11. Thea
THEA
Some pact. It’s working great.
The garage at this hour is empty the way garages get, where the emptiness has a hum to it. Concrete, sodium light, cold rubber. My Honda is in the far corner because the good spots belong to people with titles. I’m—what the hell was that?
A shout. Short, male, cut off in the middle.
Then the meat-and-fabric sounds of a fight.
Not a movie fight. A real one, which sounds like furniture being moved by people who hate each other.
Grunts. A bark of Russian, too fast for me.
The wet crack of knuckles, and a body hitting a car panel hard enough to set off, for one whoop, an alarm that dies like even the car thought better of it.
I’m halfway turned to leave when the part of me that has never once let a phone ring unanswered makes me look first, around the concrete pillar, just to know what I’m running from.
Five men stand between me and my car.
Four of them are security, the ones who order espresso in Russian and think I’m furniture. Two hold flashlights. One holds his own ribs. They’re in a loose circle around the fifth man, who is getting up off the hood of a Mercedes with blood on his mouth and a smile underneath it.
Cold water down skates on every nerve. Big. The bare scalp a map of ridged scars under the sodium light. The seam down one cheek pulling his mouth toward his ear.
I know that smile.
The man from the hotel. The four a.m. hallway man.
The one who breathed in when he looked at me and hummed his creepy two-note tune, who I was never going to see again.
Who I told myself was a guest, a drunk, a nobody, because at four a.m. in a hotel hallway you tell yourself whatever gets you to the elevator.
He’s here. In my parking garage. Fighting my company’s security, and by the state of the two men picking themselves up off the concrete, fighting them well.
I drop behind the nearest car, a dusty Audi. The box goes down with me, silent. I crouch with my back against the door panel and my pulse doing something wrong.
The fight ends fast. A scuffle-surge, a grunt of real pain, an order snapped in Russian, it means hold, or hold him. Then heavy breathing and the shuffling of men repositioning. Metal doors roll open. An engine turns over, diesel, a van by the depth of it, idling.
I ease up over the Audi’s window line instead, one inch, two, because I’d rather see it coming if I’m about to die.
My phone is in my coat pocket, and my hand finds it and grips it and does nothing else, because who would I call? Security? Security is winning. The police? Officer, the men who guard my building are loading a scarred stranger into an unmarked van, and I think I’m the only witness.
I crane my neck and see they’re loading him into a gray cargo van backed into the service bay. No plates that I can see, interior lit by one dome light. It takes three of them. He’s heavy. His hands are zip-tied in front and his mouth is bleeding.
He isn’t resisting anymore, which is worse than the fighting. He’s gone loose. Like it doesn’t matter what they do with him, because he’s already decided what happens next.
They get him up onto the bumper. At the top, framed in the van’s doorway under the dome light, he turns his head.
And looks at me.
Not around. Not past. At me, at the two inches of face I have over the Audi’s window line, from forty feet away in the dark between cars, like he’s known where I was this whole time.
His eyes find mine and hold. Blood runs from the corner of his mouth over the scar seam.
Then, slow, with a guard’s fist in his collar, he smiles at me.
The same smile from the corridor, only this time, red instead of white. And something else underneath it, worse. Not surprise.
Interest.
I do not want this man’s interest.
The guards shove him inside and the doors bang shut, and my lungs remember their job all at once, and I go down behind the Audi so fast I feel the box of files with my ribs. Each breath heaves harder than the one before. Am I hyperventilating?
Whatever I’m doing, I better do it quiet. There are more footsteps now.
Unhurried, hard soles on concrete, from the direction of the service elevator. A voice comes with the footsteps, low, formal, giving instructions in Russian.
Every hair I own stands up for the second time tonight, because I’d know that voice through a wall, underwater, in another language, which is the current arrangement.
Maxim.
I peek. I have to. I move to the Audi’s rear bumper and put one eye past it, and there he is, red in the wash of the van’s brake lights. He’s talking to the biggest of the security men with the calm of a man reviewing a delivery schedule.
Except his face. That’s not his calm face.
I’ve seen his boardroom face, his podium face, his midnight-in-the-archives face, and this is none of them. This one is older and colder, and it belongs to this concrete. The biggest of the security men says something and Maxim answers with two words, and the man steps back a full pace.
My Russian is eighteen months of apps and podcasts and subway drills, and they’re talking fast, so I get one word in five.
Interrogate, or question him, close enough.
Quietly, or a quiet place. And a word I know from nowhere academic, from the forums and the true-crime subtitles, the word with no clean English equivalent because it isn’t a business term. It’s a world.
Bratva.
And a phrase from Maxim himself, in that gravel voice, before he turns back toward the elevator. “Find out what the dog was sent to fetch.”
The van pulls out. Its taillights swing across the ceiling and are gone up the ramp. The remaining men disperse to the shadows they came from, and Maxim walks back into his building without one backward glance. The service elevator swallows him.
Sublevel three is a parking garage again, humming, empty, smelling of cold rubber. Nothing is happening now. Nothing ever happened.
Just like the nothing that happened in the archives. Maxim is very good at nothing, isn’t he?
I don’t remember getting to my car. I’m just in it, doors locked, box of files riding shotgun, hands shaking on the wheel.
I drive out past the service bay without looking at it.
The attendant booth is empty. The gate arm lifts for my badge like it’s any other night.
The city does its blue-black thing all the way to Queens while my brain replays a two-note hum on a loop, and somewhere around the bridge I realize I’ve been holding my breath at every red light.
Potato meets me at the door yelling about the hour. I feed him without taking my coat off. Then I sit down at my kitchen table, laptop open, cat circling, radiator clanking. None of it registers in any real way. I don’t feel like I’m at home.
I feel like I’m still in the garage. Still captured by that red smile.
He knows I saw it. He knows, and he’ll tell those men. Those men will tell Maxim.
But then… What will Maxim do? Will it be nothing?
I’m not doing nothing. I type into a search engine, Vernigora bratva.
My finger hovers over enter for a second. Two weeks ago, I’d have been typing it out of curiosity. Tonight, I’m typing it because I heard the word in his mouth.
The internet doesn’t hold back.
The first result is a forum thread from six years ago titled “Vernigora Industries = front??” with two hundred replies.
The second is an article from a European outlet about port corruption in Rotterdam, and the word Vernigora is in the third paragraph, and the word beside it is alleged.
Tonight wasn’t alleged. It was pure violence. Pure violence with a witness.
The third is a think-tank report on transnational organized crime with a PDF, and I click it. Vernigora. New York/Baltic routes. Logistics, suspected Bratva affiliation, links to European and East Asian syndicates—it all blurs together.
I scroll on. A shipping-industry blog, three years old, about a customs official in Riga who retired early and then didn’t turn up for his own retirement party.
A Reddit post asking if anyone had worked for Vernigora Logistics and whether it was “weird,” with forty replies that all say some version of the pay is great, don’t ask questions.
Suspected. Alleged. Reported ties. Unconfirmed.
Every sentence wears its little legal seatbelt, and none of the seatbelts matter, because I’m not reading this the way a stranger would. I know too much to pay attention to the seatbelt.
The results start to blur together—there’s so many of them. A grainy photo a decade old, a funeral in Brighton Beach, men in black coats around a grave. The caption names two of them. One name I don’t know.
The other is Lev Dworkin. The man who sits at Maxim’s right hand in every meeting I’ve minuted since Maxim returned, who turns his phone face-down on the walnut before the real conversation starts.
I close the laptop and try to breathe. My body appears to think that’s still optional. Same with my brain—not the breathing, but the thinking. I can gather bratva evidence all night long, if I wanted. It wouldn’t make a difference.
I’m in over my head. No matter what else is true about any of this, I’m in way over my head.
I sit in my kitchen with my coat still on, and Potato jumps into my lap and starts his motor. He’s trying to help me calm down. I complain, but he’s a good little bastard.
I stare at my reflection in the dark window over the sink. My blouse is mis-buttoned. Hair wrecked. Twenty-seven years old, holding a purring cat, trying to sort out my next steps.
Am I allowed to quit my job? Is this a, “Once you’re in, you can never leave,” situation? I don’t think so. The forums included people who worked for Vernigora Industries and left.
But they also weren’t fucking Maxim.
The Bratva. My company is the Bratva. My boss is a boss. A pakhan, according the internet. And I had sex with him. Does that mean… I don’t even know.
What have I gotten myself into?