Katerina
This is insane.
That’s the first clear thought in my head as I slip through the break in the wall, one hand holding my coat closed at my throat, the other lifting my skirt just enough to keep it from catching on the wet stone.
If my father finds out, he will lock the house down so tightly I will need permission to breathe. If Irina finds out, she will enjoy it. If Vika finds out, I will never hear the end of it, not even when I’m old and dying and finally free of all this.
And yet. I’m here.
Because three days of thinking have done nothing except make everything worse. Because I cannot shake the feeling that the danger isn’t just outside our walls.
And because, for reasons I do not want to examine too closely, the only person I wanted to tell was Roman.
I had almost convinced myself he would be gone.
I was late. Not carelessly late. Desperately late.
I waited until I was sure the maid had left, then longer because I thought I heard footsteps outside, then longer still because I almost lost my nerve and had to stand there in the dark telling myself that if I turned back now I would only spend the whole night hating myself for it.
So, by the time I finally slipped out the side path and made it to the road, I was sure I would find nothing.
An empty car track, maybe. Cold air. Proof that even a dangerous man has a limit when he asks for trust and gets silence.
Instead, he’s still here.
The car is parked under the trees, lights off, dark enough that I only fully recognize it when the rear door opens from the inside.
Roman.
Of course he opens it himself.
I get in quickly and shut the door behind me before I can think too hard about how absurd this is. The leather is cold. The air inside the car smells faintly like clean wool and him.
For a second, neither of us says anything.
Then he says, “Hi.”
It’s so ordinary that I almost laugh.
“Hi,” I say back.
The awkwardness settles over us immediately, thick and alive and impossible to ignore.
Not because we are strangers. Because we are not.
Because too much has happened too quickly, and now we are alone in a car at night after sneaking me out of my father’s house like this is something people do when they are not entirely out of their minds.
Roman looks at me for one beat too long. “You came.”
I look down at my hands. “You waited.”
He starts the car.
The engine is quiet, expensive, and annoyingly smooth. We pull away from the road without headlights for the first few seconds, then he turns them on once we’ve cleared the wall and the trees are behind us.
I watch the darkness slide past the window and only then realize I have not asked where we are going.
“Wait,” I say, turning toward him. “Where are you going?”
He doesn’t look at me. His hands stay steady on the wheel. “We can’t stay there.”
“I know that, but—”
“We can’t be seen here.”
It shuts me up for a second.
Because of course. Of course, he thought beyond the meeting itself. Of course, he didn’t plan to sit on the roadside talking under the Markov wall like some lovesick idiot waiting to be discovered by a patrolling guard and a bad flashlight.
I had thought—stupidly, maybe—that I would get into the car, tell him about the guard, tell him what I saw, maybe ask a few questions about the shooting, and then get back before anyone noticed how long I’d been gone.
But the moment the car turns away from the property and picks up speed, I realize I have entered his world again without meaning to.
I sit back and look at him in profile.
The city lights catch and lose his face in pieces. His jaw, the line of his mouth, the dark shape of him behind the wheel. He looks calmer than I feel. He always does. But it’s not real calm. Not the kind ordinary men have. It’s attention under control.
That’s different.
I realize suddenly that he doesn’t trust the people around him completely.
Not even now. Not even here, with this car and this plan and the road opening ahead of us. He arranged this meeting himself. He waited instead of sending someone. He parked where he could leave fast. He chose movement over stillness the second I got in.
I don’t say any of that.
I only say, quieter now, “You really thought I might not come.”
He gives the smallest shrug. “You were late.”
“I nearly didn’t.”
That gets his attention.
He looks at me briefly then, just long enough for me to wish he hadn’t.
“Why?”
“I don’t understand it myself,” I say. “I just knew I had to get the information to you somehow.”
He takes me to an apartment building on a quiet side street with no doorman in sight and no obvious sign that anyone important lives there at all. The lobby is clean, anonymous, and forgettable. That’s probably the point.
We go up in silence.
My nerves start climbing again somewhere around the third floor.
By the time he unlocks the apartment, I have fully registered that I have just left my father’s property in the middle of the night to come to a hidden flat with Roman Sokolov, a man I once ran from because I learned too much about him all at once and never quite recovered from the knowledge.
“This is a safe place,” he says as he lets me in.
The apartment is not large, but it’s finished with the sort of careful understatement that tells me it cost more than most people’s houses.
Dark wood floors. Neutral walls. Clean lines.
No photographs. No clutter. A sofa, a dining table, a kitchen that looks used but not lived in.
It feels less like a home than a place someone keeps ready for the moment they need four walls and no questions.
Roman closes the door behind us and locks it.
I turn slowly, taking everything in.
Then another man steps out of the hallway, and my pulse jumps before I can stop it.
“Mikhail,” Roman says. “This is Katerina.”
I know immediately that he’s not the kind of man who wastes movement, quieter too, dressed simply enough that you could miss him in a room until he decided you shouldn’t. His face gives away very little, but his eyes are taking in everything at once, including me.
“Katerina,” he says, with a slight nod.
There is no suspicion in it. That almost unnerves me more.
Roman says to him, “Check it.”
Mikhail nods once and starts moving through the apartment.
Not hurried. Not theatrical. Just efficient.
Bedroom, bathroom, windows, balcony door, the second entrance if there is one.
I understand then that even this place, this so-called safe place, is still only safe because they keep proving it is.
Roman watches him go, then gestures toward the kitchen. “Sit.”
I don’t. Not right away. I’m too full of the wrong thoughts.
“You’re safe here,” he says.
I almost laugh.
The problem is, I think I believe him.
That’s what frightens me.
I move to the kitchen island and set my hands on the cool stone just to have something solid under them.
Roman takes off his coat and drapes it over the back of a chair. He looks tired now that we are under proper light.
“Who wants to hurt you?” I ask. The question comes out more quietly than I meant it to.
Roman opens a cabinet, takes down two glasses, and answers without turning around. “My father.”
For one second, I don’t understand him.
Then I do, and I go completely still.
His father.
My eyes widen before I can stop them.
I had met Lev’s father, Andrei Morozov, only once, years ago, when Lev came to the States for that visit before everything fell apart.
Just once. A dinner, tightly controlled, too formal, too polished.
A man with cold eyes and perfect manners, the kind of man who could make a room feel smaller by entering it.
Ruthless, even then. You could feel it without needing proof.
After Moscow, he disappeared.
Or that’s how it felt from where I stood.
I had heard from Papa that Andrei Morozov spent most of his time back in Moscow anyway, working, consolidating, cleaning up whatever chaos followed a Pakhan.
I look at Roman now and try to fit all of it together.
Five years. Five years since Moscow.
Five years since I stood outside that club and heard enough of a conversation to terrify myself into running. I had spent years telling myself I understood what I heard. That Roman had been part of it. That Lev died in the world Roman belonged to and maybe because of the war he started there.
But did I understand it? Or had I only heard fragments and built the rest around my own fear?
He had been talking about destroying his father’s family.
I remember that. Or I remember thinking that was what he meant.
The problem with memory is that after enough years, grief and fear start editing. You begin to remember the version that best excuses your choices.
The thought turns my stomach.
Roman sets one of the glasses in front of me. “Vodka?”
I look at it. Then at him. “Is that a trick question?”
“No.”
“Then yes.”
He pours.
I take the glass and drink without grace. The vodka burns all the way down, which helps. A little.
Mikhail comes back into the room a moment later. “Clear.”
Roman nods once. That’s apparently enough.
I put the empty glass down and reach into my coat pocket for my phone.
“There’s something else,” I say.
Roman’s attention turns back to me.
I unlock the screen and pull up the photograph. It’s not a good picture. Blurred, taken over my shoulder, just enough of a forearm and the black lines of ink beneath a cuff.
“I tried to leave the house this afternoon,” I say. “One of the new guards stopped me. I’d never seen him before.”
I hand the phone across the counter.
Roman takes it.
For the first time since I got in the car, he goes completely silent.
He studies the image too long for it to be nothing. Mikhail steps closer, glances over Roman’s shoulder, and his face changes too, though less visibly.
My pulse starts climbing again. “What is it?”
Roman doesn’t answer immediately.
He zooms in on the photo, studies the mark again, then lowers the phone.
“That belongs to my father’s men,” he says.
The room feels suddenly colder.
I stare at him. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“How?”