Chapter 9 Pyotr
Pyotr
Day ten starts like any other morning in this apartment.
Kira insists on showing me her collection of dinosaur drawings before school, and I spend fifteen minutes examining each one with the seriousness she’s come to expect.
Daria watches from the kitchen doorway with a cup of tea in her hands. When it’s time to leave, Kira hugs my leg and makes me promise to be here when she gets back.
I promise. It’s getting harder to remember that I shouldn’t.
Once they’re gone, the apartment falls silent. I stand at the window and watch Daria and Kira disappear around the corner, two small figures bundled against the cold. Kira’s new shoes leave prints in the fresh snow. She’s walking properly now, not shuffling to keep broken soles from flapping.
I wait until they’re out of sight before I turn away from the glass.
I’ve been putting off a second thorough search of Daria’s bedroom. Part of me claimed it was about respecting her privacy and not crossing lines that didn’t need crossing. But that was a lie I told myself to avoid the truth.
I didn’t want to find anything.
But Dmitri needs answers, and my time is running out. I can’t protect her from what’s coming if I don’t know the full picture.
I cross the apartment and push open her bedroom door.
The room is small and neat, like everything else in this place.
Her bed is made with military corners, and the pillows are arranged just so.
A small dresser holds a jewelry box and a framed baby photo of Kira.
The closet door is closed, and a romance novel sits on the nightstand beside a half-empty glass of water.
I start with the dresser.
The top drawers hold what I expect. Socks, paired and folded. Shirts arranged by color. Nothing hidden between the layers, and nothing taped to the undersides. I move methodically through each drawer, checking each corner and seam.
I stop cold when I reach the bottom drawer.
My fingers brush something hard and rectangular beneath a pile of lace and cotton. I pull it out and stare at the object in my hand.
A burner phone.
The screen is cracked in one corner, and the case is scuffed from use. Someone’s been using this phone for a while, which is odd, because it wasn’t here when I arrived ten days ago. Maybe she’d had it on her.
I power it on and wait for it to boot up with my heart beating a little harder than normal. The call history shows only one contact, a blocked number. Daria’s personal phone goes off with a blocked number constantly, and every time, her face goes white.
I photograph the screen and keep digging.
The closet yields secrets, too. I discover a stack of bills behind her winter coats, shoved into the far corner. Brand new. Sequential serial numbers. Everything about it screams dirty money to anyone who knows what to look for.
I count it twice. There’s enough to live on for months if she stretched it.
Not only was this also not here during my initial search, but I have a hard time believing Daria let her daughter walk through the snow with holes in her shoes while this money sat untouched in her closet.
That doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense.
But I photograph the bills and move on.
A ledger page is tucked inside the romance novel on her nightstand.
Smart hiding spot. No one searching would think to flip through a paperback with a shirtless man on the cover.
The page contains a list of account numbers, and I recognize three from Dmitri’s file.
Flagged accounts. The ones with Daria’s name attached.
I photograph that, too, and stand in the middle of her bedroom, trying to piece together what I’ve found.
The evidence is damning. If I report this to Dmitri, Daria’s fate is sealed.
But something feels wrong.
I’ve been doing this work for years. I know what planted evidence looks like. Real evidence is messy and hidden in places that make sense to the person hiding it. Scattered across multiple locations because criminals rarely keep everything in one place.
This is too neat. It’s everything an investigator would need to condemn her, gathered and gift-wrapped in her bedroom.
Someone wanted this found.
I sit on the edge of her bed and turn the burner phone over in my hands. The call history nags at me. Incoming calls only. Daria never dialed out from this phone.
If she was coordinating with conspirators, she’d need to contact them. She’d need to send information, ask questions, and confirm plans. But nothing is outgoing, just incoming call after call from the same blocked number.
I check the GPS history next, and my stomach drops further.
The phone was activated three years ago in Moscow, the same month Daria fled to St. Petersburg with her daughter. Someone gave her this phone right before she ran. Someone who wanted to be able to reach her no matter where she went or how well she hid.
The pieces are falling together in my mind. The blocked calls that terrify her. The man at the grocery store who grabbed her arm like he owned her. The bruises I saw on her skin. The way she flinches at sudden movements and checks locks until her hands shake.
Daria isn’t running an operation; she’s trapped in one.
But I can’t prove that yet. If I’m wrong, and I let my instincts override the evidence and she really is guilty, I’ll have helped a traitor escape justice.
I’ve made that mistake before. The cost was everything.
Syria had taught me that lesson in blood.
The mission briefing painted a clean picture: Extract a diplomat’s family from hostile territory. We had good intelligence and solid support—a team I would have died for without question. Everything looked perfect on paper.
But the intelligence was wrong. It wasn’t just incomplete but intentionally falsified.
Someone sold us out and fed us information designed to walk us straight into a kill zone.
Half my team died in the first thirty seconds of the ambush.
I grabbed the diplomat’s daughter and ran while the world exploded around us.
We survived three days in bombed-out buildings, moving at night and hiding during the day. Lana was eight years old and scared out of her mind, but brave in a way most adults never manage. She held my hand through the darkness and believed me when I told her we’d make it home.
After Syria, I stopped trusting anything that looked too perfect, like clean evidence, simple answers, and neat packages tied with bows. Perfection is almost always a lie, and the truth hides in the mess.
Daria’s evidence is too perfect, which means someone constructed it. Someone who wants her to look guilty.
I need to find out who.
I put everything back where I found it. The phone beneath the lace, the cash behind the coats, and the ledger page inside the romance novel. If someone is watching, and if they planted this evidence and are waiting to see what happens, I don’t want them to know I’ve found it.
Let them think their trap is still set. Let them get comfortable while I work.
I pull out my phone and message Tony.
Need everything on Bogdan Lebedev. Ex-husband of Daria Kozlov. Associates, business dealings, current location. Full workup. Priority.
His response comes within minutes.
Already on it.
Bogdan’s man grabbed Daria in public like he had every right to touch her. Bogdan’s man has been calling her from a blocked number for three years. Bogdan gave her a phone the same month she fled Moscow.
This isn’t about money laundering; this is about control.
The front door opens, and I quickly pocket my phone. Daria’s voice carries through the apartment, slightly out of breath. “Kira, grab your permission slip from the table. Quickly, malyshka, or we’ll be late.”
“I know, I know!” Small footsteps thunder down the hallway, and Kira appears in the kitchen.
She grabs a piece of paper from the counter, then spots me standing near the living room.
Her face breaks into a grin. “Pyotr! Mama forgot to sign my permission slip, so we had to come back. We’re going to the museum next week to see dinosaur bones! ”
“That sounds exciting.”
“It’s going to be amazing. They have a real T. Rex skeleton. A real one!” She bounces on her heels while Daria signs the paper. “Oh! I almost forgot!”
She digs into her backpack and produces a crumpled piece of paper, which she thrusts toward me with both hands.
“I remembered I made this yesterday at school. I was going to give it to you when I got home, but now you can have it early!”
I take the paper and smooth it out. Three figures stand in front of a house, holding hands. A small one in the middle with dark hair, a taller one beside her, and a third figure, the tallest of all, with what appears to be scars drawn on his hands.
“That’s me,” Kira explains, pointing. “And that’s Mama. And that’s you!”
My throat goes tight.
“You drew me?”
“Of course! You live with us now.” She says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “That makes you family.”
I crouch to her level and study the drawing more carefully. The house has a crooked chimney, and the sun is a yellow blob with uneven rays.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in years.
“I love it,” I tell her. “Thank you, Kira.”
She beams at me, then Daria’s hand lands on her shoulder.
“We need to go, malyshka. Say goodbye to Pyotr.”
“Bye, Pyotr!”
She races toward the door, and Daria follows. But she pauses in the doorway and glances back at me, her eyes dropping to the drawing still clutched in my hands.
“She’s getting attached,” she comments.
“I know.”
“You’re not staying forever.”
“No. No, I’m not.”
“Neither am I,” she whispers, so softly that I almost miss it.
Then she’s gone, and I stand in the empty apartment and stare at the drawing in my hands. Three figures. A family. The word bounces around inside my head alongside Daria’s parting words.
She’s planning to run. She has been all along.
She’s not a traitor, she’s a prisoner trying to find a way out. I was too blinded by her maternal side to see it.