Chapter 26 Lev
Lev
Tony is explaining the Batumi account structure, and I’m thinking about Polina’s mouth.
More specifically, I’m thinking about the way she convulsed in my arms when she came.
That was two days ago.
I’ve spent most of the time since in this conference room, sitting across from Tony and Boris and a rotating cast of men trying to decide whether I’m worth keeping alive. At least forty percent of my brain has been tied up in what happened in that gym.
Still, I answer Tony’s question. The Batumi account numbers are automatic. I built that myself, and pulling it up takes about as much effort as breathing. Useful for the current operation. Less useful for my concentration, since it keeps freeing up mental space I could be putting to better use.
Ruslan watches me from across the table, knows exactly where my attention has gone, and chooses, out of loyalty, to say absolutely nothing about it. I appreciate that more than I’ll ever tell him.
“We decoded something out of a relay station in Ryazan,” Tony states, setting his pen down. “Came in two nights ago.” He opens a new folder and pushes it across.
I read the first page. By the second, I know exactly what I’m looking at.
“He’s moving on all three territories simultaneously,” I realize aloud.
“Tver, Yaroslavl, the southern Moscow corridor.” Tony folds his hands on the table. “End of month. Twelve days.”
I set the folder down. My father has been building a coordinated three-front operation for weeks.
The timeline isn’t a response to my defection.
He may have accelerated it, but the structure was already in place before I walked through these gates.
Looks like he’s done waiting to see if I’d come back and decided to move without me.
“The Tver operation,” Tony prompts. “How much do you know about the structure?”
“I designed it two years ago.” I push the folder back. “Entry points, timing windows, the chain of command between ground teams and the operational directors. He’s running my blueprint exactly.”
Tony looks up. “Which raises the question of why.”
“Yes,” I agree. “It does.”
Because my father knows I’m here. My guess is he figured out Polina is a Kozlov.
Even if his network needed a few days to identify her, they’ve had enough time by now.
It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots.
He knows I walked through Dmitri’s gates willingly and handed over everything I had.
Running my blueprint after that should be the last thing he does.
“Or,” Boris says from the doorway, “he’s running it because he doesn’t care that you know. Because his timeline is aggressive enough that it doesn’t matter.”
Dmitri follows Boris in. Alexei comes last and takes up his usual position against the far wall, scowling in my direction. He does this every session—takes up space without ever fully entering the room.
Dmitri reads both pages without speaking. When he looks up, he addresses me. “Walk me through the Tver entry structure.”
I walk him through all of it—the three access points, the timing windows built around the security rotation, the staging site that exists in no official record because I made sure of it, and the two directors who coordinate with my father’s office, along with the specific couriers they use.
Boris takes notes as I go. Tony checks something on his tablet and nods.
“If he knows you’re here,” Dmitri says, “and he’s running your blueprint anyway, what does that tell you about how much time he thinks we have?”
“That he doesn’t think we have enough. He knows what a counter-operation of this scale requires. He’s betting we’re not ready. And… he might be right.”
“He’s not right about the Tver entry points,” Boris states. “Not anymore.”
“You know how to take it apart?” Dmitri asks.
“Yes.”
“Then we use that.”
Alexei doesn’t move from the wall. “Or maybe this is exactly how you’d build a trap if you wanted us to walk straight into it.”
Tony keeps writing. “He’s had two weeks to put us in a bad position. He hasn’t. The Volga routes held up against eighteen months of port authority records. The Kazan floor plans matched our independent verification on all four levels.”
Alexei says nothing. For him, that’s as close to an endorsement as I’m going to get, and I’ll take it.
We work another four hours. The counter-operation for Tver takes shape across two whiteboards.
Yaroslavl is still partial, but the structure holds.
By the time we break for the afternoon, I’ve stopped being an intelligence source they’re tolerating and started being the only man in the compound who understands how my father thinks when timing matters.
Ruslan catches me in the corridor and falls into step beside me. “I’ve been keeping tabs. Frol’s been making calls. Every contact you ever used. Anyone who ran work for you, owed you a favor, or had your number saved in their phone. He’s working backward through your whole network.”
“How far has he gotten?”
“Far enough that it’s a question of when, not if.
There are two men in Kazan who know the full scope of what you handed over.
If Frol reaches them before the facility operation closes, your father has the complete picture by morning.
” He waits for a guard to pass the far end of the corridor.
“I told Boris this morning. He’s moving Kazan up forty-eight hours. ”
“That’s tight.”
“It’s workable.”
“Stay close to Boris until Kazan closes,” I tell him. “After that, we figure out the rest.”
He nods, and we go back inside.
The afternoon session runs long. When it finally breaks, I’m the last one at the table, checking account numbers against a cross-reference grid Boris left behind.
Part of that is because the work matters.
Part of it is because Polina passed the conference room window twice in the last hour, and I wanted to go after her.
She’s in the corridor when I come out.
The first thing I think when I see her face is how she looked in the gym when I fucked her against the wall. I get that under control before I’ve taken three steps, which I consider an improvement.
“How much did you hear?” I ask.
“Enough to understand we’re in for some shit.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
She’s quiet as we walk past the junction where the corridor splits, and neither of us takes the turn toward her room.
“Are you going to have to fight them?” she asks. “Your father. Frol. When this happens…are you going to be in it personally?”
I could manage the edges of this answer.
I could point to timeline uncertainty, operational flexibility, or the possibility things resolve before it reaches that point.
She’d know what I was doing before I finished the sentence.
She’s been reading people in crisis for a decade, and she doesn’t ask questions she isn’t braced to hear answered honestly.
“Yes,” I tell her.
She takes that in without asking for a softer version of it. She doesn’t tell me it’ll be fine, because she has no data to support that claim and she knows it. She just lets it be what it is.
Then she reaches over and takes my hand.
She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t say anything to explain it or frame it. We walk the full length of the corridor in silence, and I think about everything she’s still carrying—what the gym didn’t resolve and the two years she keeps returning. She took my hand anyway.
When we reach her door she stops. She looks at me for a long moment, and I watch her decide against whatever she was about to say. She holds on one second longer, then lets go.
And then she goes inside without looking back.