30. Dmitri
Dmitri
I’m on my third call about port delays when Katya kicks open my office door like she’s conducting a fucking raid.
“We need to talk. Now.”
The folder in my hands drops to the desk as I take in her posture. Gone is the confused woman who’s been tiptoeing around me for weeks.
This version stands in my doorway with her feet planted and her arms crossed, radiating the kind of rage that makes smart men very nervous.
“Good morning to you, too. Everything alright?”
“Cut the bullshit, Dmitri. I know who I am.”
My blood turns to ice water. The carefully constructed world I’ve built around her recovery starts crumbling before she even takes another step into my office.
“What do you mean?”
“I remember everything. Every goddamn detail about why I’m really here.” She walks closer to my desk, and I notice she’s moving differently. Not like the uncertain woman I’ve been protecting, but like someone who knows how dangerous she is.
“Katya—”
She stops in front of my desk and plants her palms on the surface, leaning forward. “My name is Agent Katya Sidorov, FSB domestic operations. And you’ve been lying to me for weeks.”
There it is.
The moment I’ve been dreading since I pulled her from that hospital bed.
The words punch through me like a knife between the ribs. Everything I’ve built, every moment of happiness I’ve stolen, and every lie I’ve told myself about this somehow working out collapses in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
She knows.
“How long have you known?”
“A few days. Maybe longer.” She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a small stack of folded papers. “But these made it impossible to keep pretending I didn’t understand what was happening.”
“What are those?”
“Legal documents giving my handlers authority to make decisions about my future. Including decisions about testifying against you.” She throws the papers on my desk. “Someone made it very clear that my cooperation is no longer optional.”
I gather the papers and flip through them. “Where did you get these?”
She doesn’t answer, just stares at me with those blue eyes that used to look at me with trust instead of fury.
“I decided to hear your side of the story before I make any decisions about what happens next.” She crosses her arms again. “Because despite everything, I deserve to know the truth from you instead of finding out during a government debriefing.”
I sink back into my chest as every speck of air leaves my lungs. The fact that she came to me first, and that she’s giving me the chance to explain before her handlers drag her away and turn her against me is more than I deserve. More than I had any right to hope for.
She could have just disappeared in the night, called her extraction team, and been gone before the arrest happened.
Instead, she’s standing here demanding answers, giving me one last opportunity to tell my side before everything goes to hell and warning me in the process.
It’s either mercy or cruelty; I’m not sure which.
“It wasn’t kidnapping,” I try to lie. “You were injured in an explosion. I took care of you.”
She jabs a finger against the wooden surface and says, “You took advantage of my memory loss to create a fictional identity. You made me believe I loved you when I was actually here to investigate your organization.”
“The feelings between us aren’t fictional.”
“Don’t. I remember now why I was at that gallery. I remember my mission parameters and my handler’s instructions. I remember everything about Operation Nightfall.”
Operation Nightfall. The FSB’s attempt to infiltrate and destroy my organization from the inside. The mission that was supposed to end with my arrest and the dismantling of everything my family built.
“And what do you remember about that operation?”
“That I spent a year getting close to you. That I was supposed to gather intelligence about your financial operations, your personnel structure, and your territory agreements. That I was supposed to seduce you and make you trust me enough to reveal information that would destroy you.”
My stomach drops. She was ordered to seduce me? That doesn’t make any sense. She never acted interested in me. Sure, we had some innocent flirtation, but she never crossed that line.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I’m not a whore. I gather intelligence, I don’t fuck targets for information.”
Her voice carries disgust at the very idea.
“I had everything my handlers wanted. A complete picture of your organization that would have brought you down, but the intelligence died with Alexandra Volkova in that hospital, didn’t it?
” She tilts her head. “You made sure of that when you picked me up at the hospital.
“All of it. Before the explosion interrupted my mission, and you erased every piece of evidence I’d collected.”
It’s true. I destroyed her equipment. I wiped her digital footprint and eliminated every trace of her identity before I brought her home.
“What do you remember about the explosion, Katya?” I ask, trying to steer the conversation away from that pointed barb.
Her confidence wavers, and she looks around the room like she’s trying to remember. “A car bomb. Someone drove into the building, and then?—”
“The Borisenko family tried to kill you. They approached me three weeks before the gallery opening with information about your real identity. Offered to ‘take care of the problem’ as a gesture of goodwill between our organizations.”
Katya pales. “What?”
“I declined their generous offer. Told them I preferred to handle my problems. Apparently let slip that I had more than a professional interest in my supposed art curator.” I lean back in my chair and add, “So they decided to eliminate the threat themselves.”
Her mouth falls open, and she gasps. “You knew? You knew who I was before the explosion?”
“I’ve known since about two weeks into your little infiltration game. Did you really think you could fool me for long?”
“Then why didn’t you kill me?” she asks.
“Killing you would have been wasteful.”
I stand up and walk around the desk until I’m close enough to see the confusion and anger warring in her eyes.
“Better to make you fall in love with me… then reveal the truth and destroy you the way you planned to destroy me.”
And there it is. No more pretense, no more carefully constructed lies. Just the brutal truth about what I planned and what actually happened.
“So, this was all revenge,” she asks, her voice cracking.
“It started as revenge,” I concede with a nod, “but somewhere along the way, it became something else.”
“Bullshit.”
“The woman I’ve been living with for the past month isn’t Agent Alexandra Volkova. She’s Katya, and she’s real, and what we have together is real.”
“What we have together is based on lies and psychological manipulation.”
“Maybe it started that way. But what I feel for you now has nothing to do with revenge or manipulation. What you feel for me?—”
“Is the result of trauma bonding and Stockholm syndrome,” she snaps. “I was vulnerable and confused, and you took advantage of that to create emotional dependence.”
The clinical way she describes our relationship feels like knives behind my sternum. She’s reducing everything we’ve shared to psychological terminology, like our connection was just another aspect of my manipulation.
“You think what happened between us was just trauma bonding?”
“I think you’re very good at making people believe what you want them to believe.”
“That’s a convenient way to dismiss what you felt. What you still feel.”
“I don’t feel anything for you except hate,” she seethes.
“Don’t dictate my feelings.”
I’m trying to sound confident, like I know that she’s trying to delude herself, but the truth is, I need it to be a lie.
I need what we felt to be real.
“Don’t.” That one word comes out as a sob that shatters my heart into pieces.
“Don’t what? Don’t remind you that you chose to stay with me even when you started questioning the story? Don’t point out that you initiated intimacy with me yesterday, knowing something was wrong with our situation?”
“I was confused and manipulated?—”
“You were falling in love with me despite your training telling you not to trust the situation. And that terrifies you more than anything I did to you.”
“You kidnapped me. You kept me prisoner. You created a false identity and made me dependent on you for everything in my life.”
“And you fell for it. More than that, you fell for me.”
“Because I didn’t know better!” she screams. “You took advantage of my vulnerability and isolation.”
Katya shakes her head like she’s trying to dislodge thoughts she doesn’t want to have. “This is what you want, isn’t it? To make me doubt my perceptions and feelings.”
“I want you to acknowledge that what happened between us was real. That it mattered. That it changed both of us.”
“It doesn’t matter if it was real. It doesn’t matter if it changed us. It was built on deception, and that poisons everything else.”
“The way you looked at me last night when we made love didn’t feel poisoned. It felt like the most honest thing either of us has experienced.”
“Stop,” she barks out.
“The way you said my name when you came apart in my arms?—”
“Stop talking.” She’s pleading now, covering her ears, and shrinking away from me.
“You chose to stay with me instead of running when you could have?—”
“I said stop!”
Katya pulls back her hand like she’s going to slap me, but catches herself at the last second. We stare at each other, both breathing hard and fighting against the electricity that’s still between us despite everything.
“You want to hit me,” I observe.
She grits her teeth and spits out, “I want to kill you.”
“But you won’t. Despite everything I’ve done, you still feel something for me that you can’t dismiss or explain away.”
Her hands snake up between us and settle on my chest, and for a moment, I think she’s going to hold me, to fall into me and give in, but instead, she shoves me backward, hauling all her weight against me until I stagger back a few steps.
“I feel betrayed. I feel violated. I feel like everything I thought I knew about myself was a lie.”
“And?”
“And nothing. That’s it.”
“That’s not it. There’s something else you feel. Something you don’t want to admit because it complicates your nice, clean narrative about being the victim of my psychological manipulation.”
“Which is?”
I reach out and grab her arm, but she digs her heels in, preventing me from bringing her any closer without hurting her, which I refuse to do. “Love. Real, genuine, inconvenient love for the man who destroyed your life and rebuilt it into something better.”
“Better?” She sputters her lips and asks, “You think this is better?”
“You were more alive with me than with them. You know it.”
“You don’t know anything about my life before this.”
“I know enough. I know you were alone, dedicated to a job that required you to lie professionally and trust no one personally. I know you’ve spent years pretending to be someone you’re not for people who see you as an expendable asset.”
Her eyes narrow to slits, and she wrenches her arm free.
“At least they never pretended to love me while they were using me.” She stalks toward the door, then stops and looks back at me.
“For what it’s worth, I did fall in love with you.
Real, genuine, inconvenient love. And that’s the part I’ll never forgive myself for. ”
She slams the door behind her, leaving me alone with the ruins of everything I thought I’d built.
She’s gone. The woman I kidnapped, manipulated, and somehow managed to love anyway is gone, and I have no idea if she’ll ever come back.
All I know is that losing her feels like dying, and I finally understand why people say revenge is a dish best served cold.
Because the meal I spent months preparing just burned down my entire fucking world.