Chapter 27 #2
The man hesitates. Then he turns and leads us through a set of double doors into a space that’s trying very hard to look like a nineteenth-century gentleman’s club and mostly succeeds.
Deep green walls. Chesterfield sofas. Oil paintings of horses and hunting scenes.
A fire crackles in a grate the size of a small car, and the handful of members scattered across the room glance up with the polished disinterest of people who’ve trained themselves not to react to anything.
Regina Orlov is in the far corner. She’s seated in a wingback chair with a cup of something steaming on the side table, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, a leather folio open in her lap. She looks like someone’s elegant grandmother reviewing her investments.
She looks up as we approach, and the reading glasses come off with a slow, deliberate fold that tells me she saw us the second we walked through the door. Everything before this was theatre. The book. The tea. The posture of a woman undisturbed.
“Mr Voronov,” she says, as if I’ve arrived for a scheduled lunch. “How unexpected.”
“Regina.” I don’t sit. I don’t wait to be offered a seat. I stand over her with Lidiya at my side and Kirill two steps behind, and I let the geometry of it do the talking. “We need to have a conversation.”
Her gaze slides to Lidiya, devoid of any emotion. “I see this was a good match.” Her shrewd gaze lands back on me.
“A good match,” I repeat, letting the words curdle between us. “Is that what you call it? Pairing a woman with a price tag and a room full of men with chequebooks?”
“I call it opportunity,” Orlov says, unruffled. She closes the folio in her lap and sets it aside with the care of someone who values her possessions. “For both parties. The women are compensated. The buyers receive companionship. Everyone leaves satisfied.”
“Not everyone,” I say. “Some of them don’t leave at all.”
The teacup pauses halfway to her lips. It’s fractional—a hesitation measured in millimetres—but I catch it, and she knows I catch it. She takes the sip anyway, sets the cup down, and folds her hands.
“I’m not sure what you’re implying.”
“I’m not implying anything. I’m telling you that three women purchased through your auctions in the last six months have disappeared. No trace. No contact. No bodies, which is either very good news or very bad news depending on your perspective.”
Orlov’s face doesn’t change. But her fingers lace tighter, the knuckles whitening beneath papery skin. She’s recalculating. I can see it the way you see weather shift—not the storm itself, but the pressure dropping.
“My auctions are legitimate events,” she says. “What buyers do after the two hours is not my concern. Case in point.” She returns her stare to Lidiya for a second.
“Who is the other bidder, Regina?” I say, sitting down and leaning my elbows on my knees. “I want a name. Not leaving without it.”
“I am not in the business of taking names unless bidders owe me.”
“So you are telling me these events aren’t invite-only? Anyone can show up?”
“They are curated,” she says, choosing the word like she’s selecting a diamond from a tray. “Vetted. Referrals only.”
“Then you have a referral trail. A name attached to a paddle. A bank that processed the wire.” I keep my voice conversational, the way you do when you’re holding a blade behind your back and want the other person to keep talking.
“Eighty million doesn’t come from a petty cash drawer, Regina.
Someone authorised that transfer. Someone’s compliance team signed off.
Someone’s name is on a piece of paper, and you have it. ”
“I have confidentiality obligations to my clients.”
“You have obligations to me now,” I say.
“Because the woman standing next to me was supposed to disappear, and she didn’t.
And the three men who came to my house to correct that mistake are currently in pieces.
Which means your operation has a leak, or worse—it is the operation.
Either way, the next body that turns up lands in your lap. ”
The fire crackles. Someone across the room turns a page of a newspaper with exaggerated casualness.
Orlov studies me with the careful assessment of a woman deciding how much of her hand to show. Her gaze flicks to Lidiya again, and this time something shifts in it.
“You have ten seconds, and five of them are already gone. If you think I won’t kill an eighty-year-old woman, think again.”
“Seventy-nine,” she says primly. “You want a name, it’s going to cost you.”
“You got an extra fifteen million from the yacht, Regina,” I say, sitting back. “I’ve already paid my due.”
She purses her lips. She knows I’m right and is in no position to negotiate.
“Stanislav Gorbachev.”
The name drops into the room like a stone into still water.
I know the name. Everyone in the Bratva ecosystem knows the name, even if most of them have never met the man.
Gorbachev is old guard—Soviet-era money that survived the collapse, reinvented itself in the nineties, and metastasised across Europe like a tumour with a passport collection.
He’s not Bratva. He’s something adjacent.
Something that operates in the spaces between organisations, filling the cracks with cash and influence until the walls depend on him to stay upright.
He’s also supposed to be dead.
“Gorbachev died in 2019,” I say, testing the name against her composure. “Heart failure. Monaco. Closed casket.”
“Closed casket,” Orlov repeats, and the ghost of a smile crosses her thin lips. “How convenient.”
The implication settles into my chest like a splinter. A faked death. A man who erased himself from the board so he could move without being tracked. No surveillance. No intelligence updates. No flags on financial transfers because the account holder is officially a corpse.
“How long have you known?” I ask, and my voice has dropped into the register that makes people confess or run. Orlov does neither.
“Known what, precisely?”
Shaking my head, I chuckle. “Are we playing this game? Fine. Allegedly, how long have you known he is alive?”
“Time doesn’t matter, Mr Voronov,” she says.
“Then what does?”
“What he was looking for. Or rather, who.” Orlov’s eyes land on Lidiya, and the snap of information is like a loud crack in the room. “His granddaughter.”