Chapter Nine – Elena
I noticed the added heaviness and tension around the manor.
Footsteps that moved faster than usual. The specific cadence of men who were relocating rather than patrolling, covering new ground, filling gaps.
Two conversations that stopped when I came to the top of the staircase, the voices dropping to nothing in the way that indicated the conversations were resuming in my absence.
I descended the stairs and ate breakfast in the kitchen with the cook, Mariya, a quiet and kind woman who was too old to be called middle-aged and had worked for the Golovin family for twenty-two years.
She put a plate of warm bread and soft cheese in front of me with the particular deliberateness of a woman offering what comfort was available in the vocabulary she had.
I ate it slowly, forcing the anxiety that had refused to leave me to slow down.
“Thank you,” I told her when I was done. “Is there anything I could help you with?”
God knows a little manual activity would do me a lot of good.
“Oh, no, no,” she answered, shaking her head like she did the last time I asked the same question.
“He’s not going to know. Nobody will.” I gestured to the two young ladies who were kneading a large amount of flour at the far end of the kitchen. “They won’t tell anyone.”
“I know, my dear,” she agreed. “But the guards enter anytime. Even the Pakhan can find out himself if he walks past.”
I sighed in resignation. I couldn’t put her or the other kitchen staff in trouble.
*************
The phone was in the lining of the toiletry bag, in the interior zip pocket behind the travel bottles of shampoo.
I turned it on and there was a message waiting for me.
“You’ve been quiet. We need to talk.”
Below it was a number to call. Different from the last one, which was always different from the one before, the rotation systematic, designed to stay ahead of the kind of monitoring that a man like Mikhail might run on communications touching his household.
My reflection was in the bathroom mirror.
The face that looked back was the face of a woman who had been making a specific kind of terrible mistake and had understood for the last twenty-four hours exactly what that mistake had cost.
I turned the tap higher and made the call.
“There she is,” he said when he picked up, tone cold.
“I’m here,” I said.
“You’ve been quiet,” he said. “You weren’t meant to stop there. You know that.”
“I understand.”
“I need you to understand more specifically than that, Elena.” The cold that started at the base of my spine and moved upward. “You are in the best possible position. Inside the house. Inside the marriage. Closer than any of our people have gotten in three years of trying.”
“I’ll be in touch,” I said.
“Don’t make us find other ways to remind you what the alternative looks like.”
I ended the call.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub for a long time with the phone in my hands and the tap still running.
The timeline of it assembled itself the way it always did when I was too exhausted to stop it—when the defenses I maintained against the full weight of what I had been doing were insufficient, when the thing I had been keeping at managed distance arrived at close range and I had to simply receive it.
Three days after the hotel suite. Three days after I had woken up in sheets that smelled like expensive cologne and found nothing on the pillow beside me and an envelope on the counter that I hadn’t touched and hadn’t been able to throw away.
The loan sharks had been waiting at my apartment building.
Not Petrov’s men—or not only them. Someone else was with them, someone I hadn’t seen before, who had communicated what was required with the specific efficiency of someone who had done this many times and found the direct approach the most time-effective.
“You’ve made a new friend. That doesn’t erase what you owe us. It creates an opportunity,” he’d said before explaining the proposal they came with.
I had said no, telling myself that continuing to pay the debt wouldn’t be that bad. Except that that wasn’t the only thing they held over me.
It was my safety. My life, in fact.
So, I had said yes.
The first thing they had asked for was simple.
Confirmation of presence—if he was at the casino on a specific evening.
I had confirmed it. The question had already been publicly answerable from the casino’s promotional schedule, and I had told myself this, had turned it over until it was smooth, until the edges were gone and I could hold it without it cutting.
But then things progressed.
Last night had happened.
Mikhail had come home with an injury I hadn’t seen until I walked in on him shedding his shirt. The sight of the bandage had shaken something in me. Even as he tried to shrug it off and avoid my questions, I felt pain that was not physical.
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth.
The tap was still running. The water was cold now, the hot exhausted, and the bathroom was the temperature of the manor’s stone walls which was always slightly cooler than the heated rooms.
Mikhail.
He had been protecting me.
The marriage, the comprehensive security infrastructure, the timeline laid out across his desk in the careful shorthand of a man who had been working the problem since the beginning, all had been built around the singular objective of keeping me alive.
He had absorbed the cost of it. Had taken a wound for it, last night, on a road outside Las Vegas, because someone had taken the information I’d provided and used it to put men with guns on a route.
I set the burner phone on the edge of the sink, just looking at it.
The call I had just made had given them nothing specific. A confirmation that I was present, that I was functional, that I had not stopped cooperating. Nothing operational. But the calls before this one had been bricks, each small, each building something against him.
There was no version of this in which I was not responsible for what had happened last night.
I had told myself so many things. That each ask was small, that I had said no to the asks that would cause direct harm, that I had been coerced rather than recruited, that coercion was a category that changed the moral accounting.
All of that was true. The coercion was real. The fear was real. I had not wanted any of this, had not gone looking for it, had not understood in the beginning what the structure I was agreeing to enter actually was.
And last night had still happened.
I had been sitting in the category of the betrayer without his knowledge. I sat in the cold and I thought about what happened to people like me in this world.
I was going to stop.
Not just from fear of the consequences but because I couldn’t anymore. I was tired of it. It was beginning to put me in agony and I couldn’t bear it.
I picked up the burner phone.
I would not make another call on this phone. Whatever came from that, I would face when it arrived. And if Mikhail’s finding out came before their punishment, I’d take whatever came from that, too.