2. Two Steps Back
Two Steps Back
Zhenya Romanov
Iwoke up at six to a sharp, dull throb behind my left eye.
Two hours of sleep, maybe less. Most of the night had just been me staring at the ceiling, which wasn’t the same as rest, but my body refused to do anything else. I lay there for a moment before forcing myself up. Lying in bed wasn’t helping.
The penthouse was a heavy and unnatural kind of quiet.
You don’t realize how much space someone takes up until they leave it.
His shoes were gone from the door. His books he’d normally leave on the kitchen counter, gone.
Even the air felt stripped of that brief, strange sense that someone else belonged here.
I brewed a cup of coffee I had no intention of drinking and stood by the window. Outside, Moscow was already churning through its morning commute, completely indifferent to whatever had shattered inside these walls last night.
Olga arrived at seven. She took one look at me and didn’t say a word. That silence was precisely why she’d been on my payroll for seven years. She cooked a breakfast I couldn’t stomach, set it on the counter, and moved on with her work without comment.
At my desk, I opened my laptop, stared blankly at the glowing screen for a few minutes, and shut it again.
The box was still sitting on the kitchen island where I’d left it after coming out of the cinema room, the diary resting on top. I didn’t open it. I didn’t need to; I’d already read enough to burn every word into my memory.
I was still trying to process what I’d seen on those tapes.
Not the medical diagnosis, I’d spent the early hours of the morning reading up on dissociative identity disorder, digging through clinical papers and research.
I understood the medical framework well enough.
What I couldn’t reconcile with any medical textbook was the image of Nikolai at eighteen: sitting in that sterile office, malnourished and exhausted, picking at his nails and brushing it all off as “bad sleep habits.”
Or the deadpan way his voice flattened when he said, When I killed my father.
No drama or guilt. Just a dry, hollow fact he’d dragged around for so long it had worn smooth.
I needed to talk to Dr. Bozheva.
Not to discuss the condition in theory, but to understand Nikolai. What he could handle. What he couldn’t. What last night had done to him, and whether the man who walked out of my penthouse was making his own choices, or if something else entirely was pulling the strings.
Those were two very different problems. They required very different solutions.
I picked up my phone and dialed.
“Lev.”
“Sir.” He sounded as wrecked as I felt.
“Dr. Bozheva. Psychotherapy department at Lyubertsy Medical Center. Find out where she is now and set up a meeting for this afternoon. I need to ask a few questions about Nikolai.”
Silence stretched across the line. “Sir, patient confidentiality—”
“I know what confidentiality is.”
“She might not agree to—”
“Find her, Lev.”
He had her location and pictures by ten.
She’d moved into private practice, operating out of an office in the Presnensky district. The sort of high-end building designed specifically for wealthy people who valued discretion. Lev had called ahead, and as expected, she’d turned us down flat.
I went anyway.
* * *
The drive to Presnensky took twenty minutes.
I spent the first five watching the city bleed past the window before breaking the silence.
“Inessa.”
Lev’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. “Still at the facility. She hasn’t made contact with anyone since she was brought in. Awaiting your instructions.”
“Good.”
He let a beat pass. “When do you want to handle her?”
I watched a traffic light turn from green to red. “Not yet. We need to see where the pieces land first.”
He gave a brief nod and let it drop. Neither of us spoke for the rest of the trip.
The car eventually pulled up to a narrow building tucked away on a quiet street. Clean facade, high-end stone, and a small, understated brass plate beside the heavy front door.
The kind of place that cost a fortune just to look discreet.
Inside, the young receptionist made the mistake of gesturing toward the waiting area.
I ignored the chairs and slid my card across her desk. “Tell Dr. Bozheva I’m here. She’ll recognize the name.”
I walked over to the window, kept my hands in my pockets, and waited. Three minutes passed. Then five. Behind me, the receptionist made a hushed phone call she thought was out of earshot.
At the seven-minute mark, a door opened down the hall.
Dr. Bozheva was in her mid-fifties, wearing practical shoes and carrying the unhurried composure of someone who’d spent decades listening to people unravel. She looked at me directly, completely unbothered by my presence.
“Mr. Romanov.” More of an acknowledgment than a welcome.
“Dr. Bozheva.”
“I’m with a patient.”
“I’ll wait.”
She held my gaze for a beat, then turned and closed her door behind her.
I took the chair closest to the hallway. Eight minutes later, her patient stepped out—a man in his forties who took one look at me, tightened his posture, and left considerably faster than he’d planned to.
The office door opened again.
“Five minutes,” she said.
I stood up. “That’s all I need.”
Neither of us believed that, but I stepped inside anyway.
She sat across from me with her hands folded on the desk, carrying the stillness of someone who had learned, a long time ago, never to break a quiet room.
“What brings you here, Mr. Romanov?”
“I’m here about a former patient of yours. A boy you saw roughly six years ago at Lyubertsy Medical Center.” I let his name land between us. “Nikolai Levin.”
A shadow crossed her face, quickly caught and masked, but not fast enough.
She recovered in an instant.
“I remember him. What is your connection to Mr. Levin?”
“He’s my fiancé.”
She held my gaze without speaking, taking that in before answering. “Then you understand I’m bound by confidentiality. Regardless of your relationship, I can’t discuss a patient’s case without their explicit consent.”
“He had an episode,” I said, deadpan. “A severe one, last night. He’s been missing ever since.”
She didn’t react.
“I found his medical files and the session tapes in his room. I’ve watched them.”
“Those records are—”
“I know what they are. And I’m not here to debate the ethics of how I got them.” I leaned forward slightly. “I’m here because I need to understand what I’m dealing with. Not for my sake—for his.”
Dr. Bozheva studied me with a sharp, methodical attention.
“You watched the tapes,” she said at last.
“Every one of them.”
“And you came straight here.”
“Yes.”
She slowly unfolded her hands and laid them flat on the desk.
“What specifically are you trying to learn?”
“Whether he can navigate his way back from this on his own, or if he needs help.” I held her eyes. “And whether the man I’ve been living with is the one coming back—or if whatever broke that night changed him permanently.”
The silence in the office settled thick around us. Dr. Bozheva stared at me for a long time, no longer weighing my questions, but weighing me.
“You care about him,” she said. It wasn’t a question. I didn’t treat it like one either.
“Tell me what I need to know.”
She hesitated a moment longer, then pulled a fresh notepad from her desk drawer and laid it between us.
“Your five minutes are up,” she said softly. “But I suspect you knew you weren’t leaving in five minutes anyway.”
She clicked her pen.
“Start from the beginning. Tell me everything that happened that night.”
Dr. Bozheva listened without interrupting once.
When I finished, she sat in silence for a long moment, her pen resting untouched on the paper. She turned her head toward the window, looking at something far past the glass.
“The first time Nikolai came to see me, he was eighteen,” she said softly.
“His grandmother brought him. She sat in the waiting room through the entire session—refused to leave the building. When I introduced myself afterward, she took both my hands and begged me to be patient with him. She told me he wasn’t used to people caring. ”
She turned back to face me.
“He came alone after that. Guarded at first, as most patients are, but over time he let his guard down. Underneath all that defense, he was honest. He genuinely wanted to get better, and that matters more than people realize.”
She folded her hands on the desk again.
“One afternoon, he walked in with heavy bruising along his jaw. When I pressed him on it, he went quiet for a long time. Then he admitted it was his partner. A man named Kuzmar.”
Kuzmar.
The name landed like a stone—the exact same way it had the first time Nikolai dropped it into conversation. Quietly, laced with something dark I tucked away to deal with later.
“I wanted to report it,” Dr. Bozheva continued, her voice devoid of pity. “Nikolai panicked at the idea. He begged me not to. He was crying. So I didn’t. I’ve questioned that decision many times since.”
She picked up her pen, turned it over in her fingers, and set it back down.
“What’s relevant to your situation, Mr. Romanov, is how his condition evolves over time.
With a system like his, each breakdown leaves a deeper mark.
Early on, interrupting an episode was relatively simple.
The sight of his own blood acted as a circuit breaker—a harsh, physical grounding technique his mind created to snap him back to himself.
It was self-destructive, but it worked.”
She held my gaze to make sure I was tracking.
“The problem is that those triggers wear out. Every time the alternate personality—Fyodor as he calls himself —takes control, he gains ground. Think of Nikolai’s true consciousness like a muscle: the longer Fyodor keeps him pushed under, the more that primary self weakens from disuse.
If this keeps happening, there’s a real danger that Nikolai simply won’t have the strength to pull himself back to the surface on his own. ”
The room went completely still.
“What do I do?” I asked.
“You can’t force Nikolai back out,” she said firmly. “If you try to corner Fyodor through confrontation, physical force, or emotional pressure, his instincts will kick in. Remember, Fyodor exists solely to deal with threats. If you attack him, you’re only giving him a reason to stay in control.”
“So what’s the alternative?”
“Fyodor has to step back on his own terms. He has to believe, by his own logic, that letting Nikolai take over again won’t put them in danger. Which means you can’t treat Fyodor like an obstacle to destroy. You have to treat him like a person.”
I stared at her, processing the weight of that.
She snapped her notepad shut. “That’s the reality, Mr. Romanov. The rest depends on variables I can’t evaluate from inside this room.”
I stood up. “Thank you for your time.”
She looked up at me, her expression softening just a fraction. “He was a kind person when I knew him. Remarkably so, considering everything he went through.” She paused. “I hope you find him.”
I turned and walked out without answering.
* * *
In the car, Lev pulled out into traffic without asking where we were going.
I stared out at the passing street. Kuzmar. The name bugged me.
“There’s someone we need to pay a visit to,” I said.
Lev’s gaze darted to the rearview mirror.
“Who, and where?”
“A man who should have been dealt with a long time ago.” I took a breath. “But first—get everyone on the street. Every corner of Moscow. Find Nikolai.”
“How wide are we casting the net?”
“He’s only been gone fifteen hours,” I said, looking back out. “He hasn’t gone far.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lev started making calls.
Fifteen hours.
I knew what Dr. Bozheva had warned me about. I knew what those tapes showed. I knew the person walking through Moscow right now wasn’t entirely Nikolai, and that pushing him would only backfire. Patience was what this required.
Patience had never been my strength.
But if there was one thing I’d learned recently, it was that some things couldn’t be bought, ordered around, or bent to my will. Nikolai had taught me that—without meaning to, and without ever knowing he’d done it.