Chapter 9
MARGOT
The briefing ended twenty minutes ago. I answered all three questions without hesitation, and Kolya said I’d pass, and now I’m sitting on the edge of the bed in the room they gave me.
I performed well. The backup ledger location, Zhenya, Volga-nine…
Nadia’s audio files are still playing in my head, Katya’s cadence looping under my own thoughts.
The room accepted it. Everyone left, and I came back here.
The performance is over, and the reality of what I agreed to is settling in like cold water.
A knock. Not the rotation guard’s single flat rap. This one waits.
“Dinner.” Valentin’s voice through the door. “Nadia suggested a practice session in a relaxed environment before formal drills continue tonight. Easier to hold the framework if you’ve used it over something ordinary.”
I open the door. He’s changed his shirt. He doesn’t mention it, and neither do I.
I follow him down the hallway without protest. The kitchen is quieter than I expected. There are no guards at the table, and no files on the counter. He’s cleared the space down to two plates, two glasses, and an unopened bottle of wine.
“Katya didn’t drink during operational periods.” He sets a plate in front of me. Grilled chicken, roasted vegetables, and bread someone baked today. It smells delicious. “She kept it visible as a social prop. It signaled everything was normal to anyone watching.”
“So the wine is a training tool?” I could go for a large glass right now.
“Everything in this building is a training tool.” He sits across from me. “Eat. You haven’t had a full meal since yesterday.”
I eat because my stomach rumbles, not because he told me to. The food is good. The silence between us is different from the silence in his office earlier. It’s less charged and more careful. We’re both aware of what happened earlier.
He asks me to run through Katya’s vocal cadence between bites. I do it. The rhythm comes easier when I’m not under fluorescent lights being evaluated. He corrects me once on the placement of a stressed syllable. I adjust.
“Better.” He reaches for the bread. “You’re more convincing when you’re not performing.”
“That’s the problem. The call is a performance.”
“The call is a conversation. Performances get flagged.”
His phone buzzes on the table. He glances at the screen, and his posture shifts in the space of one breath. Whatever he’s reading pulls him back into the part of his world where I don’t have clearance.
“I need ten minutes.” He pushes back from the table. “Nadia found something in the payment logs.”
He leaves the phone on the table. The screen hasn’t locked.
I pick it up.
The decoded Kirill message fills the screen. Live visual proof within forty-eight hours. Encrypted relay. Facial recognition on his end. Voice analysis probable. Three operational details only Katya would know.
I understood the words during the briefing.
Hearing Nadia report them across a table made them clinical, solvable.
Reading them alone in a quiet kitchen with bread crumbs on my plate makes them real.
Kirill’s people will look at my face through a camera and decide whether I live or die based on the angle of my chin and the way I pronounce a dead woman’s name.
The phone screen locks. I set it down.
Valentin comes back. He looks at the phone, then at me. “You read it.”
“You left it on the table.”
He doesn’t argue that. He pours two cups of coffee without asking if I want one and sets mine on the counter.
“I’m not going on camera for him.”
He pulls out a chair and sits. “The proof call draws the source into motion. We can triangulate the leak from the prep alone. Who gets told, what story changes, and which assets go quiet.”
“That’s your business. My body isn’t your business expense.”
He holds my stare. “Kirill’s network bought the silence on your sister’s case. You want the name at the center of that network or you don’t.”
“That’s manipulative.”
“It’s accurate.”
I hold the mug. “You’re asking me to show my face to the people who protect the man who killed Mara. If they figure out I’m not Katya, I’m not a liability. I’m a loose end.”
“They won’t figure it out.”
I sip the coffee but maintain eye contact. “You don’t know that.”
“We have less than two days of training before the call. Nadia is good at what she does.”
“Then Nadia should do the call.”
“Nadia doesn’t have your face.”
I drink more of the coffee and stop arguing. “I need to call Kimberly.”
He doesn’t reach for the phone to block me. He nods once.
I take the phone to the smaller room down the corridor and close the door.
The bed is made because I didn’t sleep in it.
I sit on the edge of the mattress and dial the number from memory.
Ten digits I’ve recited to myself in the dark more times than I can count, the only proof that someone outside this building still knows my name.
The call to Kimberly takes longer to make than it should because my fingers hover over the phone for thirty seconds before I press the button.
Every time I call her, I’m admitting that the world I’m living in requires an outside witness, someone beyond these walls who knows I exist and will notice if I stop existing.
Grant taught me that isolation was the first step.
He cancelled my phone plan. He changed the WiFi password.
He told my friends I was going through a difficult time and needed space.
By the time I realized what he’d done, the only person who called regularly was his mother, and his mother believed everything he told her.
Kimberly is my counterweight against that. She’s the person who calls when I don’t, who notices when my voice changes, and asks the questions I’m not ready to ask myself.
Kimberly picks up on the second ring. “Margot.” She sounds relieved and terrified at the same time, then switches to her manager voice. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” I’m in the smaller room they gave me for sleep, door not locked from the outside but not exactly open either. “I have maybe twenty minutes.”
She doesn’t hesitate. “Then talk fast.”
So I do. I give her the outline, omitting the names she doesn’t need but explaining my resemblance to a missing woman.
I explain the demand for a live visual proof call, the forty-eight-hour window, and Valentin’s argument that it’s the fastest path to the leak.
She listens without interrupting, which is how I know she’s scared. Kimberly usually interrupts.
A long pause on the line follows. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to say it.”
I pull my knees up. “Kirill Antonov’s people are on the other end of that call.”
“I know.”
“They paid to suppress Mara’s case.”
She’s quiet for a beat too long. “I know that too.”
“If I don’t do it, the trail might go cold. If I do it and something goes wrong, I’m dead.” I pause. “Or worse, Kirill figures out I know about Mara and then the people protecting Grant know I’m still a problem.”
“Margot, I need to ask you something and I need you to answer me straight.”
“Okay.”
“Did you sleep with him?”
I don’t answer right away. Then, quietly, “Yes.”
She exhales slowly but without judgment. More like she’s been bracing for it. “Okay.”
I grip the phone harder. “Okay?”
“I’m not going to yell at you. You’re under enormous pressure and he’s presumably—“ She stops herself. “Is he good to you? In the ways that count?”
“He backed down when I pushed back. He let me have this call.”
“Margot, that’s the minimum. That’s baseline human behavior, and a man who locks your door doesn’t get credit for occasionally unlocking it.”
I wrap an arm around my knees and press my back against the wall. “I know.”
“Do you?” She drops the careful tone. “I’ve watched women at the motel convince themselves that dangerous men become safe once the sex is good.
I’ve cleaned rooms after those stories ended.
I’m not comparing him to Grant. I’m asking whether you can tell the difference between wanting someone and needing him because he’s the only option in the building. ”
I swallow hard. “I’m aware.”
“Then stay aware for yourself. Not for me or him.”
I don’t respond for a long moment. Outside the door I can hear voices and footsteps, the rhythm of a house built around men who move with purpose.
I press the phone tighter to my ear. “I hear you.”
“Good.” She clears her throat. “I left a copy of your timeline with Drea at the diner. She knows to go to the police if she doesn’t hear from me.”
“Kim—“
She cuts me off. “It’s already done. You don’t get to talk me out of it.”
I don’t try. “I’ll call when I can.”
“You better.” She softens just enough to mean it. “Margot? You’ve survived worse than this. You know how to make hard choices. Make this one with your eyes open.”
The call ends. I sit with the phone in my lap for a minute before I stand up. I don’t know what I want, but I’ll figure it out.
Nadia sets up in the training room with a laptop and a directional mic. She doesn’t offer small talk. I respect that.
“Katya has a cadence.” Nadia pulls up an audio file.
“A rhythm when she speaks Russian. Slower on stressed syllables than you’d expect.
Like she’s deciding whether she trusts you even when she’s already decided.
” She plays a clip of a woman’s voice, low and deliberate, just a few sentences.
“You don’t need to sound identical. You need to sound consistent with your own established version of her. ”
“Which version have you given them?”
Nadia scrolls to another file. “Terse and cautious. A woman who’s been running too long to waste words.” She looks at me evenly. “That’s easier to fake than warmth.”
I listen to the clip three more times. Then I try the cadence, the slight lilt at the end of short sentences, and the pause before she commits. Nadia makes a small adjustment to where I place my hands, which apparently changes my posture and, with it, how I sound.