25. Nina
NINA
The man at the east gate is not the one who was there yesterday.
I notice it on my morning run. A new face, same post, same stance, but the way he holds himself is different from the man who was there Tuesday. Tighter. More alert.
I finish the loop, come back inside, pour my coffee, and stand at the kitchen window, looking at the grounds.
The car on the street outside the north wall is new too. Dark, parked two properties down, engine off. It was not there three days ago. It has been there since yesterday morning.
I drink my coffee.
By the time I finish it, I’ve counted four changes in the rotation that were not there at the start of the week, all of them concentrated around the parts of the estate I move through most. Not the perimeter in general.
Me specifically. The kitchen entrance, the garden path, and the library window that faces the street.
I put my cup in the sink and go to find Nikolai.
He’s at his desk, on a call, jacket on, which means he has somewhere to be this morning. He looks up when I come in and holds up one finger. I sit in the chair across from him and wait.
He wraps the call up in two minutes and sets the phone down.
“The security rotation changed,” I say. “Four posts, all of them around where I move in the house and the grounds. There’s a car outside the north wall that wasn’t there three days ago.” I look at him. “Tell me what’s happening.”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he leans back in his chair.
“The rival faction,” he says. “They’ve been probing my operations for several weeks. The intelligence they’re using is sourced from inside my world, detailed enough that it’s not coming from the outside.” He pauses. “They’ve identified you as a pressure point.”
“A pressure point.”
“The fastest route to me.”
I sit with that for a moment. Outside the window, the grounds are quiet, the new man at the east gate visible from here if I angle slightly, standing exactly where the old man used to stand.
“How organized are they?” I ask.
“Organized enough.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer you’re getting right now.”
“Nikolai.”
“Nina.” His voice stays level. “I’m not keeping you in the dark to manage you. I’m keeping you at a certain level of detail because the operational specifics don’t change what you need to know, which is that the security shift is for your safety and it is not negotiable.”
“What do they want?”
“To destabilize my operations. Use you to get to me.”
“How?”
He looks at me. “Several ways. None of which I’m going to walk you through in detail.”
I lean forward. “I have spent ten years reporting on organized crime networks across three continents. I have sat across from men who make the people in your world look like they’re still in training. You don’t need to protect me from information.”
“I know that.”
“Then stop acting like you do.”
“I’m not protecting you from information.” He picks up his pen, sets it back down. “I’m protecting the integrity of how we respond to this. The less you know about the operational specifics, the less useful you are to them if they find a way to get to you before we close this.”
I open my mouth and close it.
He’s not wrong. I hate that he’s not wrong.
I know exactly what he’s describing because I have seen it from the other side, sources who knew too much becoming liabilities, information becoming a target painted on someone’s back.
He’s applying the same logic to me, and he’s applying it correctly, and I can’t argue with the logic without arguing with my own decade of field experience.
“How long?” I ask.
“Before it moves? Thirty days. Maybe less.”
“You told me that last night.”
“It’s still true this morning.”
I look at him across the desk. He looks back, steady, giving me exactly as much as he has decided to give me and holding the rest behind his eyes in the way he holds everything he has decided I don’t need yet.
“Is there anything I can do?” I say. “Practically. That helps rather than complicates.”
He looks at me for a moment, and I watch him recalibrate slightly, just slightly, the way he does when something I say lands somewhere he did not expect.
“Stay inside the adjusted rotation,” he says. “Don’t vary your patterns. If something feels wrong, you come to me directly, not to staff, not to Rico. Me.”
“All right.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it,” I say. “You’re not going to tell me anything else?”
“Not today.”
I stand up.
The room is very quiet, and we’re on opposite sides of his desk, and the air between us has the density of everything we are not doing with it.
I feel it, and he feels it, and neither of us moves toward it.
Not because it isn’t there. Because there’s something outside this house that is real and moving, and the usual release feels wrong against that reality, like laughing at the wrong moment.
I hold it.
He holds it.
“Okay,” I say.
I walk out.
Upstairs, I sit at my desk, open the laptop, and look at the document I’ve been writing for weeks, the private one, the one that is not for print. I read three paragraphs and close it.
I open a new document and stare at the blank page.
The man at the east gate is standing in the same place he was an hour ago. I can see him from here if I sit at the right angle, which I’ve been doing since I came upstairs, and I am aware that I’m doing it, and I’m aware of why, and I’m not going to examine it too directly right now.
Someone out there has looked at everything Nikolai Vasin has built and everything he is and decided that I am the fastest route through it.
I think about what that means.
I think about it for a long time.
Then I start typing, not the private document, not a piece for my editor, words on a blank page, and I don’t stop until the light outside the window has changed and Marta knocks on the door to tell me dinner is in an hour.
I save the document without reading it back.
I go to get ready for dinner, and I think about the restraint in that study, the thing neither of us reached for, and how much it cost me to walk out of that room.
I think about it the entire time.