12. Isla
ISLA
I called Matvei because waiting was not a skill I had ever been good at, no matter how many hours I had logged doing exactly that in hospital hallways.
Nikolai had been gone since morning. No text, no call, nothing but the memory of a voice I had never heard him use and a phone I had only just learned existed, hidden in the one drawer he had ever told me not to open. I sat with that memory until it stopped feeling like enough to sit with.
The apartment did not help, too quiet in the particular way a place gets when the person who usually fills it is somewhere you cannot picture. I reorganized the same shelf twice, made tea I did not drink, and finally admitted that none of it was going to make the hours pass any faster.
I tried his number twice before I gave up on it, both times going straight to a voicemail that had never once, in eleven days, actually recorded a greeting.
I texted Renee something meaningless about a shift swap after that, just to remind myself that ordinary problems still existed somewhere in the world.
I found the card in my bag, the one with nothing on it but a number, and dialed before I could talk myself out of it.
He picked up on the third ring. "Yes."
"It is Isla."
"I know who this is. I have your number."
"Right. Obviously." I pressed the phone tighter against my ear, as if that would make the next part easier.
"I need to ask you something, and I need you to actually answer this time."
"I generally answer. You simply do not care for the answers."
"Fair. Then let me be specific." I took a breath.
"Nikolai went somewhere this morning. He made a call first, on a phone I had never seen, and his voice changed into something I did not recognize."
"He said he needed to handle something. He has not come back."
Silence on the other end, longer than his usual pauses, long enough that I checked the screen to make sure the call had not dropped.
"What did his voice sound like?" Matvei asked finally.
"Controlled. Cold. Like he had put something else on, the way you put on a coat."
"That is not a voice I like hearing about secondhand."
"Then tell me what it means."
"I cannot tell you what I do not know."
"You know something. I can hear it in how carefully you are not saying it."
"I am not being careful. I am being loyal, which occasionally looks the same from the outside."
"He is out there right now wearing a voice I have never heard, and you want to talk to me about the difference between careful and loyal?"
He exhaled, a rough sound down the line, the sound of a man deciding whether loyalty to a friend outweighed loyalty to an order nobody had actually given him tonight. "I am not supposed to talk about before."
"Before what?"
"Before New York. Before any of this." A pause.
"Before the fire."
My chest went tight around that last word in a way I did not examine too closely.
"What fire, Matvei?"
"You already know there was one. I can hear that in how you asked."
"I know there was a warehouse. I know he has scars from it. I do not know anything else, and he will not tell me, and I am done sitting in an apartment waiting for him to decide I have earned the rest of it."
Matvei was quiet again, and when he spoke his voice had lost some of its usual dryness.
"Four men went into that warehouse six years ago. One of them walked out."
I sat down slowly on the edge of the mattress, the phone gone heavy in my hand.
"He was the one," I said, not quite a question.
"Yes."
"What actually happened?"
"Officials called it an accident afterward. Faulty wiring, they said, in a building that had never once had faulty wiring in the years before that night."
"Nobody who actually knew him believed that report for a single day."
"Why didn't anyone push for the truth?"
"Some people did. It did not change the report. It only made those people careful about who they said it to."
"How do you know all this, if it happened before you knew him?"
"I did not always work for him. I worked near him, for someone else, in those years. I heard the stories the way everyone heard them, in pieces, from men who were not supposed to repeat them."
"What kind of pieces?"
"That he tried to get the others out before the roof came down. That he went back in twice, and only stopped because there was nothing left to go back in for."
His voice had gone rougher by the end of that sentence than I had ever once heard it before, even over the phone.
"You knew one of them," I said. It was a guess, but it did not feel like one.
"I knew of him. That is different, and it is also not something I am going to discuss tonight."
I pressed a hand flat against my chest without meaning to, the way I did sometimes at work when a chart told me something a patient's face was not saying yet.
"So he watched three men die, walked away with half his face burned off, and the official story is faulty wiring."
"That is the official story, yes."
I thought of Nikolai standing in Cruz's briefing, coffee cup stopped halfway to his mouth, going still in a way I had never seen a body go still before.
"That is why the company name did that to him," I said, mostly to myself.
"I would imagine so."
I did not say anything for a moment, letting the shape of it settle.
A young man walked into a fire with three other men and walked out alone, and then spent six years being told, officially, that it had simply been an accident, that nobody was owed an answer for it, that the men he lost did not even deserve the dignity of an actual cause.
"He is not cold," I said slowly, the words arriving before I fully understood I believed them. "He has just been waiting six years for someone to finally tell him the truth, and nobody ever has."
Matvei did not answer that right away either, which told me I had gotten close to something he was not going to confirm out loud.
"You should sleep," he said instead. "He will come back. He always comes back."
"That is not the same as coming back in one piece."
"No. It is not." A pause, and then, quieter, in the closest thing to gentle I had heard from him yet.
"He has not let anyone stay the night in that apartment since I have known him, and I have known him a long time. Longer than you, longer than most people currently living."
"That does not sound like a compliment to me specifically."
"It was not meant as one."
"It was meant as information. You are still there. That means something, whether he has said so to you or not."
"Even if he never actually says it out loud?"
"Especially then. He is not a man who says things out loud. You are learning that faster than most."
I did not know what to do with that, so I thanked him and let him go before either of us had to sit any longer in what he had just admitted.
I did not sleep. I told myself I would, and then I sat on the edge of the mattress with the lamp on, running back through every version of Nikolai I had collected since a fire extinguisher and a hallway at two in the morning, looking at all of it with different eyes.
The long sleeves in a warm hallway were not vanity.
The chairs angled just so, the doors closed fast and checked twice, the exits counted in every room he ever stood in, none of it was paranoia dressed up as habit.
It was a man who had learned, in the worst possible way, exactly how little warning the world gave before it took something from him.
The photograph in the drawer made a different kind of sense now too, four young men caught mid laugh in a moment none of them knew was borrowed.
I understood, finally, why he had crossed the room so fast to take it out of my hands.
I had been holding proof of the last morning three of his brothers ever had.
I understood, too, why control mattered to him as much as it did. He had not been in control of anything that night, and it had cost him everything he loved.
Every locked door since, every angled chair, every counted exit, it all came from the same place. He never wanted to stand somewhere again and watch something happen that he was powerless to stop.
Steady hands, soft eyes, Corinne used to say. I had spent three years giving that to strangers without once considering that the hardest person to offer it to might be the one sharing my kitchen.
Nikolai had built an entire life around never needing anyone to give it to him at all. Sitting there, that was what actually broke my heart a little, more than anything else about him.
He came home a little after midnight. I heard the deadbolt before I heard him, the same fast, careful motion he used on every door, and I was on my feet before he finished stepping inside.
He looked tired in a way that went past sleep, the kind of tired that lived in the shoulders instead of the eyes. His knuckles on his left hand were split, the skin torn and already starting to swell, dried blood cracking at the edges of it.
"You are still up," he said, like that was the part that surprised him.
"I was worried."
"You did not have to be."
"I know. I was anyway."
Something moved across his face at that, quick and unguarded, gone before I could name it fully.
He did not offer an explanation for the hand. I did not ask for one, mostly because I already understood, with a clarity that surprised me, exactly what kind of answer that question would get me tonight.
I went to the bathroom instead and came back with the first aid kit, the same one I had used on him once before in a supply closet that felt like a different lifetime now. I set it on the table and opened the latch, the familiar click of it steadying my hands more than I expected.
"Sit," I said, nodding at the kitchen table.
He looked at the chair for a moment, the one angled the way he angled every chair, and then he crossed the room and sat down without a single word of argument.
I knelt in front of him and took his hand in both of mine, turning it gently toward the light to get a better look at the damage. His knuckles were warm despite the night air still clinging to his jacket, and he let me hold his hand steady without once trying to pull it back.
"This will sting," I warned him, uncapping the antiseptic.
"I have had worse."
"I know you have. That is not exactly the comfort you think it is."
He did not answer that, but something in his shoulders loosened anyway, the way it always seemed to when I refused to treat him like something fragile.
It was such a small thing. It should not have meant anything at all.
It meant everything, and we both knew it, and neither of us said so out loud.