Chapter 7 Pyotr
Pyotr
The sound of small feet padding down the hallway wakes me before my alarm.
I’m reaching for the knife under my pillow as I realize the footsteps are too light and uneven to be a threat. Kira. I secure and release the weapon, roll over, and push myself up against the headboard as my door creaks open.
“Pyotr?” Her voice is the kind of comical stage whisper children use when they’re trying to be quiet. “Are you awake?”
“I am now.”
She takes this as an invitation and slips through the gap. Her new shoes are conspicuously absent, replaced by fuzzy socks with dinosaurs on them. Her dark hair is sticking up in every direction.
“Mama’s in the shower.” She climbs onto my bed without asking permission. “I need someone to braid my hair for school. Mama usually does it, but she takes forever in the shower. I don’t want to be late, because Masha is bringing cupcakes today. If I’m late, I might not get one.”
The logic is flawless in the way only a five-year-old’s can be.
“I don’t know how to braid hair,” I tell her.
“It’s easy. I’ll teach you.” She produces a hairbrush from her little pocket and deposits herself in my lap. “You do three pieces and cross them over each other. Mama showed me, but my arms aren’t long enough to reach the back of my head.”
She holds out the brush and waits.
I should tell her no. I should send her back to her room to wait for her mother. I should maintain the professional distance that’s already eroding faster than I can rebuild it.
Instead, I take the brush.
Her hair is tangled from sleep. I work through the knots as gently as I can manage with hands better suited to breaking things than fixing them. She chatters the entire time about cupcakes and Masha and whether velociraptors could beat a T. Rex in a fight.
“Velociraptors are smaller,” she explains, “but they’re really smart, and they hunt in groups. So maybe if there were like ten of them, they could win.”
“Ten seems like a lot.”
“That’s what I said! But Grisha said it would only take five.” She shakes her head and clicks her tongue. “I think he’s wrong.”
I separate her hair into three sections and try to remember if I’ve ever seen anyone braid. My mother died when I was young, and there weren’t exactly styling tutorials in the military.
“You have to cross the outside one over the middle,” Kira instructs. “Then do the other side.”
I follow her directions and fumble through the process while she patiently corrects my mistakes. The braid we end up with is lumpy and uneven, nothing like the neat plaits I’ve seen Daria create. But Kira twists to examine it in the mirror on my dresser and beams like I’ve given her a crown.
“It’s perfect,” she declares.
The pride in her voice makes something warm behind my ribs.
She turns around and looks up at me with beaming blue eyes. So trusting. So certain that I won’t hurt her.
Lana looked at me like that.
The memory surfaces before I can stop it. Eight years old with dark braids and a gap-toothed smile. She held my hand through three days of hell in Syria. She trusted me to keep her safe and get her back to her father.
I promised her she’d see him again. I promised her everything would be okay.
In the end, it turned out anything but.
“Pyotr?” Kira’s voice yanks me back to the present. “Are you okay? You look sad.”
I blink hard and shake my head. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? Because Mama gets sad sometimes, and she says she’s fine, too, but I can tell she’s not.”
“Your mama just doesn’t want you to worry.”
“I know.” Kira scrambles off my lap and retrieves her hairbrush. “Thank you for braiding my hair. You did a really good job for your first time.”
She’s out the door before I can reply, leaving me with ghosts I thought I’d buried years ago.
I sit on the edge of the bed and rub my palms against my eyes until the memories fade. Lana is gone, and nothing I do will bring her back. But Kira is here, and she’s unaware of the danger surrounding her mother.
I decide right at that moment that no one will touch this child or her mother.
I make the vow silently, knowing full well it contradicts every reason I’m here. I’m supposed to be investigating Daria, not protecting her. Gathering evidence of her guilt, not planning ways to keep her safe.
But some promises matter more than orders.
***
Daria leaves for the grocery store around eleven, after Kira has been safely dropped off at school.
I wait two minutes after she exits the building, then trail her at a distance in my car as she makes her way through the gray St. Petersburg streets. She walks quickly with her head down and her shoulders hunched against the cold. Not once does she look back.
Either she’s not expecting to be followed, or she’s past the point of caring.
The grocery store is a modest place a few blocks from the apartment. I position myself near the entrance and watch through the window as she grabs a basket. She disappears into the produce section, and I keep my eyes on her through the glass.
Everything looks normal for a few minutes. She examines vegetables and checks her list twice before adding anything to the basket. She moves through the aisles like a woman who’s done this a thousand times.
Then, a man in a dark coat approaches her near the apples. He’s well-dressed and in his mid-thirties. He looks normal enough, but something about him sets off alarms in my head. Maybe it’s the way his eyes stay locked on her back.
I pull out my phone and snap a few photos through the glass before he reaches her.
Daria freezes the second she sees him.
The man grabs her arm. His fingers dig into her biceps, hard enough that the fabric of her coat bunches beneath his grip. Even from this distance, I see her go pale. But she doesn’t pull away or call for help. She stands there while he leans in to speak directly into her ear.
I’m through the door before I make a conscious decision to move.
The store is small enough that I reach them in seconds. The man is still talking with his hand locked around her arm when I close my fingers around his wrist.
I squeeze, not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to make my point.
He looks up at me, and whatever he sees in my face makes his lose color.
He releases Daria’s arm before I say a word. I hold his wrist for another moment to let him feel how much damage I could do if I wanted to.
“Walk away,” I growl.
The man doesn’t glance at Daria before he turns and rushes toward the exit.
I watch him leave before turning to Daria. She’s still frozen in place. Her basket dangles from nerveless fingers, and her face is the color of old snow.
“We’re leaving,” I tell her.
Instead of arguing, she sets down the basket and follows me out of the store, leaving behind the items she came to buy.
The walk to the car is silent. Daria keeps her eyes fixed on the ground, and I don’t push her to talk. Whatever happened, she’s not ready to explain it. The trembling in her hands tells me everything I need to know about how afraid she is.
Once we’re inside the vehicle, she finally speaks. “That was nobody.”
“That wasn’t nobody.”
“It was just someone I used to know.” She stares straight ahead through the windshield. “He surprised me, that’s all.”
“He grabbed you.”
“He was trying to get my attention.”
I start the engine but don’t pull away from the curb. “People don’t freeze like that when an old friend surprises them. They don’t stop breathing.”
“I was startled.”
“You were terrified.”
She doesn’t respond. I glance over and find her staring out the window with her jaw set in a stubborn line.
“Who was he, Daria?”
“I told you. Nobody.”
“If he’s connected to the investigation—”
“He’s not connected to anything. Drop it, Pyotr.”
I could push harder, demanding answers or threatening to tell Dmitri about the incident. I could use every tool at my disposal to break down her walls.
But I remember the way she looked when that man grabbed her. She froze like a rabbit caught in a snare.
Whoever he is, he has real power over her. The kind that comes from knowing someone’s secrets. The kind that comes from years of control.
I think about the bruises on her arms and the finger-shaped marks on her skin.
“Fine,” I tell her. “We’ll drop it. For now.”
She exhales but doesn’t thank me.
Back at the apartment, she disappears into her bedroom and closes the door. I hear the lock click into place.
In the living room, I pull out my phone and scroll through the photos I took outside the grocery store. The man’s face is clear in one of them, and looking at it fills me with rage.
I send the image to Tony with a message.
Need an ID on this man. Connected to Daria Kozlov. Priority.
His response comes within minutes.
On it. Give me a few hours.
I set down the phone and fall back against the couch.
Daria is hiding something bigger than laundered money or suspicious phone calls. Someone has their hooks in her, and that someone was bold enough to grab her in broad daylight.
The pieces are forming a picture, but it’s not clear enough to understand what’s going on quite yet.
One thing I know for certain, though, is that the man wasn’t nobody.
And I will find out who he is.