33. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
I had already called her twice by the time my phone rang with a number that was not hers.
Neither call had gone through at all. Not straight to voicemail, which would have meant her phone was simply off, but four rings and nothing, the specific kind of silence a phone makes when nobody is anywhere near it to answer.
There had been no patient on that floor tonight who had any reason to know her name. I had understood that the second the door closed behind her, and I had spent every minute since trying to convince myself I was wrong about what it meant.
Six years of training had taught me exactly what that particular silence usually preceded. I had spent every one of those years hoping I would never need to recognize it again.
I was not wrong. The screen lit up with a name I recognized from Isla's phone, not mine, because Renee had apparently decided calling me directly was faster than waiting for me to check messages I did not yet know existed.
"Nikolai." Her voice came out too fast, breathless in a way that told me she had been running before she ever dialed.
"Is Isla with you? Please tell me she's with you."
"She left forty minutes ago for a call from the hospital. A patient asking for her by name."
"There's no patient." Renee's voice cracked slightly on the word, fear doing what training usually kept locked down in people like her.
"I checked the second Marcus mentioned it, because nobody on that extension has any business calling for her specifically. I've been trying her cell for ten minutes straight."
"Where was she going? Which entrance?"
"The front, probably, that's the one closest to the lot she parks in." A pause, and I could hear her moving, footsteps fast against tile.
"Nikolai, I'm scared. This isn't like her, not answering."
"I know." I was already moving myself, keys in hand, the apartment suddenly feeling like the wrong place to be standing in.
"Call security. Ask if anyone saw her leave the lot. I will call you back."
I hung up before she could say anything else, because there was no version of that conversation that would help either of us faster than actually moving would.
My phone buzzed again before I reached the door. A different number this time, unknown, a single message waiting on the screen instead of a call.
I opened it standing in the hallway, my hand steadier than the rest of me had any right to be.
She sends her regards. I imagine you already suspect who has her. You are correct.
This was never going to end with a phone call and a name he stole, Nikolai. It was always going to end here.
No signature. None needed. I had spent six years learning exactly what Orlov's silence sounded like, and this was the opposite of that silence, a man finally comfortable enough to speak in his own voice again because he believed he had already won.
Something in me that had spent six years running toward exactly this kind of moment alone stood very still instead.
I thought of a kitchen table the night before, of a fire escape months before that, of every single time leaving alone had felt like the only honest thing left to offer anyone.
I thought of what I had told her on that couch two hours earlier, about choosing her over another errand, about learning the difference between being useful and being honest.
This was not a moment for either of those old instincts. This was a moment that required both of them at once, and every resource I had spent six years refusing to ask for.
I called Matvei first.
"He has her." I did not waste time on a greeting.
"Kovalenko. He took Isla from outside the hospital less than an hour ago, and he wants me to know it, which means he wants me to come alone."
Silence for exactly one second, which from Matvei was as close to shock as the man allowed himself in front of anyone.
"Where are you?"
"The apartment. Moving now."
"Do not move yet." His voice had gone flat, clipped, the tone he used when a plan was assembling itself faster than either of us could speak it out loud.
"You move alone into whatever he has waiting, and he gets everything he wants in the first ten minutes. I am calling Basin. You call the detective."
"Cruz."
"Cruz. Now, Nikolai. Not after you have already made a decision you cannot undo."
I stood in my own hallway with my hand still on the door and understood, with a clarity that cost me nothing to reach this time, that he was right, and that six months ago I would not have called him until I was three blocks from wherever I intended to go alone.
"I am not doing this without help," I said, and heard how strange the sentence sounded leaving my own mouth, how long it had been since I had said anything like it and meant it.
"Good." Matvei did not make it a moment. He simply moved past it, straight into the actual problem.
"Text me everything he sent you. Every word, exactly as written. I want Pavel looking at it inside five minutes."
I called Cruz next, and she picked up on the second ring, alert in the particular way people get who sleep with their phone within reach out of professional habit rather than personal comfort.
"Stepanov. This better be good."
"He has Isla."
The silence on her end lasted longer than Matvei's had, and when she spoke again every trace of sleep had left her voice entirely.
"Kovalenko."
"He sent a message confirming it himself. Taken from outside the hospital within the last hour."
"I'm already moving." I heard a door somewhere behind her voice, keys, the particular urgency of someone who had been half expecting a call like this one for longer than either of us wanted to admit.
"Meet me at the lot two blocks from the Red Hook property. I'm pulling every asset I can justify without a warrant and a few I probably can't."
"That is not enough time for a warrant."
"No, it isn't." Her voice hardened into something I recognized, the same flat certainty she had used on Isla that same morning about promises she could actually keep.
"But I've got surveillance running on three properties tied to that shell company, and if he's stupid enough to bring her somewhere we're already watching, that changes what I need permission for."
The next twenty minutes moved faster than any twenty minutes I could remember living through since the night of the fire.
Pavel called back within ten, all business, no wasted words.
The number Kovalenko had used to text me traced to a burner purchased two days earlier from a shop nowhere near any of his known properties, a dead end by design, exactly what I expected from a man careful enough to hide behind a company name for six years.
Basin's people worked faster than the trace did.
Three properties tied to Kovalenko Restoration and Claims sat inside a ten mile radius, and by the time I reached my car two of them had eyes confirmed, quiet men in parked cars reporting back on channels Matvei had access to that I had never once asked how he acquired.
I called Renee back once, brief, to tell her security had turned up nothing on the cameras yet and that she should go home and lock her door behind her.
She argued for exactly one sentence before she gave it up, because six years of watching me function under pressure had apparently taught her when arguing cost more than it was worth.
The Red Hook property came back first. A van matching a description Cruz's people had flagged an hour earlier for an unrelated reason had crossed a traffic camera two blocks from the building, timestamped less than thirty minutes after Isla's last confirmed location.
"That is our building," Matvei said, reading the same feed over my shoulder in the passenger seat, his voice low and certain in a way that steadied something in my chest I had not realized still needed steadying.
"You are absolutely certain?"
"I trust it enough to move on, and so should you. That is the only certainty either of us gets tonight."
Forty minutes later I stood at the edge of a gravel lot two blocks from a warehouse I had never personally set foot inside, surrounded by more organized law enforcement presence than I had ever willingly stood this close to in my life.
Matvei stood at my shoulder, silent and coiled, the particular stillness he wore when violence was close enough to smell.
Basin's people held the perimeter further out, unmarked cars angled into the dark like men who had done exactly this kind of waiting before, and for once in six years I was not the only one carrying the weight of what came next.
Basin found me before Cruz did, clasping my shoulder once, hard, no words wasted on a comfort neither one of us actually needed tonight. He had brought four men and left the rest watching the other two properties, in case this was misdirection instead of the answer it felt like.
"If it is the wrong building, we still have two more we can move on before sunrise," he said. "It is not going to be the wrong building."
Cruz met us at the hood of an unmarked sedan, a laptop open beside a printed satellite image weighted down against the wind by a coffee cup gone cold an hour ago.
"Talk to me," I said.
"Thermal picked up movement twenty minutes ago. Two men on the exterior, one more visible through a window on the east side." She tapped the image without looking up from it.
"One room lit on the second floor. Everything else dark."
"Is she in that room?"
"I can't confirm that from a satellite feed, Nikolai." She said it plainly, not unkindly, the version of honesty I had learned to trust more than easy reassurance.
"But it's the only occupied room in a building that should be empty at this hour, and that's the best answer I've got for you right now."
"It is enough."
"It has to be." She finally looked up at me, something steady and certain settling into her face, the look of a woman who had already decided which version of tonight she intended to live with afterward.
"Federal partners are twenty minutes out. I don't want to wait twenty minutes, and I'm guessing you don't either."
"I do not."
"Then here's where we stand." She slid the image another inch toward me, tapping the single lit window a second time.
"I've got eyes on the building right now. Entry teams staged at two points, ready the second I give the order. Every second we wait is a second he gets to decide what happens next instead of us."
Matvei's hand found my shoulder once, brief, grounding, the closest thing to a blessing the man had ever offered me in eleven years of knowing him.
"You do not have to be the one who says it," he said, low enough that it stayed between the two of us. "Nobody here would think less of you either way."
"I know that." I did not look away from the satellite image, from the single bright window that might or might not hold everything I had left to lose.
"I am saying it anyway, because six years ago I would have already been through that door alone, and tonight I am still standing here, asking three other people to walk through it with me instead."
Cruz straightened, phone in hand, waiting.
"Eyes on the building," she said. "Say the word."
I said it.