the plates.
Nina takes her water glass and goes upstairs without a word and I sit at the empty table and finish my drink.
In the morning I go to the office.
Vasin Holdings sits on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth floors of a building I’ve owned for twelve years in Midtown.
Glass front, doorman who knows better than to make conversation, an elevator bank that opens directly into the reception area where a woman named Clare has worked the desk for six years and has never once asked me a question that wasn’t strictly necessary.
I walk in and she looks up and says, “Mr. Vasin, your nine o’clock is already in the conference room,” and goes back to her screen.
Dmitri meets me in the hallway before I reach the door.
He’s been running this floor for nine years. Compact, efficient, the kind of man who has already solved the problem before he’s finished explaining what it is. He falls into step beside me.
“Volkov’s people called again,” he says, keeping his voice low. “Third time this week. They want a response on the Hendricks placement before Friday.”
“Tell them Friday.”
“They won’t like that.”
“They’ll wait.”
He nods. “Feldstein is in the room. He flew in from Chicago last night.” He pauses. “He’s nervous.”
“He should be.”
Dmitri opens the conference room door, and I walk in.
The room is floor-to-ceiling glass on the east side, the city sitting gray and enormous beyond it.
Four men at the table, all of them standing when I come in, the particular posture of men who have been waiting and are trying not to look like they’ve been waiting.
Feldstein is at the far end—mid-fifties, good suit, the careful face of someone who has been rehearsing what he’s going to say since the airport.
“Sit,” I say.
They sit.
I take the chair at the head of the table, and I don’t open anything or look at my phone, and I give Feldstein my full attention, which is the thing people in that chair always find most unsettling.
“The Chicago arrangement,” I say. “Walk me through it.”
He walks me through it. Fifteen minutes, thorough, nothing left out, which tells me he was more afraid of being caught holding something back than of whatever the numbers actually say.
I listen without interrupting. When he finishes, I ask him three questions, not the ones he prepared for, and I watch his face work through the answers in real time.
By the end of it the position is clear.
“Restructure the routing through the Cayman entity,” I tell Dmitri. “The Chicago exposure closes by the end of the quarter.” I look at Feldstein. “You’ll hear from my office.”
He nods. He looks like a man who has just been told he’s not going to die today and is still processing the relief.
I’m out of the building by eleven thirty.
In the car on the way home, Sofiya calls.
“Nikolai.” Her voice is careful, the way it’s been careful with me since the wedding. “I’ve been trying to reach Nina.”
“Her phone’s being replaced,” I say.
A pause. “Is she all right?”
“She’s fine.”
She’s quiet for a moment, deciding whether to push. She decides not to. “Can you tell her I called?”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Thank you.” A beat. “Take care of her.”
She hangs up.
Rico is waiting at the house when I get back, standing outside my study with a slim case under his arm. He hands it to me when I come down the hall.
“Everything’s set up,” he says. “New laptop, new phone. Both run through our server. Key logging is active, outgoing traffic gets flagged automatically, anything that tries to route outside the monitored channels gets blocked before it leaves the device.” He pauses. “She won’t be able to tell.”
I take the case.
“The phone has one external line cleared,” I say. “Her sister. That’s all.”
“Understood.” He holds my eye for a second. “You want me to flag the sister’s calls too?”
I think about Sofiya, the way she said take care of her .
“No,” I say. “Leave that one.”
Rico nods once and goes.
On the fourth morning, I come downstairs with the case under my arm.
Nina is already at the table. Coffee in front of her, half gone. She came down before me for the first time since the study. I set the case down in front of her, go to the coffee pot, pour my cup, sit down, and open the brief.
She looks at the case and then opens it.
The laptop powers on, and she pulls it toward her, and her hands find the keys, and the typing starts slow, then steadier, then the rhythm I’ve heard through walls for weeks—fast and focused, the kind that means something is moving.
I read the brief.
After a while, I look up. “Your sister called three days ago,” I say. “She says hi.”
The typing stops.
She looks up. Holds it for a second, not at me, somewhere past me, and I know exactly what she’s thinking about—Sofiya picking up a phone to reach her sister and finding me on the other end instead. She brings her eyes back to mine.
“Thank you for telling me,” she says.
Not warm. Not cold. Exactly what’s required, nothing more.
“There’s a line set up on your new phone,” I say. “For your sister. It’s the only one for now.”
She looks at me for a moment. “Okay,” she says.
She goes back to the laptop. The typing starts again. I go back to the brief and outside the window, the city moves the way it always moves, gray and indifferent, and in this room, the only sounds are a turning page and steady keys, and neither of us says anything else.