Chapter Eighteen
Nikolai
“I can’t,” says Elias. “This is as far as my hands reach.”
“What the fuck you mean you can’t?” I grip the phone tighter. “Why do you think I pay you, mudak?”
“Because I’m the best you’ve got. Which is exactly why I’m telling you—I’m not built for Aslanov. Nobody is. You want to take the fucker down, Popov’s your best shot.”
“And what about the risk that comes with—”
“It’s a risk you’re willing to take. Who cares if he killed your girlfriend’s mother? You know how this works in the Bratva.”
The room goes very quiet.
Girlfriend’s mother.
I don’t move. Don’t speak. The words sit there, rearranging everything.
“What did you just say?”
“What?”
“Popov. Lauren’s mother. Say it again.”
Elias pauses. Then, with the casual delivery of a man reporting weather: “Oh you didn’t know? Popov dropped her. Or his men—same thing. I assumed you knew.”
“How the fuck would I know?” I drop my voice. Lauren is somewhere in the penthouse, and this conversation must not reach her. At least not yet. “How do you know this?”
“Resources.” He sighs. “Look, Niko. Do you want Aslanov dead or not?”
I press two fingers to my temple and breathe through it.
Jesus Christ.
Popov killed Lauren’s mother.
Lauren, who has spent years not knowing who was responsible. Lauren, who stopped looking for answers when Hannah was born because the search had already cost her too much. And I’m about to sit across from the man who did it and negotiate terms.
Pizdets!
I file it. I have to. It sits in my chest like coal—hot, heavy, something I'll have to carry carefully—but I can’t let it surface right now. There’s a hierarchy of problems, and Aslanov is still at the top of it.
“Talk,” I say.
Elias exhales. “The man I had inside Aslanov’s network—three days, no contact. Phone goes straight to voicemail. He’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Come on, your English is better than mine. Gone. My best guess is that Aslanov found out he was feeding intel and took care of it.”
I lean back in the chair. The office is little more than a storage room—cramped, low ceilinged, a desk that wobbles if I put too much weight on it. I’ve worked from worse. I rub my eyes and let the information settle.
Aslanov is eliminating anyone he suspects. Which means he’s scared—or at least, he’s uncertain, which for a man like him amounts to the same thing.
“He’s tightening his circle?” I ask.
“Since you surfaced? He’s been purging. Anyone he can’t personally verify, he’s removing.”
I come forward, elbows on the desk.
That means the fucker’s scared. And scared is good. Scared means mistakes, means gaps, means he’s operating on instinct rather than strategy. But scared also means indiscriminate. He won’t wait for confirmation before he moves—he’ll move and let the consequences sort themselves out.
That makes him more dangerous, not less.
“The bounty?” I ask.
“On you?” Elias almost sounds amused. “My guess? He doesn’t want money involved. He’ll want to do it himself.”
“That’s what I thought.”
A man who wants to pull the trigger personally is a man who can be drawn out. That’s useful. I’ll need to think about how to use it.
But underneath all of it, still burning: Popov killed Lauren’s mother.
I have to keep that sealed for now. If Lauren finds out—when Lauren finds out—it can’t come in the middle of this. Not when I still need Popov, not when one wrong move unravels everything I’m trying to build.
I don’t like it. But I’ve made harder calls than this.
“What’s the last thing your man reported before he went dark?”
“That Aslanov had the perfect way to lure you out.”
My stomach drops. “Perfect way. Those were his words?”
“That’s what he said.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
Elias clicks his tongue. “If I knew that, I’d tell you. I suggest you sit with it and figure it out yourself. I have to go.”
The line dies.
I set the phone down carefully, which takes more restraint than it sounds.
Blyad.
A perfect way to lure me out.
The question is whether Aslanov said it knowing he was being listened to—a deliberate message, designed to travel—or whether Elias’ man caught something genuine before he was taken out.
Both possibilities are bad. The first means Aslanov already knows more than I’ve accounted for.
The second means he has something specific in mind and is moving toward it.
Either way, the clock has shortened.
I get up and move through the cramped space—two steps to the wall, turn, two steps back. I used to have an office where I could think. Marble floors, enough room to let a problem breathe. Now I’m pacing a storage room, navigating around a chair that sounds like it’s dying every time I look at it.
I run through what I have.
Timur—solid, reliable, proven. I’d trust him with my life. I have, more than once.
Popov—a loaded weapon pointed in a useful direction. Useful right up until the moment he decides it isn’t. And now, carrying a secret I can’t surface without burning the alliance before it’s served its purpose.
This is what I have. It has to be enough.
Something is coming—I can feel the shape of it pressing in at the edges, the way you feel a storm before the sky changes. Whatever Aslanov is planning, he’s already set it in motion.
I need to move faster than he expects.
The office falls quiet after I pocket my phone.
I sit with it for a moment—the Popov problem, the missing informant, the threat I can’t yet put a shape to—and then I hear it. Faint, from somewhere downstairs. The soft, rhythmic scratch of a pencil.
I find Hannah at the kitchen table, alone, bent over a sheet of paper with the concentration of someone defusing something delicate. She doesn’t look up when I come in.
I pull out the chair beside her and sit.
She holds up the paper without being asked. “It’s a cat. But the face is weird.”
I look at it. She’s right about the face—the head lists slightly to one side, the features bunched together like they’re trying to escape—but the body is confident, the tail a sweeping curve. She drew it with conviction.
“I’ve seen worse cats.”
Hannah gives me a deeply skeptical look.
I take a clean sheet from the stack on the table and one of her pencils.
It sits strangely in my hand—I haven’t drawn anything since I was roughly her age, and I wasn’t skilled then either.
I start with a circle. The circle becomes lopsided.
I add ears. They’re more like triangles that got into an argument.
Hannah watches in silence for a moment. Then she dissolves.
“That’s not a cat!”
“It’s modern art.” I keep my expression serious. “It can be whatever you want it to be.”
“It’s not anything!” She’s laughing so hard she has to put her pencil down, her whole body shaking with it. That laugh—unguarded, helpless, filling the whole room—does something to my chest I have no defense against.
I shade in one of the lopsided ears. “I think he has character.”
“He is not a cat.” She wipes her eyes, still giggling. “You’re silly.”
Just like her mother.
I lean back and let the laughter run its course.
Outside, the city moves through its evening—traffic, distant sirens, the indifferent machinery of a world that doesn’t know we’re up here.
In here, there’s just a bad drawing of a cat and my daughter’s laugh and the particular quality of light that comes at the end of a day when nothing terrible happened.
This is what I’m fighting for. Not the reckoning with Aslanov—that’s just the obstacle. This is the destination. Hannah making fun of my artistic failings over dinner. Lauren’s voice from the next room. The specific peace of an ordinary evening.
I look at the drawing again.
Once this is done, I think. I’m going to be here for all of it.