Chapter 3
ROMAN
I reach for her before I’m fully awake.
My hand finds cold sheets, and that is what opens my eyes.
The room is gray with early light that arrives before the city has properly committed to morning, and the bed beside me is empty in the way that tells me it has been empty for some time.
No warmth. No sound from the bathroom. No movement anywhere in the room at all.
I lie still for a moment, look at the ceiling, and do something I almost never do.
Nothing.
She is gone. The only evidence that anyone shared this room with me is the faint depression in the pillow beside mine.
I stand at the bathroom sink and look at my own reflection while the water runs hot and think about a woman who gave me a first name and nothing else, and then disappeared before the light changed.
Lena.
I turn the name over once. Then I step into the shower and put it away, because I am a man with a full day ahead of him and I have never had any patience for mornings spent in my own head.
I dress without rushing. Dark trousers, a blue shirt, no tie. I have a car in forty minutes and a schedule that doesn’t care what happened the night before. I sit on the edge of the bed to put my shoes on and notice, without meaning to, exactly how far the cold has spread across the sheets.
She has been gone a long time.
I put my shoes on and go downstairs.
The estate is already in full motion. The cleaning crew arrived at seven, and they move through the ballroom and the main reception rooms with quiet, heads-down efficiency.
I pass two men rolling up the temporary dance floor in long sections, working from opposite ends toward the middle without speaking.
In the ballroom itself, round tables are being broken down and stacked, the white linens pulled and folded with the mechanical speed of people paid by the hour.
The floral arrangements, elaborate things that cost more than I remembered approving, are being disassembled and boxed by a woman who seems personally offended by the waste of it.
Out on the terrace, someone is moving along the railing, collecting champagne flutes two at a time, setting them into a plastic crate with small, precise clicks.
Three hundred people moved through this house last night. By noon, there will be no evidence of any of them.
I stand at the bottom of the staircase for a moment and watch it all happen, and then Kostya appears from the direction of the kitchen.
He is carrying two cups of coffee and a leather folder and wearing the expression I have learned over eleven years. This morning it sits at a moderate level of concern.
“You slept,” he says, handing me a cup.
“Don’t make it strange.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
He says nothing, which is confirmation enough. We take breakfast in the small dining room off the main hall, away from the activity.
Someone from the kitchen has left a spread on the sideboard, eggs and bread and fruit, and I take a plate and sit and go through my phone while Kostya settles across from me with his coffee and his folder and the patience of a man who has learned that I will engage when I am ready and not a moment before.
My phone has seventeen unread messages. Twelve of them are things I can deal with in the car. Three are things Kostya already knows about and has prepared materials for. Two are from council members I have no interest in speaking to before I have finished my breakfast.
What my phone does not have is a morning summary from Elena.
She sends it every day without exception. Confirmed appointments, flagged correspondence, anything in my schedule that has shifted overnight. It arrives between eight and eight fifteen.
It is eight forty-nine.
I look at the blank space in my inbox for a moment, then I call her.
It rings twice. Two full rings, which is one more than usual.
“Mr. Petrov.” Her voice is even. Composed. There’s something underneath it that is so faint I would not catch it if I were not already paying attention. A slight breathlessness, like she has just stopped moving very quickly.
“It’s nearly nine,” I say.
A short pause. “I know. I apologize, I was going to send the summary before—”
“Where is it.”
“I’ll have everything to you within the hour. I can be at the office by—”
“The car will be outside your building in forty minutes.” I pick up my coffee. “Be ready.”
Another pause. Shorter this time. “Forty minutes. Yes. Of course.”
I end the call and set my phone face down on the table.
Kostya is looking at me.
“Marchetti,” I say. “Start there.”
He opens his folder. “Their activity in Red Hook has accelerated significantly over the last three weeks. We logged three separate incursions into territory they have no historical claim to. Two were managed quietly. The third was not.” He turns a page.
“The pattern is not opportunistic, Roman. They’re not probing for weakness.
They know exactly where our rotation gaps are, and they are moving into them with precision. ”
“Someone is feeding them information.”
“Yes. And not old information. What they are acting on is current. Updated. Someone with access to operational scheduling is in contact with them now, actively, and has been for at least a month.”
I set my cup down. The particular coldness that comes over me when something inside my organization is broken is not anger.
It is something quieter and considerably more dangerous than anger.
I have built what I have built on the understanding that loyalty is not a sentiment.
It is a structure. When it fails, it does not fail quietly.
“Pull the rotation logs,” I say. “Sixty days. I want every name with scheduling access cross-referenced against known Volkov associates. Anyone with so much as a social connection.”
“Already running.” He turns another page. “Which is a natural point to move to the council.”
“Of course it is.”
He doesn’t smile. Kostya almost never smiles during briefings.
“They have formalized the Volkov directive. Grigori had language entered into the last session minutes. You are expected to initiate the alliance arrangement within the quarter. It is no longer a recommendation, Roman. They have put a deadline on it in writing.”
I lean back in my chair and look at him.
The Volkov arrangement means a marriage. It means Grigori’s daughter, or whichever female relative he has decided represents the best political currency, becomes my wife in exchange for his faction’s consolidated support behind my position on the council.
It’s a transaction wearing the clothes of tradition, and I have been managing the pressure around it for four months through a combination of genuine busyness, strategic unavailability, and deliberate vagueness that powerful men use when they want to say no without yet saying no.
The quarter ends in eleven weeks.
“Tell them I received the message,” I say.
Kostya writes something in the margin of his notes. He does not look up when he says, very evenly, “And the woman from last night.”
I look at him.
He looks back at me with an expression of complete professional neutrality.
“Stay out of it,” I say.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“Good. Keep not saying anything.”
He closes his folder and drinks his coffee, and the silence he produces is technically empty and somehow extremely full. I have known this man since before either of us was who we are now, and his restraint, when he exercises it, is one of the loudest things about him.
I look out the window at the terrace. The last of the champagne flutes are gone. The railing is clean. Three hundred people were here last night, and the house is eating the evidence of them one hour at a time.
Her voice on the phone. That slight catch underneath the composure, there and gone so fast I almost decided I imagined it. The two rings instead of one. The of course at the end, quiet and quick, like she was already moving before I finished the sentence.
I turn it over once without meaning to, then put it away with the rest.
“Have the car ready,” I say, standing. “We’re picking up Elena on the way in.”
Kostya makes a note. “Of course.”
I take my coffee and walk out of the dining room and into the rest of the morning, and I am almost entirely focused on what is in front of me.
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