11. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
Kovalenko did not let me sleep. Four syllables, over and over, syllables I had not let myself say out loud in six years, running the same track through my skull until the ceiling above the mattress turned slowly from black to gray, then to the flat white of a morning I had not asked for.
I got up before the sun did, which was not unusual. Most mornings I got up already knowing what the day required of me. This morning I only knew the name, and the name did not come with instructions.
I burned my hand on the kettle, a small thing, barely worth noticing, and for one full second the kitchen was not a kitchen at all.
It was a warehouse on the wrong side of a river I had not stood beside in longer than I liked to admit, heat coming off corrugated metal in waves I could feel through my boots before I ever saw the flames.
Smoke found the ceiling first, the way it always does.
Somewhere underneath it, a man was screaming a name that was not mine.
I set the kettle down and made myself breathe until the kitchen went back to being a kitchen.
It was not the first flashback I had lived through since the fire, but it was the first one Kovalenko had caused entirely on its own, with no photograph and no stranger's badge to set it moving. That felt like a door swinging open on hinges I had believed rusted shut years ago.
I had told Basin I recognized the name on a folder and nothing more. That had not been entirely a lie. It had also not been entirely true, and six years of choosing which half of an answer to give a client had never once come back to find me the way this one already had.
Isla found me like that, standing over a kettle that had already finished boiling, staring at nothing.
"You're doing the thing again," she said, not quite awake yet, hair still loose from sleep. "The staring at nothing thing."
"I am thinking."
"About the company. Kovalenko." She said the name easily, the way a person says a word that has not yet earned any weight for them.
"You went somewhere last night. I watched you go."
I poured water I did not want into a mug I was not going to drink from, mostly to have somewhere to put my hands.
"It is an old name," I said. "Old names surface sometimes. It happens."
"That's not an answer. That's a fortune cookie."
"It is the only one I have this morning."
She crossed her arms, the same stance she used on frightened families in a hallway, the one meant to say I am not going anywhere. "You went still last night in a way I have never seen you go still."
"Not even the night with the badge. Not even the night at my apartment."
"This was different, and you know it was different, and you are standing here acting like I imagined the whole thing."
"You did not imagine it."
"Then talk to me."
"There is nothing to say yet."
"Yet."
"Isla."
"No, I heard the word. Yet. That means there is something, and you are choosing not to say it, which is a very different sentence than nothing to say."
I could not fault her reasoning, since every version of the truth I could give her would cost me more of my past than I was ready to lose in a single morning.
The lieutenant's name surfaced the same way Kovalenko had, uninvited, precise. Orlov. I had never proven he lit the fire himself, only that he had reason to want the warehouse gone and every man inside it silenced along with it.
Reason was not proof, and I had spent years reminding myself of the difference, which had never once felt as thin as it did standing in my own kitchen with Isla watching my face for something to hold onto.
"Talk to me the way you talk to Ortiz," she said. "The way you talk when it is only information, not feelings. I will take facts."
"I do not need feelings from you this morning. I just need to not feel like a stranger walked into this kitchen wearing your face."
That landed somewhere I had no wall built for yet.
"I cannot give you facts I do not have confirmed," I said. "And I will not give you the ones I only suspect, because suspicion dressed up as fact has cost men their lives before, and I am not going to let it cost you anything."
"That is not protecting me. That is deciding for me."
"Perhaps."
"Perhaps is not a word people use when they actually disagree with something."
She was right, and I let the silence say so instead of finding a way to argue it.
"Nikolai."
"I heard you."
"Hearing is not the same as answering."
"I am not trying to shut you out," I said finally, though the sentence felt smaller than what it was standing next to.
"You're doing an excellent impression of it, then."
"I am aware."
She studied me the way she studied a chart she did not fully trust, looking for the number that did not match the rest. "You have that look Reyes had, the first week. Like you are already somewhere else, and the rest of us are just furniture you have to step around to get there."
I said nothing to that one either, mostly because it was accurate, and I had never found a way to argue with something accurate.
I checked my phone twice before I understood I was not going to use it.
The number I needed was not saved in anything with a screen.
It lived in the part of my memory that never fully shut off, the same place that held exit counts and license plates and a warehouse fire I had not spoken about since before I owned this apartment.
I found the second phone in the drawer she had been told never to open, the one that held nothing worth explaining until this exact morning. I dialed a number I had not used in three years.
It picked up on the fourth ring, longer than I expected from a man who had once answered before the first ring finished.
"Kolya." Pavel's voice had gone rougher since I last heard it, though the caution underneath it had not changed at all. "This number is supposed to be dead."
"I need it to not be dead for the next ten minutes."
"Ten minutes costs more than it used to."
"I am not calling about money. I am calling about Kovalenko."
Silence, the kind that told me more than any answer would have.
"That name should stay where you left it," Pavel said finally. "Whoever gave it to you, tell them to forget they did."
"It found me on its own. New York. A construction and restoration front, laundering through shell accounts, tied to a case I am already working."
"Tell me it is a coincidence, and I will believe you, because I would very much like to."
"It is not a coincidence." Pavel exhaled, the sound of a man deciding how much a favor from six years ago was actually worth.
"Orlov never stopped building. He only got better at hiding what he was building."
Hearing the name out loud, in another man's mouth, did something to my chest that six years of discipline had apparently not fixed at all.
I asked him the one question I had never let myself ask anyone, not even myself, not out loud: whether the fire had been meant for the warehouse, or for the four of us who had been standing inside it.
"I do not know that either," Pavel said. "I only know it worked."
"Is he here?"
"I do not know that. I know the company is, and companies do not run themselves."
"Find out."
"That will cost you the favor, and the one after it."
"I am aware of what it will cost."
Pavel was quiet for a moment, weighing something I could not see from my side of the line. "You sound like him again. The version of you from before the fire."
"I did not expect to hear that voice a second time in this life."
"Neither did I."
"Be careful which parts of him you let back out, Kolya. Some of them do not know how to leave once they are standing in the room again."
He hung up before I could decide whether that was advice or a warning.
I ended the call and became aware, all at once, that Isla had not moved from the doorway the entire time.
"That was not your usual voice," she said, quiet in a way I had not heard from her before either. "That was not a voice I have ever heard from you."
"It is a voice I used to need. It still works, apparently."
"You sounded like someone I have not met."
"You have not met him. I am glad of that."
"Nikolai." She said my name like she was trying to find the man attached to it. "Whatever that was, it scared me a little."
"I do not scare easily. You know that about me by now."
"Which is exactly why it worries me that you did."
"Then tell me what I am supposed to do with being scared, if the why is off the table."
Nothing I could say would have made it better, so I reached for my jacket instead, the decision made somewhere between Pavel's voice and my own.
"Nikolai."
"I need to handle something."
"Handle what? You cannot just say a sentence like that and walk out the door."
"I can, and I am going to, because the alternative is standing here trying to explain six years of history I do not have time for this morning."
"That is not fair."
"No," I said. "It is not." I found my keys, aware of exactly what that answer would cost me later, and decided it was a price I could pay.
"I will call you when I know something worth telling you."
"And if I would rather know now, even if it is not finished yet?"
That one deserved better than silence, and I gave her silence anyway, watching it land on her face like a decision she had not been consulted on.
She followed me as far as the door, arms crossed, not stopping me, which somehow felt worse than if she had.
"Be careful," she said, quieter now, some of the fight gone out of it. "Whatever this is."
"I am always careful."
"You are always something. I am not sure careful has been it, the last eleven days."
There was nothing honest I could say to that, so I kissed her forehead instead, quick, before either of us could decide what it meant, and stepped out into the hallway.
The door clicked shut behind me, the same fast motion I used on every door I had ever needed to close quickly, and I stood there one second longer than the moment required.
She had a name for me that was only half true, an apartment she was not supposed to be able to find twice, and a promise that I would explain everything eventually. It was not enough to hold onto anything with, and I knew that better than anyone standing on either side of that door.
I had spent six years making certain nobody could ever get close enough to need more than that from me. Isla had gotten close anyway, and now she was standing on the wrong side of a door I had built for exactly this purpose, holding half a name and a promise I was not certain I could keep.
I went to find Pavel's answer anyway, because it was easier than turning around and giving her mine.