Chapter 26
STEFAN
Taras shuffles into my office with the bleary, red-eyed, thousand-yard stare of a man who’s been staring at spreadsheets for too long. He’s got a thick folder in his grasp.
“Tell me you found something,” I say, setting down my pen.
“I found a whole lot of nothing.” He drops the folder on my desk. “Iakov Zakharov is the most boring criminal I’ve ever investigated.”
I flip open the folder and skim through its contents quickly.
But what I see confirms what Taras just said: there’s not shit we can use.
It’s a mish-mash of bank transaction records, city and county property deeds, business registrations with all the proper stamps and attestations.
All legitimate, all above board, all very fucking boring.
“This can’t be everything.”
“That’s what I thought. I said to myself, ‘What’s Stef gonna say if I bring him this fat stack of nada?
He’s gonna be pissed, isn’t he?’ So I dug deeper.
And deeper. And deeper. Do you see the bags under my eyes?
There’s one for every year of my life I lost squinting between the lines for one single shred of something we can weaponize against this mudak.
But you gotta believe me when I tell you this, brother: There isn’t.
The man doesn’t go to clubs. Doesn’t visit brothels.
He does not gamble, he does not use drugs, he does not have mistresses tucked away in various illicit penthouses like Princess fucking Peach. ”
Taras sinks into the chair across from me and rests his forehead on his knuckles.
“He might as well be a goddamn accountant. He owns an apartment in Back Bay with a fucking HOA, if you can believe that. Drives a Mercedes, not a Lambo. Goes to work, goes to business meetings, goes home. God, I want to put a bullet in my head just imagining what it would be like to live his day-to-day life.”
“What about his social life?”
“What social life?” scoffs Taras. “The man’s a ghost. Parties? Dinners? Galas? No, no, and no. None of the above. He shows up for business when he has to and that’s it.”
I shut the folder with a pained grimace. “This is too clean,” I say. “Nobody’s this clean. Mother Teresa isn’t this clean.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. Either he’s the world’s most disciplined criminal, or...”
“Or he’s hiding something bigger.”
I lean back in my chair and brood. Iakov’s father Mikhail was a drunk and a gambler, weak and easily manipulated. But the son... the son learned from his father’s mistakes. He’s built himself into something else entirely. Something harder to crack.
That’s a problem.
“Every man has a weakness,” I muse. “If we find his, we’ll be able to use it as a bargaining chip.”
Taras snorts. “Short of following him night and day, I’m not sure what else to do. And before you say it, I’ve already had guys on him for a week. This is all they got.”
“Then we need better guys.”
“Stefan, please don’t say what I think you’re gonna—”
“You’ll do it yourself. Follow him. Learn his patterns. Find the chink in his armor.”
Taras’s face falls. “You’re kidding.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
“I’m your second-in-command, not a bomb-sniffing dog, bro.”
“You’re whatever I need you to be.” I close the folder. “Start tomorrow. I want to know everything. When he takes a piss, what brand of coffee he drinks, who cuts his hair. Everything.”
“This is beneath me.”
“Nothing is beneath you if I ask you to do it.”
He glares at me but doesn’t argue further. He knows better. “Fine,” he mutters. “But you owe me. Big time.”
“I’ll buy you a new car.”
“I don’t want a new car. I want a vacation. Somewhere warm with beaches and curvy women with loose morals who don’t know my name.”
“After we deal with Iakov and my mother, I’ll buy you a ticket to anywhere in the world you want.”
“That could be months,” he protests.
“Then you better find something on him quickly.”
Before Taras can complain more, the door opens. Arkady walks in, and immediately, I know something’s wrong. His face is pale, his usual swagger replaced by nervous energy.
“Boss,” he says, his voice tight. “We need to talk.”
“What is it?”
He glances at Taras, then back at me. “It’s about that house. The one where your mother was spotted.”
I sit up straighter. “What about it?”
“I did the background check like you asked. Deep dive into ownership, history, everything.” He sets a folder on my desk, thinner than Taras’s but somehow heavier. “The house was owned by a woman named Vera Vladislav.”
“And?”
“When she died, she left the property to her two daughters.” He opens the folder, pulls out a photograph. “And I found their names. Mila and Mikayla.”
Suddenly, the rest of the world fades into irrelevance. “Did you say Mikayla?”
Arkady nods, his face grim. He pulls out another photograph, this one older, grainier. Two teenage girls standing in front of a house—the same house where my mother was hiding. “This was hard to find. Someone worked real hard to bury it.”
I study the photo. Two girls, maybe fourteen and sixteen. Sisters, clearly. Same dark hair, same sharp features. The younger one...
“That’s her,” I say, pointing at the younger girl. “That’s our Mikayla. Mikayla Santos.”
But Arkady shakes his head. “According to all the records I found, including the original birth certificate I managed to get my hands on, that isn’t Mikayla. That’s Mila.” He taps the older sister’s picture. “That is Mikayla Vladislav.”
The office goes silent. I can hear my own heartbeat, loud and fast.
“She took her sister’s name,” Taras infers slowly. “Why would she do that?”
I have a better question. “Where’s the real Mikayla?” I ask, though I already suspect the answer.
Arkady shakes his head. “No one knows. She disappeared. No death certificate, no missing person report, nothing. She just vanished.”
“When?”
The pause before he answers tells me everything. “Around the same time we buried your mother and uncle.”
The pieces click into place with sickening clarity. The woman I’ve trusted for eight years, the woman who’s been by my side through everything, isn’t who she claimed to be. She’s been lying since the day we met.
My hands curl into fists. All this time. All these years. Mikayla—Mila—I don’t even fucking know—has been playing a game I didn’t even know we were in.
“She knew my mother was alive,” I say. “She’s known this whole time.”
“It’s worse than that,” Arkady says. “If she’s been in contact with your mother, if they’ve been planning this together...”
“Then everything she’s done has been part of the plan. From the very fucking start.” I think about all the times Mikayla had access to sensitive information. All the operations she knew about. All the secrets I trusted her with.
“Stef,” Taras says carefully, “we need to be smart about this. If she realizes we know—”
“She’s in the basement,” I say. “She can’t realize anything. We just need to make her talk.”
“She won’t,” Taras warns. “You’ve tried. I’ve tried. She’s not giving up anything.”
“Then we need to try harder.” I grab my keys and my phone and stand up. “Time to pay Mila one more visit.”