Chapter 14 Sergei
SERGEI
The guard’s voice is a little too fast. His hand holds the rifle a little too high. I feel the old instinct rise. It isn’t a roar. It’s a quiet pull that tells me where to look. “Show me,” I murmur.
We move toward the stairwell door. The air in the corridor is warm from the vents, but there’s a colder draft slipping through the metal frame. The guard opens the door and starts down. I follow, with Kirill behind me. The stairwell smells like concrete dust and recycled air.
Halfway down, the guard stops and points at the landing below.
“There,” he says. “Something fell.”
I see a dark smear on the concrete and a small scrap of cloth near the rail. He goes down one more step and leans forward, his back to us.
Everything in me goes still.
His shoulders tighten. His fingers shift on the rifle. The angle of his head changes a little too much.
I move before he turns.
He spins around and swings the rifle stock at my face.
I duck, grab the weapon with one hand and his wrist with the other, and yank.
The rifle hits the rail and cracks loudly.
He tries to kick me. I shift my weight and slam his shoulder into the wall.
The air rushes out of him. He reaches for the knife at his belt, but I already have my hand on his throat.
His eyes go wide. There’s real fear there now.
“You picked the wrong staircase,” I tell him.
I twist. His neck snaps against my palm. His body drops heavily onto the steps. The sound echoes up and down the shaft.
Kirill is there a moment later, rifle raised, breathing hard.
“Shit,” he says. “He was on watch with us two hours ago.”
“He was waiting,” I answer. I look down at the broken rifle, the cloth on the landing, the smear of blood that isn’t mine. “The Courier got to him. Or someone who works for him did.”
Kirill glances up toward the ceiling of the stairwell, toward the floor where the apartment sits. His jaw clenches.
“If he placed someone here,” he says, “what else did he place?”
“The bigger question,” I say, “is who he came for once I left that room.”
The answer hits both of us at the same time.
Raina.
I take the stairs up two at a time. Kirill stays close. The door at our landing is still closed. I shove it open and step into the hall. My heart beats heavily, but my head stays clear. Panic wastes time. Time is the only thing the Courier really wants from me.
The apartment door is open. The living room lamps are on low. The air smells like cocoa, fabric softener, and a faint trace of blood from Vera’s body that we moved earlier to the cold room.
“Nadia first,” I say.
We go straight to her room. I push the door in with my fingertips and step inside.
Nadia lies on her side under the blanket, tiny fists tucked near her chest. Her lips are parted. Her breathing is slow and deep. It isn’t the sharp, restless sleep she has after nightmares. It’s heavy and still. Her bear is pressed against her chest.
Anastasia sits in the chair beside the bed. Her hands are on her knees. Her eyes are on Nadia’s face. When she hears my step, she looks up.
“She cried until her throat hurt,” she says in a low voice. “She asked for Vera and for Raina and for you. Then she drank her cocoa and finally settled. She fell asleep fast. It worried me, but I thought she just ran out of strength.”
Her voice shakes on the last words. She takes a breath and holds on to her control.
I move around the bed and touch Nadia’s hair. It’s warm and damp from earlier tears. Her eyelids don’t flutter. The cocoa mug on the bedside table is almost empty. Another mug sits on the dresser with a trace of chocolate at the rim.
“Where is Raina?” I ask.
Anastasia blinks as if I slapped her. The color runs out of her face.
“She was right here,” she says. “She sat in this chair. She drank her cocoa. She told Nadia she’d stay until she fell asleep. I only left to get a clean cloth and more water. I was gone for one minute. When I came back, the chair was empty.”
“Did you hear anything?” I ask. “A door, a struggle, a voice.”
“Nothing,” she answers. Tears stand in her eyes now. She doesn’t let them fall. “I would’ve heard her fight. I know how she moves. I heard nothing. I would never let anyone take her. I swear, Sergei. I would never betray you. I would throw myself in front of her first.”
She grips the edge of the chair until her knuckles pale. Her whole body shakes, not with guilt, but with a kind of raw fear.
I study the room. The sheets are smooth except for Nadia’s small imprint. The curtain is still. The window latch is secure. The closet door is closed the way Raina always leaves it when Nadia is inside. There’s no sign of a struggle. No knocked-over lamp. No broken glass. No scuff on the floor.
My gut says one thing.
Someone came prepared. Someone knew exactly how to move in this house. Someone counted on my trust in my own walls. Someone counted on the fact that Raina would not expect an attack in the room where she tucks our child in.
“We lock the building down,” I say.
I pull the blanket up to Nadia’s chin and tuck it in. I press a kiss to her forehead, hold there for a second, and listen. Her breathing stays slow and steady.
Anastasia watches me. Her eyes are bright with tears she still refuses to let fall.
“I won’t leave her,” she says. “You can put a gun in my hand. You can lock the door. I will sit here all night.”
“I know,” I answer. I mean it. If she’s playing me, she’s the best liar I’ve seen in years. “You stay with her. You don’t open this door for anyone but me. You hear my voice, not a radio call, not a code. Only me.”
She nods hard. “Yes.”
I step into the hall and signal Kirill. My voice carries through the apartment and into the net.
“Full lockdown,” I say. “No one leaves this floor. No one uses the stairwell alone. I want two men at each access point and two more inside the service corridors. You search every room, every shaft, every pipe chase. You check the camera feeds from the moment we left this apartment. The Courier got past us. I want to know how.”
My men move fast. Boots hit the floor in a tight rhythm. Heads turn, guns rise, commands crack into radios. Vlad appears at the end of the hall, face set.
“We already started a sweep when the stairwell report came,” he says. “We found nothing on the lower levels yet. No unknowns in the lobby. No strange vehicles at the garage entrance. If someone took her, they knew where the blind spots are.”
“Which is the same as saying someone fed them our map,” I answer.
I don’t need to say Mikhail’s name. It sits between us like a stone.
I send Vlad to lead the outer sweep with three men. Kirill takes the upper floors. I take the heart of the problem.
Mikhail waits in the storage room where I left him. Plastic cuffs on his wrists. Tape over his mouth. Two guards on either side, rifles steady. A camera in the corner, red light blinking.
I enter and shut the door behind me. The air in here is cool and still. The concrete floor holds the faint echo of earlier steps. Mikhail’s eyes lift at the sound.
He reads my face and flinches before I even speak.
I walk up to him, peel the tape off his mouth, and let it hang from my fingers.
“Something changed,” he whispers. His voice shakes.
“Something changed the moment you let the Courier walk into my walls,” I say. “Now it’s worse. Raina is gone.”
His face goes slack. For a second, I see real shock.
“Gone?” he repeats. “How?”
“If I knew how, you’d still be breathing because you’d be useful,” I say. “You lied about the bathhouse. You lied about the glitch. You lied about what the Courier asked for and what he took. You still have pieces you didn’t give me. I want them now.”
He shakes his head. “I told you everything.”
“You told me the part that kept you alive,” I answer. “You didn’t think he would take her. You thought he only wanted to make me run. You misread him. You misread me.”
“He always goes for the person who thinks they’re safe,” Mikhail says. His eyes flick past me to the door, to the camera, back to my face. “You built a fortress in this city and you think a fortress is enough. It isn’t.”
“That sounds like a speech you rehearsed,” I say.
“It’s the truth,” he replies. “He doesn’t stand at your door with a gun. He stands in your pipes, in your files, in your guards’ pockets. You’re fighting a losing battle, Sergei. You can’t win against something that has no face.”
He says my name without permission. That almost bothers me more than the content.
“You thought the same thing when the old bosses came for you,” he goes on, voice growing stronger as he sees he still has room to speak.
“You thought you could change a few pieces and hold the board. You cannot change the rules. You built this house on the same bones they did. He knows those bones. He was there. He watched you use the same tools. He knows you will react the way they did when someone touched their children.”
For a moment I see the terrified man who once sat in my basement with his hands on a keyboard, begging me for more time and more hardware while the city burned outside. He’s the same man. He just picked a different side this time.
“You’re right about one thing,” I say.
He looks up fast, hope sparking in his eyes.
“You’re right that he thinks I’ll act like them,” I say. “You’re wrong about everything else.”
I put my hand on his jaw and tilt his head back. His eyes widen. He opens his mouth, maybe to scream or to beg, I don’t know. I don’t give him the time.
I twist hard and fast. Bone pops. The sound is clean and final. His body goes slack in the chair. His head hangs at an angle that doesn’t belong on a living man.
My guard on the left flinches. The one on the right stands still.
“Get rid of him,” I say. My voice is steady again. “Use the old furnace. We don’t celebrate this and we don’t write it down. You remember what he did, but you don’t repeat his name to anyone who doesn’t need to know it.”
They nod. I step out and pull the door closed. The weight in my chest doesn’t ease, but it settles into something solid. There’s one less weak link between my house and the Courier.