20. Isla
ISLA
The smell of eggs woke me before my alarm did, which was the first clue that something in this apartment had quietly stopped being an emergency and started being, of all things, a home.
Two nights ago, on a fire escape three floors above a city that never once looked down to check on us, he had told me the truest thing he had ever said out loud, and then he had simply held onto me until his own shaking stopped, quiet and unhurried, like he had never once let himself be the one who needed holding before.
We had not gone back to Cruz's folder or Orlov or any of it that night.
We had just gone inside eventually and slept tangled together, like the conversation had used up every other thing either of us had left to say.
I lay there a moment longer than I needed to, listening to a pan settle against a burner in the kitchen, and did the kind of mental math I usually reserved for medication dosages instead of my own life.
Breakfast had been made every morning for the last five days. My shift schedule, taped to the refrigerator in my own handwriting, had somehow translated itself into a man who never once asked what time I needed to leave, because he already knew.
The tea in the cabinet, the exact jasmine blend I had been rationing myself for three years out of habit more than budget, had refilled itself twice without a single conversation about it running low.
I sat up in bed and catalogued the rest of it slowly, methodically, while the shower I had not asked him to warm up finished doing exactly that.
A ride waiting outside the hospital on the three nights my shift had run past midnight, no text required, like he simply knew the exact math of traffic and exhaustion better than I did.
Laundry that folded itself while I slept off a double. A pillow that had somehow migrated to the good side of the bed, the one that did not face the window, every single night without either of us discussing it.
My car had come back from a mechanic I never called, running quieter than it had in a year, and when I finally asked about the bill he changed the subject so smoothly I almost missed that he had done it on purpose.
I had spent three years being the person who noticed everyone else's exhaustion before they did, who refilled the coffee and rebooked the missed appointment and remembered the name of somebody's dog without being asked to.
Nobody had ever once done the reverse for me, not for three straight years, and I had gotten so used to the absence of it that I had genuinely not noticed when it stopped being absent.
"You are staring at the ceiling instead of getting up," Nikolai said from the doorway, a mug already in his hand, steam curling off tea that was exactly the right temperature to drink immediately.
"I'm doing math."
"About what?"
"About how long you've been running my entire life without telling me you were doing it." I took the mug, and it was, predictably, perfect.
"Five days of breakfast. Two tea refills. Three rides home I never asked for."
"I did not think it required your permission."
"That's not the point."
"Then what is the point?" He leaned against the doorframe, unhurried, the particular stillness he wore when he already suspected the answer and wanted to hear me arrive at it out loud anyway.
I opened my mouth to deflect it the way I deflected everything, a joke about him needing a hobby, or a thank-you undercut immediately by a but you really did not have to, the two-step I had performed for every well-meaning offer of help for three solid years running.
I did not do either of those things.
"The point is nobody has taken care of me like this since before I became a nurse," I said instead, and heard my own voice go quieter than I meant it to. "I got so good at not needing it that I forgot what it felt like when someone did it anyway."
Nikolai did not say anything clever back to that. He crossed the kitchen, took the mug out of my hands just long enough to set it on the counter, and pulled me against his chest in a way that had nothing to do with wanting anything back.
"You do not have to earn this," he said against the top of my head. "I am aware that is a foreign concept to you. I intend to keep proving it anyway."
"Why now? Why not two weeks ago, when I actually needed rescuing from something?"
"Because two weeks ago I did not yet know what your favorite tea was." He said it simply, without any weight behind it, the way he said most true things.
"I know it now. I intend to keep finding out things like that for as long as you will let me."
"That's either the sweetest thing you've ever said, or the most annoying, and I genuinely cannot tell which."
"Both are acceptable outcomes."
I laughed into his shirt, and let myself stay there a moment longer than strictly necessary, because apparently that was allowed now.
Which was how, twenty minutes later, I ended up standing on a kitchen chair with a screwdriver in one hand, attempting to fix the cabinet door above the stove that had been hanging half an inch crooked since the day I met him.
"You do not have to do that," Nikolai said, watching from the table with an expression that suggested he found this development significantly more entertaining than alarming.
"I want to. You fix everything for me. I can fix one hinge."
"It is not the hinge. It is the frame underneath it. The screw has nothing solid left to bite into."
"I didn't ask for a diagnosis. I asked for silence and moral support."
He gave me the silence, which turned out to be a mistake, because thirty seconds later the screwdriver slipped, the whole cabinet door swung loose on its remaining hinge, and a bag of flour I had not accounted for tipped off the shelf directly onto my head.
I stood there, coated white from the eyebrows up, holding a screwdriver and half a cabinet door, while Nikolai made a sound I had never once heard out of him before, something that started as a cough and gave up halfway through pretending not to be a laugh.
"This is not funny."
"It is a little funny."
"You could have stopped me."
"I could have." He crossed the kitchen, took the door out of my hands before I could do any more damage with it, and brushed a fond, deliberate line through the flour on my cheek with his thumb.
"I did not want to. Watching you decide you are capable of anything is one of my favorite things about you."
"Even when I'm making it worse?"
"Especially then."
"You're going to have to fix this properly now, you know. I've made it structurally unsound."
"I was always going to have to fix it properly. You simply gave me a more interesting story to tell about why."
I was still laughing, flour drifting down onto my shoulders every time I moved, when the door opened without a knock, the particular entrance that only ever meant Matvei.
He did not comment on the flour. He did not comment on the cabinet door leaning against the counter like a casualty of war. His face had none of its usual dry amusement in it at all, and something in my stomach dropped before he said a single word.
"Sit," he said, to both of us, already pulling out a chair like the kitchen had suddenly stopped being mine to host in.
Nikolai's whole posture changed before I had finished processing the tone. "What happened?"
"We picked up one of Kovalenko's people an hour ago. Low level, a courier, nothing that should have known anything worth knowing." Matvei set a phone on the table between us, screen up, and slid it toward me without ceremony.
"He was carrying this."
I looked down at the screen, and for a moment my brain simply refused to assemble what it was showing me into something that made sense.
It was a photograph of me. Outside the hospital, in my scrubs, mid-stride through the staff entrance I used every single shift, taken from an angle that meant whoever held the camera had been close enough to see my badge clearly.
"When?" I said, because it was the only word that arrived.
"Recent. The jacket in the photo is the one you were wearing three days ago." Matvei's voice had none of its usual dryness in it, which frightened me more than the photograph did.
"There is a timestamp embedded in the file. It matches."
"Three days ago I worked a double and came home to breakfast," I said, and heard how absurd the sentence sounded even as it left my mouth, the two facts sitting side by side, unable to make room for each other.
"Someone was watching me while I did that."
"They had you under watch for days, and I did not know." Nikolai's voice had gone into the register I recognized now, flat and precise and entirely without room for anything softening it. "That is the part I am going to need a moment with."
"Where is he now? The courier."
"Somewhere he is being encouraged to remember more than he initially claimed to." Matvei did not elaborate, and I did not ask him to.
"He gave up the photo easily enough. Too easily. Which tells me it was meant to be found, not hidden."
"Meant to be found by who?"
"By us. By you." Matvei looked at me directly for the first time since he had walked in, and whatever he saw on my face made something in his own expression soften by exactly one degree.
"This was not incidental surveillance, Isla. Nobody photographs a nurse walking into work by accident."
"And nobody hands that photograph to a man he expects to survive the conversation unless he wants the message delivered clearly."
"What do we do now?" I asked, because somebody needed to say something practical before the silence swallowed the whole kitchen.
"We do what we should have done days ago," Nikolai said. "You stop taking the staff entrance. You stop parking where anyone can watch you park."
"Every route becomes something we plan instead of something you assume is safe."
"That sounds less like a plan and more like a cage."
"It is a cage with better odds of keeping you alive in it." His jaw had gone tight in the way it only did when he was working hard to keep his voice level. "I would rather you resent me for a month than mourn you for the rest of my life."
Matvei watched the exchange without commenting, though something in his expression suggested he had heard some version of this argument before, on someone else, a long time ago, and had not liked how that particular story ended.
"There is a version of this where we move faster than they expect," he said finally. "Orlov built a habit of patience. We use it against him before he remembers to be careful."
Nikolai did not answer right away. He looked at the photo one more time, then at me, like he was recalculating every plan he had already made now that the two of us were sitting on the same side of the danger instead of me watching it happen from a safe distance.
I looked at the photo again, at my own face caught mid-stride, unaware, ordinary, a woman walking into a building she had walked into a thousand times before without once imagining someone was cataloguing the exact time she did it.
Two weeks ago I had been a witness who happened to be standing in the wrong hallway, a complication in somebody else's dangerous life that I could, in theory, have walked away from if I had been the type of person who walked away from things.
That version of me did not exist on this phone screen at all.
I was not incidental to any of this anymore. Whatever I had been to Orlov's people before this morning, an unknown, an inconvenience, a face nobody had bothered to look at twice, I had clearly become something else to them now.
I was a name on a list, and every single person sitting in this kitchen understood exactly what that meant, even if none of us said it out loud.