Chapter 17
Maksim
T he glow of three screens turned my office into something clinical.
Blue light washing over everything—my hands, the cold coffee I'd forgotten hours ago, the tension in my shoulders that came from chasing ghosts through digital architecture.
I'd been at this for three hours. Long enough that my eyes burned.
Long enough that the city beyond my windows had shifted from afternoon gold to evening grey.
Elena Voss.
The name sat at the center of my investigation like a spider in a web. And at first glance, she looked real.
Her gallery website was polished. Professional.
The kind of clean design that cost money and communicated taste—white space and elegant typography, high-resolution images of exhibition openings where well-dressed people held wine glasses and pretended to understand conceptual art.
Voss-Laurent Gallery, established Chelsea presence, specializing in emerging artists.
The social media presence backed it up. Instagram with three thousand followers. LinkedIn with appropriate connections. Even reviews—actual reviews from artists who'd supposedly worked with her, praising her eye for talent and her commitment to emerging voices.
If I'd been anyone else, I would have believed it.
But I wasn't anyone else.
The website was my first thread.
Domain registration. A simple check that most people never thought to run—why would they? But I'd been running checks like this since I was nineteen, building the surveillance infrastructure that kept my family alive. The Voss-Laurent Gallery website had been registered eight weeks ago.
Eight weeks.
A gallery that claimed to be established. That spoke of a spring collection with the casual authority of a business that had weathered multiple seasons. Registered eight weeks before reaching out to an artist whose work had only recently appeared online.
The timing made my skin prickle.
I pulled up the social media photos. Started running them through facial recognition, through reverse image searches, through the algorithms I'd built for exactly this purpose—finding stolen identities, manufactured personas, the digital paper trails that criminals thought they'd covered.
The woman in Elena Voss's photos existed.
Her name was Margot Hoffmann. She ran a gallery in Berlin called Galerie Hoffmann. Real gallery. Real person. Completely unconnected to Voss-Laurent or anyone named Elena.
Her photos had been lifted wholesale. The exhibition openings, the professional headshots, the candid moments of someone who actually lived the life Elena Voss was pretending to have. Margot Hoffmann had no idea her face was being used to bait a woman in Brooklyn into walking into a trap.
The ice started forming in my stomach then. A cold that had nothing to do with the air conditioning and everything to do with what I was finding.
The email was next.
Tracing email origins through VPNs was tedious work. Layer after layer of misdirection, each one designed to make the sender untraceable. Most people gave up after the first redirect. After the second. By the third, you needed serious resources and serious patience.
I had both.
The first layer bounced through a server in Amsterdam. Standard privacy measure—nothing suspicious on its own. The second routed through somewhere in Eastern Europe, harder to pin down, the kind of infrastructure that existed specifically to make tracking difficult.
The third layer led me to a shell company registered in Cyprus. Financial architecture I recognized—the pattern of money and data flowing through jurisdictions that didn't ask questions.
By the fourth layer, I knew.
Moscow.
The server that sent Elena Voss's email—the email that had made Auralia cry with joy, that had dangled her deepest dream in front of her like candy before a child—routed back to infrastructure I'd flagged eighteen months ago.
Deshnev.
My algorithm had tagged it during our ongoing surveillance of Belyaev operations.
Anton's people used Deshnev digital architecture the way they used Deshnev financial networks—borrowed power, borrowed cover, the alliance of convenience that connected Moscow's untouchables to Anton's expansion ambitions.
I sat back in my chair.
The evidence glowed on my screens. Irrefutable. Damning. A complete picture of exactly what had been done to the woman I loved.
Anton hadn't just found Auralia's paintings. He'd studied her.
The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow.
He'd done his research. Read her posts, probably.
Tracked her online presence. Watched her long enough to understand what mattered to her—not just her connection to me, not just her value as leverage, but the thing she wanted most in the world.
Her art.
Her dream.
The cruelty of it was surgical. This wasn't a blunt instrument—wasn't a threat to her body or a demand for information. This was something worse. Anton had taken the hope that lived at the center of her heart and turned it into a weapon.
She'd cried when she'd read that email. Happy tears, the kind that came from finally being seen. From believing, for one bright moment, that her work was good enough. That she was good enough.
All of it manufactured. All of it designed to hurt her.
I saved the evidence. Encrypted it twice—once with my standard protocols, once with the algorithm only Nikolai knew how to decrypt. Chain of custody. Documentation. The kind of careful record-keeping that would matter when we made Anton answer for what he'd done.
My hands were steady as I worked. They always were, when I was in mission mode. The trembling would come later, in private, when I allowed myself to feel what was currently locked behind the walls I'd built.
But one thought burned through the professional detachment.
I had to tell her.
I had to watch her face when I explained that Elena Voss didn't exist. That the gallery was fake. That every word of praise in that email had been calculated manipulation from a man who wanted to use her dreams to destroy her.
And then I had to make sure Anton paid.
Not just for the threat to her safety. Not just for the surveillance and the scheming and the way he'd forced us all to live in defensive positions.
For every moment of hope he'd stolen from her.
For the way her face had lit up when she'd burst into my office.
For the tears she'd cried before she knew they were poison.
I closed my laptop. Rose from my chair. The cold coffee sat untouched, forgotten, a minor casualty of the war we were fighting.
Auralia was somewhere in this building. Probably curled up somewhere soft, probably trying not to think about what I might find. Waiting for news she already suspected was bad.
I had to tell her.
And then I had to burn Anton's empire to the ground.
T he living room couch had become her nest over these weeks—a corner where the afternoon light fell just right, where she could curl against the cushions and feel contained.
Ghost sprawled across her lap, his grey head resting on her thigh, those mismatched eyes tracking me the moment I entered the room.
She was holding a book. Some paperback with a creased spine and a cover I didn't recognize.
She hadn't turned a page in the twenty minutes I'd been watching her from the doorway.
The same page, the same position, the same careful performance of someone pretending to read while their mind churned somewhere else entirely.
She knew.
The moment she looked up—really looked, meeting my eyes with that directness she had—I could see it. The knowledge already forming in the set of her jaw, the way her hand stilled on Ghost's fur.
"It's him, isn't it."
Not a question. A statement. The tone of someone who'd been expecting the worst and was simply waiting for confirmation.
I crossed to her. Sat on the edge of the couch, close enough to touch but not touching yet. Ghost whined softly, sensing the tension in the air the way dogs always did.
"Ptichka."
"Just tell me." Her voice was steady. Too steady—the kind of control that came from bracing for impact. "I'd rather know."
I took her hands. Small and paint-stained, the calluses of someone who worked with brushes and chemicals and the rough edges of canvas stretchers. Her fingers were cold.
"Elena Voss doesn't exist," I said quietly. "The website was registered eight weeks ago. The photos were stolen from a real gallerist in Berlin. The email traces back through four layers of VPN to a server in Moscow." I paused. Made myself say the rest. "Deshnev infrastructure. Connected to Anton."
The whole thing was built to lure you out.
I watched the words land.
Watched her face as she processed them—the flicker of something that might have been hope dying, replaced by something harder. Something that looked like resignation wearing armor.
She didn't cry.
That was the worst part. I'd expected tears—the kind of devastation that came from having a dream crushed. Instead, she just nodded. A single, economical movement.
And something behind her eyes shuttered closed.
I knew that look. Had seen it in the mirror often enough during my own childhood, when showing emotion meant showing weakness and showing weakness meant being targeted. The survival mechanism of someone who'd learned that wanting things too openly made them vulnerable.
She was folding the dream away. Putting it somewhere it couldn't hurt her anymore.
I couldn't bear it.
"Auralia." My voice came out rougher than I intended. "Look at me."
She did. Reluctantly. Her grey-green eyes were dry but distant—already somewhere else, already retreating into the fortress she'd built around herself long before I ever found her.
"When this is over—" I gripped her hands tighter, trying to anchor her to the moment, to me. "When Anton is gone and you're safe. I'm going to make some calls. Real ones."
"Maks—"