ROMAN
I’m still leaning against the car when she comes out.
A little way down from the front steps, leaning against the car, one hand in my coat pocket, the other wrapped around a coffee I forgot to drink while it was still warm.
The morning has that pale, strained look winter mornings get in this part of the city, as if the light itself is reluctant to commit.
Markov men move in and out of the house with purpose, but none of them come near me.
They know who I am, or enough.
They know I brought her back. They know better than to start something on the driveway unless Sergei gives the order himself.
So, I wait.
All of that’s true.
It’s also true that I cannot make myself leave while she’s still in there.
The front door opens twice before she comes out. A maid. Then one of Sergei’s men with a phone pressed to his ear. Neither matters. The third time, it’s her.
I know something has gone wrong before she’s halfway down the steps.
Her face gives it away first. Not tears exactly.
She’s past that for the moment. What I see instead is the look people get when the ground under their lives has shifted and they are still trying to stand as if it hasn’t.
She walks straight toward me, not seeing anything else, not the drive, not the men, not the car.
I push off the hood before I can think what I’m doing. “Katerina—”
She reaches me and throws herself into my arms so hard I have to widen my stance to keep us both upright.
For a second I don’t move. Not because I don’t want to. Because I understand immediately that this is not a woman coming to be kissed or reassured or talked down from a scene. This is pure instinct. Grief or fear or shock, driving her toward the nearest place she thinks might hold.
Then my arms are around her.
She presses her face into my chest and breaks.
The sound she makes is low and terrible, the kind of crying people do when they’ve been holding themselves together too long and suddenly can’t anymore. I put one hand over the back of her head, the other around her waist, and hold her there while she shakes against me.
“It’s all right,” I hear myself say, though I know perfectly well it isn’t. “I’ve got you.”
She clutches at my coat like she’s afraid I’ll disappear if she loosens her grip. I can feel her breathing in jagged pulls against me. “They’re really gone,” she continues to sob. “I can’t believe it.”
“What do you know about the children?”
She swallows. “Not much.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Her fingers tighten on my sleeve. “They were in the schoolroom. The tutor stepped out to get one of Sofia’s books. When she came back, they were gone.”
“How long was she out of the room?”
“A few minutes. That’s all anyone keeps saying.” Her mouth twists. “As if that makes it less insane.”
I nod once. “A car?”
“Yes, but we couldn’t catch the plates in the footage.”
“We’re going to get them anyway,” I say. “My men are already on it. But could you see who actually took them?”
She hesitates, and something in her face changes. Not grief this time. Something worse.
“Yes,” she says quietly. “One of them was the same guard who stopped me yesterday.”
My body goes still.
For a second I don’t say anything.
I can actually feel the fear move through me, cold and immediate. I look back at the front door of the house and then at her again. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
That one word is enough.
I drag a hand over my mouth and feel the old instinct rise hard in me, the one that says move now, hit first, tear the whole place apart until I know exactly how close Andrei’s gotten and who opened the gate for him.
And for the first time in a long time, the thought doesn’t make me angry first.
It makes me afraid. Not for me. For her. For Nikolai and Sofia.
For my children.
It hurts to breathe. I open the passenger door. “Get in.”
She catches my wrist before I can step away. “There’s something else.”
I look at her.
“My father told me what happened in Moscow.”
I stare at her for one beat too long.
Not because I care more about Moscow than the twins. Because suddenly both things are sitting in the same room with us. The old wound and the new one, my past and present colliding, my actions come to haunt me again.
“What did he say?”
Her face hardens through the tears. “That he passed the information. That he started it. That he let the blame fall on you.”
I look back at the house and start toward the steps.
She grabs me with both hands. “No. Roman, please.” Her grip tightens. “Please. Not now. I need my children.”
I look at her. Really look at her.
She’s terrified, shaking, barely holding herself upright, and still she’s the one stopping me from walking back into that house and doing exactly what every instinct in me wants.
Because she knows what I know now too—if I go in there for Sergei, I lose time. And right now, time belongs to the twins.
I force myself to breathe.
Then I turn away from the house.
“All right,” I say.
She closes her eyes for half a second in relief.
I help her into the car, go around to the driver’s side, and get behind the wheel.
When I start the engine, my hands are steady. That means nothing. Inside I’m already breaking. I just found my children, and I’m already close to losing them again.
For the next thirty-six hours, I turn the city inside out.
There is no other way to describe it.
Every warehouse, every dock office, every old route my father ever used and every newer one his men might have borrowed gets hit.
I send men into clubs, garages, marina slips, private rooms over restaurants, empty apartments held under false names, storage units that smell like oil and old paper.
I shake loose drivers, cash couriers, two brokers who thought changing phones would save them, and one customs man who starts crying before Mikhail even sits down.
Nothing.
Not nothing, exactly. Pieces. Enough pieces to keep the pressure moving.
A sighting in Red Hook that turns into a dead end.
A stolen car found abandoned near the river with wiped handles and children’s biscuit crumbs on the back seat.
A woman in Brighton who swears she heard one of Andrei’s old names spoken in the wrong bar at the wrong hour.
A church caretaker who remembers a black SUV idling too long outside a side gate.
Pieces.
Never the children.
That’s the part that starts eating through me.
I stop sleeping after the first night. Mikhail stops suggesting it after the second time I look at him like he’s lost his mind.
Coffee stops helping. Food becomes something people push in front of me and take away untouched.
My whole world narrows into maps, names, phones, routes, and the image of two children in the back of a moving car somewhere in the city while my father sits hidden and decides how much of me he wants to carve off before he’s done.
Katerina stays close.
Not in the way I would want under any other circumstances.
Twice I find her in the safe apartment kitchen in the middle of the night, one hand pressed to the counter, eyes closed, breathing carefully as if grief can be managed if you divide it into smaller portions.
I never tell her it won’t work.
She already knows.
By the third morning, the whole city feels like a net I’m pulling through water with nothing in it but mud and broken glass.
Mikhail meets me in the warehouse office with another stack of reports and the expression of a man who would prefer better news but has long since stopped expecting it.
“Savchenko’s place was empty,” he says. “I’m afraid we’re running out of leads.”
Mikhail says, “We may need to think smaller.”
I laugh once under my breath. There is nothing funny in it. “They took my children, and you want smaller.”
“Not what I meant,” Mikhail says. “He might have taken the children out of the city for all we know.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “My father wants to taunt me.”
My father was never sentimental in the ordinary sense, but he was vain. Men like him mistake old claims for permanence. If he thinks those children matter to me enough to make me irrational, then he also thinks he can predict what I’ll do.
Unknown number.
I almost ignore it.
Then another message comes in immediately after the first.
A waterfront property in Staten Island I know by sight before I even look it up properly. One of my father’s old holding places. Not important enough for family. Too expensive for ordinary storage. Built for meetings no one wanted remembered.
I go cold all over.
Mikhail sees it happen. “What?”
I hand him the phone.
He reads the address, and his face changes too.
“That’s him,” I say.
Not because I have proof. Because I know.
The simplicity of it gives him away. No negotiation. No ransom. No attempt to sound like anyone else. Just an address and the confidence that I will understand what it means.
Mikhail looks at me for a long moment. “It’s a trap.”
“Yes.”
He says it again, more firmly this time. “Roman, it’s a trap.”
I take the phone back.
The message sits there on the screen like an invitation to my own funeral.
Maybe it is. I don’t care.
“If he wanted them dead,” I say, “he wouldn’t send me anything.”
“That doesn’t mean he wants them safe.”
No. It doesn’t. It means he wants me there.
The room has gone very quiet now. Even the men at the far end of the office have stopped pretending not to listen.
Mikhail steps closer and lowers his voice. “Let me go in first.”
“No.”
“Then let me send a team in first.”
“No.”
“Roman.”
I look at him.
He knows better than most people what that address means. Not the building itself. The message under it. My father has stopped moving through shadows and started drawing lines. He wants me to come. He wants me to know he wants it.
That alone is enough to make this personal in a way Mikhail can’t fix with tactics.
He tries anyway.
“We can box the property,” he says. “Watch for movement. Sweep the perimeter. If the children are there, we do this right. If they aren’t, we still keep you breathing.”
Every word is reasonable. Every word is useless.
Because if my father sent that address, then he’s not inviting my men.
He’s inviting me.
Maybe he thinks I’ll walk in blinded by anger.
Maybe he’s right. I pick up my coat.
Mikhail says, “Don’t do this like him.”
That stops me for half a second. But it’s not enough.
I look at him and say, “I have to go.”
He stares at me. Angry now. “You don’t have to walk into his hands alone.”
“If the children are there, yes, I do.”
“And if they’re not?”
I put the phone in my pocket. “Then I still do.”
For one second, I think he’s going to argue again. Then he sees something in my face and lets the argument die because he knows me well enough to understand the line between persuasion and delay.
“Fine,” he says. “So then you’re not going without support.”
“I’m going in first,” I say. “Stay here, with Katerina. Protect her.”
“But—” he starts to protest.
“Just listen to me,” I say. He nods reluctantly.
Just as I’m about to leave, Katerina appears outside my study. She must have read it in my face before I even say a word.
“What happened? Where are you going?”
I stop. For one stupid second, I wish I could lie to her. Then I say, “He sent an address.”
She goes white. “Andrei?”
I nod, shamefully. It’s all because of me. She doesn’t have to say it, I know it.
“He has the children?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out at first. “You think it’s him.”
“Yes.”
She takes one step toward me. “Then I’m coming.”
“No.”
“I’m not asking.”
I cross the space between us before she can say anything else and catch both her shoulders.
“No,” I say again, lower now, because shouting won’t help.
“If they’re there, I’ll bring them back to you.
If it goes wrong, I need you alive and out of his reach.
I will not walk into my father with you in the room. ”
She stares at me, furious and terrified and close enough to breaking that I can feel it in the way she’s holding herself upright.
For one second, I think she’s going to fight me anyway.
Then she says, “Bring them back.”
The words almost undo me.
I lean down and press my forehead to hers, just for a breath. “I will.”
Then I let her go before I can say anything softer or more dangerous than that, and walk toward the waiting cars with my father’s address in my pocket and the old, poisonous certainty moving through me that whatever happens next, it was always going to end this way.