21. Viktor
VIKTOR
Dimitri sends the photo without a text first, which tells me everything before I even open it.
The man from Ginger’s school, caught on a long lens getting into a gray sedan two streets over from where our own watcher had eyes on it. Same plate. Same shell company registration that dissolved on paper eight months ago and never actually stopped operating.
I stare at the photograph longer than I need to, at a stranger’s face now confirmed as a real, active threat instead of a possibility I could still talk myself out of believing.
There’s a stillness to the way he stands in the photograph, patient, unbothered, a man who’s clearly done this before and expects to do it again without consequence. I recognize that stillness. I’ve built a career on men who move exactly like that.
I call Dimitri the second I’ve confirmed it myself.
“It’s him,” I say. “The same man.”
“Confirmed on our end too. I had someone cross-reference the plate against every vehicle registered to that shell company, going back as far as the filings let us look.” Dimitri’s voice has an edge to it I don’t hear often. “Viktor, you need to see what else came back.”
“Tell me.”
“Not over the phone. This needs the actual paperwork in front of you.”
“Then come to the house. I don’t want to wait for this.”
He arrives within the hour, and we take it to the study, door closed, Harper and Ginger both occupied elsewhere in the house, safely out of earshot of a conversation neither of them knows is happening.
“Walk me through everything,” I say.
Dimitri lays out a folder on the desk, more organized than I expected given how fast he must have pulled it together. Photographs of the storage unit exterior. A timeline stretching back further than two months once he cross-references utility hookups for the shell company’s listed address.
“The company’s been active for nearly two months, not the few weeks we assumed. Purchases going back that far. Surveillance equipment, long lens cameras, audio equipment, a storage unit rental near the east side we’re still working to locate exactly.”
Two months. I do the math without wanting to. That’s before the hearing. Before the marriage even happened.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I say, mostly to myself. “If this started two months ago, it started before Harper and I were anything to each other. Before there was any reason to connect Ginger’s custody case to me at all.”
“Unless it was never about the custody case specifically.” Dimitri lets that sit a moment.
“What if Pavel’s been watching your operation generally for longer than we think, and the custody case just happened to hand him a reason to focus that attention somewhere useful?
Best guess, this goes back at least four months.
Maybe longer, if we’re only now finding the trail because whoever’s running this operation is good at covering it.
” He taps the timeline. “Beyond four months ago, you hadn’t even met Harper yet. ”
“So this was never about her.”
“It’s about her now. Whatever it started as, it’s not that anymore.” Dimitri’s jaw tightens. “They’ve moved from watching your house generally to watching a six-year-old specifically, at her school, close enough that she could have looked up and seen him watching her back.”
“I’m aware of what that means.”
“Are you? Because it looks to me like you’re treating this like a security problem you can manage quietly, the same way you’ve managed everything else in this business for fifteen years. This isn’t that anymore. This is a child.”
“I know what this is.”
“Then act like it. Tell Harper. She has a right to know someone’s watching her daughter, if only so she can actually help protect her instead of walking through her days assuming a strange man at pickup is nothing.”
“If I tell her, I have to tell her everything. Who Pavel really is. What this business actually costs, in ways she’s never had to think about before. What it means that her marriage put a target on her daughter’s back before either of us knew each other’s last names.”
“Maybe she deserves to make an informed choice about that, instead of you making it for her.”
I sit with that longer than I want to, because he’s not wrong, and I know he’s not wrong, and I still can’t make myself agree to it.
“Not yet,” I say finally. “I need more before I hand her something this heavy. A name behind the shell company. A location. Something concrete enough that telling her actually helps instead of just terrifying her without giving her anything to do with the fear.”
“That’s not protection, Viktor. That’s delay dressed up as strategy.”
“Maybe. I’m still choosing it.”
Dimitri studies me for a long moment, and I watch him decide not to push further, not because he agrees, but because he’s known me long enough to recognize when I’ve actually made a decision instead of just stalling.
“Fine. But I want it on record that I think you’re wrong about this.” He closes the folder. “And I’m doubling the detail on Ginger specifically, not just the house. Someone with eyes on her every second she’s not physically inside these walls.”
“Agreed.”
“School too. I want someone inside the building during pickup and drop-off, not just watching from the parking lot. If he’s bold enough to stand in that pickup line once, he might try it again, or try something closer.”
“Do it. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes to arrange with the school.”
“And if anything happens before you tell Harper, anything at all, that’s on you. Not me.”
“I know.”
He leaves it there, gathering the folder and heading for the door, and stops with his hand on the frame the way he always does when he has one more thing to say.
“For what it’s worth, I understand why you’re doing this. But I don’t think it’s going to work the way you think it will. Women like Harper don’t stay in the dark quietly forever. Eventually she’s going to ask the right question, at the wrong moment, and you won’t have a good answer ready.”
He leaves before I can respond, which is probably intentional, and I sit alone in the study with a folder’s worth of evidence that Pavel Ivanov has been circling my life for months longer than I ever realized, patient in a way that should terrify me more than it currently allows itself to.
I open the folder again once he’s gone, going through the photographs one more time on my own, looking for anything Dimitri might have missed in his rush to bring me the news.
There’s nothing new to find. Just the same storage unit, the same sedan, the same unremarkable man doing a very deliberate job of looking unremarkable.
I think about Harper somewhere in the house right now, probably reading to Ginger, or doing the dishes, or laughing at something on television, entirely unaware that a stranger has been photographing her daughter for weeks.
I think about the promise I made myself the day I recognized Pavel’s face in that courtroom, that I’d handle this quietly, contain it before it ever had to touch either of them directly.
That promise is getting harder to keep with every new piece of information Dimitri brings me. It was easier to make when the threat was still theoretical, a face from my past that might or might not still matter. It’s harder now, staring at proof he’s been watching my family for months.