15. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
Fear was not a language I trusted. Logistics was, and by the time Isla wandered into the kitchen still half asleep, I had already turned one into the other.
Yesterday's dash to the firehouse had ended in exactly the anticlimax I should have expected, a shaken crew, a security camera angle too grainy to give anyone a face, and a name from the stranger that turned out to be fabricated within the hour.
Miles was safe. There was nothing left to chase by the time the sun went down, so I had spent the night building something I could actually control instead.
I had been awake since four, phone in one hand and a legal pad in the other, filling both with names and addresses until the panic that had been trying to climb up my throat since Isla repeated her brother's words finally had somewhere useful to go.
I had a man watching the firehouse entrance from a parked delivery van by six.
I had another running the plate of every vehicle that stopped within two blocks of the hospital for longer than a red light justified.
I had Pavel's cousin, a woman who did something with municipal records I did not ask too many questions about, quietly flagging any request for personnel schedules that touched either the hospital or the fire department.
I had also moved two of Basin's men onto rotating shifts outside Isla's own building, close enough to respond and distant enough that she would not notice them unless she already knew what to look for. It was not subtle. It was not meant to be, not to anyone who mattered.
None of it had required Isla's permission, a fact that sat in my chest less comfortably than I expected it to.
I had done worse things for less reason without losing a single hour of sleep over it. This one kept nagging at me anyway, small and persistent, like a stone in a boot I could not stop to remove.
"You built an entire operation before I finished my coffee," she said, reading my screen over my shoulder with an expression I could not immediately place.
"I built a perimeter."
"A perimeter around what, exactly?" Her voice had gone careful, the particular caution of someone bracing for an answer they might not like.
"Him. His firehouse. The two routes he drives most often between shifts."
"Around my brother. Who you have never met."
"I do not need to have met him to keep him alive."
She set her mug down harder than the moment strictly required. "You can't just rearrange my family's entire life without asking me first."
"I did not ask because you would have said yes eventually anyway, and eventually was not fast enough."
"That is not the point, Nikolai."
"I am aware it is not the point." I turned to face her fully, because this was not a conversation I was willing to have at an angle. "It is also not a point I am prepared to lose."
"Someone used your brother to get to you. I intend to make certain that door closes before anyone tries to walk through it a second time."
She held my eyes for a long moment, arms crossed, weighing something I could see her decide not to fight. "Fine. Once."
"I'm letting this go once, because the alternative is worse, and because I don't actually have a better plan."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Just don't make a habit of deciding things for me."
I did not promise that. We both understood I could not keep it.
We drove to the firehouse an hour later, ostensibly so Isla could drop off a container of something her mother had sent that neither of us had asked about, and actually because I wanted to see the building my men were watching with my own eyes instead of a stranger's report.
The building smelled like diesel and old coffee, the particular mixture that seemed to exist in every firehouse regardless of city or state, a smell I associated more with waiting than with danger.
Somewhere past the bay doors, someone had a radio playing low enough to be background rather than company.
Miles met us in the apparatus bay, wiping grease from his hands with a rag that had clearly given up being useful several shifts ago.
"So you're the guard dog," he said, looking me over with the frank, unhurried curiosity of a man who had decided in advance not to be intimidated. "Isla undersold you. She usually undersells everything, it's a whole thing with her."
"I do not think I have been called that to my face before."
"First time for everything." He stuck out a hand, and I shook it, and his grip was exactly as steady as a man who spent his working life pulling people out of collapsing structures should have.
"Miles. You already know that. Isla talks about you more than she thinks she does."
"I do not," Isla said, from somewhere behind me.
"You absolutely do," Miles said, already steering me toward a bench near the rig without waiting for either of us to argue about it further. "She mentioned the coffee machine story. Twice."
He grinned at her over my shoulder. "I've got a whole file building in my head now. This is excellent material."
"There is no file," Isla said, in the exact tone of a woman who had definitely started one.
Miles's grin faded into something more serious for exactly as long as it took him to ask the next question. "You treating her right?"
"I am trying to."
"Good answer. Wrong guys always say yes immediately." He clapped my shoulder once, hard, and just like that the seriousness was gone again, replaced by whatever came next on his mental list of things to say.
"Now sit down, I want to see this arm everybody keeps not talking about."
He caught my sleeve pulling slightly as I sat, the fabric riding up half an inch past my wrist, and his eyes went to the edge of the scarring the way a man's eyes go to something he actually recognizes instead of something he is trying politely not to see.
"Graft?" he asked, casual, already reaching for his own forearm to show me a patch of skin gone smooth and shiny in a way I knew intimately.
"Mine's from a kitchen fire when I was eight. Yours looks older, and worse, no offense."
"None taken. It is worse."
"Range of motion still an issue anywhere along it?"
I had not expected that question from anyone outside a hospital, let alone delivered with the casual authority of a man discussing sports statistics. "The shoulder, occasionally. Cold mornings mostly."
"Yeah, that tracks. Scar tissue doesn't stretch the way skin does, so it pulls tight wherever it crosses a joint unless you actively fight it." He demonstrated on his own arm, rotating his shoulder through a slow, deliberate arc.
"You gotta stretch it past the point of comfortable every single day or it wins. I do mine in the shower, water helps."
"Nobody explained that to me in any hospital I was treated in."
"Hospitals fix the fire. They don't always fix the six years after the fire." He said it lightly, no weight behind it, the observation of a man who had simply lived the fact rather than suffered under it.
"I had a physical therapist finally sit me down and explain it properly when I was maybe twelve. Changed everything."
"Massage the edges too, not just the middle of it," he added, entirely unprompted. "Everybody focuses on the thick part and ignores where the scar meets normal skin, and that's exactly where it gets the tightest. Learned that one the hard way."
"Also, ice is a scam for scar tissue specifically, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Heat first, always."
We spent the better part of twenty minutes on it, Miles walking me through exercises with the enthusiasm of someone who had never once been asked to perform this particular expertise for an appreciative audience, correcting the angle of my shoulder twice with a directness that assumed I could take correction without flinching from it.
Somewhere in the middle of him demonstrating a stretch that involved bracing his forearm against a support beam and describing the sensation as feeling like a rubber band trying to file a formal complaint, I laughed.
It came out before I had any warning it was coming, an actual laugh, unplanned and slightly rusty from disuse, and I caught Isla's face across the bay gone soft and startled in a way that told me exactly how rare a thing she had just witnessed.
"See, this is why I like him," Miles said to her, delighted, like he had personally engineered the moment. "Most people go stiff around me when they find out about the arm. He just wanted the stretching routine."
"He's not most people," Isla said, quiet enough that I do not think she meant for me to hear it clearly.
I heard it anyway, and it settled somewhere warm and unfamiliar in my chest, sitting there uneasily beside the part of me still counting exits in a building full of people I had not personally vetted.
I could not remember the last time laughter had arrived without my permission first. Every version of it I could recall had been deployed on purpose, a tool for putting someone at ease before I needed something from them. This one had simply happened.
We left an hour later with a promise from Miles to text me a proper stretching schedule, and a warning that he would absolutely be checking in on whether I actually did it.
Matvei was waiting outside my apartment door when we returned, a leather folder under one arm and an expression I recognized from every time he had ever shown up with news that could not wait for a phone call.
"You look like a man who found something he did not want to find," I said, unlocking the door.
"Several things, and every one of them makes this worse." He set the folder on the kitchen table, the same table where Isla had cleaned my hands two nights before, and began laying out documents in a neat, deliberate row.
"Kovalenko Restoration and Claims filed for a settlement eleven days ago," he said. "A commercial fire two towns over. The claim was approved and paid out in record time, unusually clean, unusually generous, with almost no independent investigation attached to it."
"Insurers do not move that fast for anyone."
"No. They do not, unless someone with influence over the claims process wants them to." He tapped the top document.
"This is not the first time. I pulled two more from the last three years, similar profile, similar speed, and the same absence of anyone asking hard questions before the check cleared."
Isla leaned over the table, reading upside down with the quick, practiced focus of someone used to scanning charts under pressure. "These are all Kovalenko fires?"
"Kovalenko adjacent. Different shell entities each time, different addresses, but the money moves through the same three accounts eventually, if you follow it long enough to be patient about it."
"How much money are we actually talking about?" Isla asked.
"Enough that nobody involved needed to ask twice for it. Enough that three separate fires becomes worth the risk of someone eventually noticing the pattern."
Matvei's mouth twisted, not quite a smile. "Apparently they decided that risk was acceptable."
Something old and familiar tightened low in my stomach, the particular cold clarity that used to arrive right before I understood exactly how much worse a situation was about to get.
He set the third file down beside the other two and squared all three edges with a precision that felt more like a warning than a habit.
I looked at the dates first, out of instinct, the same instinct that had once kept men alive by noticing patterns nobody else bothered to look for. Eleven months apart. Then nine.
Then the most recent one, only seven months after the last, the interval shrinking each time like something gathering speed.
"They are getting faster," I said.
"They are getting greedier." Matvei tapped each date in turn, slow, making certain I saw exactly what he wanted me to see.
"Look at the pattern, Kolya. This is not one fire. This is a business model."