30. Yaromir
YAROMIR
I know something is wrong before I reach the house.
It starts as a feeling I don’t trust because feelings are unreliable things. The car turns through the outer road toward the estate, and my attention keeps going to my phone. No message from Anya. No complaint about the guards. No cute little demand asking when I’m coming back.
The gates come into view, and I see Viktor before the car stops.
He’s waiting outside the main entrance, not inside. Coat unbuttoned, phone in hand, face controlled in a way I recognize too well.
Something has happened.
My driver barely brakes before I open the door.
Viktor comes toward me fast.
“Where is she?” I ask.
He stops. That’s answer enough.
The world goes quiet around the edges.
“Where is my wife?”
“She’s gone.”
For a second, the words don’t make sense.
Gone. What the fuck?
I step closer to him. “Explain.”
Viktor’s jaw tightens. “Her phone is upstairs. Guards thought she was in the room. No one saw her leave through the main entrance. We’re checking the service gates now.”
Rage fills my head, floods my vision. Where the fuck is my wife?
I turn toward the house, and every guard near the steps goes still. “She walked out of a locked estate?” I ask.
Viktor says nothing.
I look back at him. “Or someone helped her?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Then find out.”
“We are.”
“Faster.”
He nods once, already reaching for his phone.
I move past him and enter the house.
The main hall looks exactly the same as it did this morning. Marble floor. Dark stairs. Tall windows. Staff disappearing into doorways because they can feel what has entered with me.
Her absence is in the room like smoke.
I take the stairs two at a time.
Our bedroom door is open. Her phone sits on the vanity, face up, useless. Her pale dress is thrown over the chair. One drawer is half-open. The bathroom cabinet has been disturbed, towels not quite lined up the way the staff would leave them.
She changed clothes. She planned enough to leave her phone.
My jaw tightens.
I pick it up. Locked.
It doesn’t matter. My thumb moves over the screen, and for one stupid second, I think of her hands holding it at breakfast. Her annoyance. Her father’s messages. The way she pushed the phone away like she could push him out of her life by force.
“Find her father,” I tell Viktor, who has followed me upstairs. “Now.”
He speaks into his phone, then looks back at me. “Already trying.”
“What else?”
He hesitates. I hate hesitation.
“What else?”
“A maid may have seen her near the service corridor.”
“May have?”
“She’s scared.”
“Bring her.”
“No need,” he says carefully. “She says Anya was wearing a scarf. Plain coat. Dark trousers. She moved with the delivery van when the east gate opened.”
My hand closes around Anya’s phone. The screen cracks.
Viktor’s eyes flick down, then back up. “She left willingly,” he says.
I look around the room. Her brush on the vanity. A ribbon near the bed. One of my shirts folded badly on the chair because she never folds anything properly. Her presence is everywhere, and she’s not here.
Why?
Because I said no again?
Because she felt trapped?
I turn toward Viktor. “Her father’s phone.”
“What about it?”
“The messages were from him.”
Viktor’s expression narrows. “I’ll get the records,” he says, “but I checked a few hours ago and he’s where you put him up. He never left.”
Before he can move, my phone buzzes. Unknown number.
For one second, I already know.
I open it.
A photo fills the screen.
At first, I don’t understand what I’m looking at.
A warehouse. Gray light. A man’s hand at the back of a woman’s head. A kiss.
I blink, and the faces come into focus. It’s Anya… and Dmitri.
The world drops out from under my feet.
My body goes still.
Not because I’m calm. Because something inside me has gone so violent it has no room to move.
Viktor takes one step closer. “Yaromir?”
I don’t answer.
I stare at the image. Dmitri’s hand is in her hair. Her face is partly hidden by the angle. His body blocks most of hers. The picture is close enough to look intimate, far enough to hide force.
Then I see her hand.
It’s raised against his chest. Pushing, perhaps. Touching, perhaps. I can’t tell.
But I see the ring. Her wedding ring.
My ring on her finger while Dmitri’s mouth is on hers.
The room turns red at the edges. A real wash of heat behind my eyes, a brutal narrowing of the world until there’s only that image and the sound of my own breathing.
She ran to him?
The thought is so ugly I almost reject it immediately.
Almost.
Then the jealousy comes. Not clean. Not rational. Not worthy of the control I have spent my life building. It comes like a blade under the ribs.
“No,” Viktor says.
I look at him. He has seen the photo. He’s reading my face now, and for once, he ignores the danger of speaking.
“No,” he repeats. “Look at her hand.”
“I’m looking.”
“She’s pushing him.”
“Is she?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
Viktor holds my gaze. “Yes.”
I look back at the picture. I don’t see what he does. But maybe I’m not looking at it objectively.
I forward the image to Viktor. “Trace it.”
“Already on it.”
Another message arrives. No photo this time. Just text.
She came when I called. Maybe she remembers who she belonged to first.
My hand tightens again.
Viktor sees my face and says, “Don’t answer.”
I almost laugh. “Do I look like I want to text him?”
“You look like you want to go alone and kill him with your hands.”
I look at him. “I’m going to kill him. Now let’s go.”
“Where?” he asks bewildered.
“I will tear down the city to find her,” I say, walking out the room before he can reply.
My phone rings before the car reaches the main road.
Larisa.
For half a second, I consider ignoring it.
Then I answer. “This is not the time.”
Her voice comes through cool and dry. “You don’t want to know where your wife is?”
Everything in me goes still.
Viktor looks at me immediately.
I sit straighter. “What did you say?”
“I said I know where Anya is.”
My hand tightens around the phone. “And how do you know that?”
Larisa makes a small sound, impatient and unimpressed. “Because unlike the rest of the house, I didn’t mistake that girl’s pretty face for innocence.”
My jaw locks. “Careful.”
“No,” she says sharply. “You be careful. I warned you about her.”
“She was taken.”
“Was she?” Larisa asks. “Or did she leave?”
The photo flashes in my head again.
Dmitri’s mouth on hers. Her hand against his chest. My ring on her finger.
Rage climbs back up my throat, but I force it down. Larisa wants reaction. She always does.
“Say what you know,” I tell her.
“I knew the girl had ill intentions.”
Viktor hears enough from my expression to start typing on his phone.
Larisa continues, “She grew up with Dmitri. She was supposed to marry him. You believed a few weeks in your bed would erase years of attachment?”
“She doesn’t want Dmitri.”
“You want that to be true.”
“It is true.”
“Then explain why she walked out of your house alone.”
My teeth grind together. I have no answer that doesn’t hurt.
Larisa takes the silence for victory. “Exactly.”
“Where is she?”
“I had a man keep an eye on her.”
A cold anger cuts through the heat. “You put a tail on my wife?”
“And I was right to do it.”
The car feels too small. Viktor’s eyes are on me, waiting, calculating, probably already trying to trace Larisa’s call while pretending not to.
I look out the window as the city begins to blur past. “Give me the location.”
Larisa pauses. Not long. Long enough to make it clear she enjoys having something I need.
“She was last seen near the south canal. Old textile district. My man followed her taxi from the flower market. She entered a warehouse on Krestov Lane.”
Viktor’s head snaps up. He mouths, South canal.
I nod once.
Larisa says, “There was a man waiting.”
“Dmitri?”
“I didn’t get a name.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
Her voice hardens. “Yes. Dmitri.”
For a moment, the sound of the engine fades beneath the pressure in my skull.
Dmitri.
I hang up on Larisa.
For a few seconds, the car is silent except for Viktor’s voice giving orders into his phone.
Larisa’s words keep trying to get under my skin.
“Four minutes,” Viktor says.
“Make it two.”
The driver doesn’t answer. He only presses harder on the accelerator.
The city changes around us. Clean streets give way to narrow roads, rusted fences, broken loading yards, old warehouses with windows boarded up or smashed out. The canal runs alongside the district, gray and slow, reflecting nothing.
When we turn onto Krestov Lane, I see the warehouse immediately.
The loading bay door hangs open. A black car sits near the side entrance, abandoned at a bad angle. No guards. No movement. No Dmitri standing outside to enjoy his own trap.
That’s wrong.
The car stops before Viktor finishes telling the driver to slow down.
I’m out first. Gun in my hand. Viktor and two men move behind me, spreading out without needing instruction. Another car turns into the lane behind us, tires skidding on loose gravel.
I enter through the loading bay.
The warehouse smells of dust, damp brick, and old oil. Pale daylight falls through broken windows, slicing the floor into dirty rectangles. Crates are stacked along one wall. Torn plastic hangs from rusted beams. Somewhere water drips steadily into a metal bucket.
“Anya,” I call. My voice carries through the empty space.
No answer.
I move deeper.
There are marks on the concrete. Fresh scuffs. A heel dragged through dust. A dark smear near one of the support columns.
Blood.
My body goes still.
Viktor sees it at the same time. “Yaromir.”
I crouch and touch two fingers to the stain.
Fresh.
Not much, but fresh.
My chest tightens so hard it feels like my ribs are being pulled inward.
“Search,” I say.
The men scatter. Viktor moves toward the office at the back. Another man checks behind the machinery. Someone kicks open a side door hard enough that the sound cracks through the warehouse.
Nothing.
No Anya. No Dmitri. No Sergei.
Only blood on the ground and silence.
I stand slowly. There’s a second smear leading toward the side exit. I follow it.
Outside, the air is colder. The service road behind the warehouse slopes toward the canal. The river wall is low here, old stone slick with moss and rain. Beyond it, the water moves dark and heavy between the warehouses.
I see the scarf first. Her scarf. Caught on a piece of rusted wire near the edge of the path, the dark fabric torn at one end.
My throat closes.
Then I see something on the ground near the river wall. Each step feels wrong. I already know before I bend down.
Her wedding ring.
My ring.
The platinum band lies in the dirt, streaked with mud, the narrow diamonds catching the gray light.
For a moment, I can’t pick it up. I stare at it like if I don’t touch it, the meaning will not settle.
Then I take it between my fingers.
It’s cold. Too cold.
Viktor comes up behind me and stops dead when he sees what I’m holding.
No one speaks.
There’s blood on the stone near the canal edge. Not a pool. Not enough to prove anything. Enough to make the mind do terrible work.
I look over the wall at the water. The canal moves slowly, dark under the sky. It could take a body beneath the surface and carry it under the next bridge before anyone saw. It could hide a woman in a black coat. It could swallow every answer before I arrived.
No.
The word doesn’t come out. It stays inside me, hard and useless.
Whatever happened here, someone tore my name from her hand.
The rage comes then.
Not hot. Not uncontrolled. Something far worse.
It moves through me like a door shutting on every human part I have left. I’m going to find and kill everyone responsible.
And I’ll start with Dmitri.