Chapter 11
MARGOT
“You look terrible,” Kimberly tells me through the laptop screen.
I lift my coffee toward the camera. “Good morning to you too.”
It’s been six weeks since they took me from the motel.
I’ve spent them training, drilling, and sleeping in a room fourteen steps from a man I’ve slept with twice and argued with more times than I can count.
Kimberly and I have settled into a pattern of video calls that make both of us feel better but neither of us feels safe.
She’s sitting in the booth I know without asking, the one by the window at Drea’s diner, with the sticky laminate.
She looks tired. I look tired. We’re both tired women pretending to each other that we’re fine.
We both know it but do it anyway because the alternative is admitting how bad this actually is.
“How are the wrists?”
I turn them over under the desk lamp so she can see.
The bruising has gone yellow-green at the edges, which Anya tells me means healing.
Anya came by the morning after a training block left me with welts across both wrists two weeks ago.
She knocked twice, came in when I opened the door, and carefully unwrapped the ACE bandage I’d applied myself, without comment aside from introducing herself as the doctor Valentin has on retainer, like she’s an attorney.
She gave clear instructions: ice that night, compression the next day, and no return to training until I could make a fist without whimpering. Then she left.
Two weeks ago I couldn’t grip a door handle without wincing. Now I can grip one and only wince a little, which I’m calling progress.
I flex my fingers off-camera. “Nathan’s not pulling punches. Literally.”
Her eyes widen. “Nathan Bykov is teaching you to fight?”
“Mostly, he’s teaching me to fall without dying. There’s a difference.”
She sets her mug down with a frown, clearly building toward a harder question. I know her tells the way she knows mine.
“Margot, how are you actually?”
I count to four before I answer. Out in the hall, someone walks past, unhurried, one of the regular rotation Valentin installed three weeks ago when he swapped out the guard who’d been stationed outside my door.
That one had a habit of watching me cross the common room the way buyers survey livestock at a fair.
He was gone by Tuesday. I didn’t ask how Valentin arranged it or when he noticed it.
“I’m scared of Kirill.” I press my thumbnail into the edge of the desk. “I’m furious at Valentin because I’m starting to trust him in ways that terrify me.”
Kimberly doesn’t blink. “Okay.”
“Okay?” I sound suspicious because I am.
“I’m not surprised. Tell me about the trust part.”
I lean back in the chair. The desk has three drawers and a surface that wobbles if I press on the left side. I’ve memorized every inch of this room the way you do when you’re not sure if you’re a guest or a prisoner and the difference keeps shifting depending on the hour.
“He had Anya look at my wrists after training.” I count the examples off on my fingers without meaning to.
“He stopped Kolya from using Grant’s name in front of me.
Kolya was running a debrief three weeks ago and dropped Grant’s name like a test, watched my face for the result, and Valentin said Kolya’s name once, nothing else, and Kolya moved on.
There was a creepy guard, and he replaced him as soon as he picked up on the way that guy watched me.
” I pause. “He does things I can’t dismiss. That’s the problem.”
Kimberly tilts her coffee to one side. “He’s protecting his asset.” Her voice is gentle, not cruel. She’s giving me the other explanation—the one besides him caring about me—because I need to hear it.
“I know.”
“And?”
“It still feels like something that means…something.” I press my thumb against the faded bruise on my left wrist. “Which is what makes it dangerous. Grant did this sort of thing for three years, the care that turns into control. I know the pattern. I know what it looks like and what it leads to, but I’m still sitting here telling you it feels different. ”
Kimberly leans back in the booth. “Does it feel different? Or does he just do it better?”
I study her face on the screen instead, noting the shadows under her eyes, the set of her mouth, and the way she’s gripping that mug even though it’s probably gone cold.
“I don’t know yet.”
She’s quiet for a moment. She sets down her mug, picks it up again, then sets it down.
“Trust earned under pressure still counts.” She leans closer to the camera. “Only if you keep choosing with your eyes open.”
I meet her gaze without blinking. “My eyes are open.”
“Good. Now tell me about the files.”
The files are the thing I didn’t expect to want.
Valentin set Katya Vasilieva’s case materials beside me on day three, presented as background. For two weeks, I left them on the desk and read the novels Nathan lent me instead. Then one night after the phone call, I picked up the first folder and didn’t put it down until two a.m.
I’m reading them because Katya and I are apparently the same height, same coloring, same general structure of cheekbone, and she disappeared three weeks before I arrived here.
No one has found her, and I want to understand what kind of woman becomes someone else’s ghost, and why.
I’ve been sharing tidbits with Kimberly. “I’m still working through them.”
“Stay smart and stay safe.” She says that at the end of each video chat.
I give my usual response. “I’m safe for now.” I don’t pretend there’s anything smart about what I’m doing.
My mornings have developed a rhythm I didn’t design.
I’m up by seven, dress in the new clothes that materialized in my closet and dresser one day, and in the kitchen before Nathan arrives so I can make coffee the way I like it and not the way whoever’s on duty makes it, which is always either burnt or watery.
Nathan shows up ten minutes later, usually looking like he argued with his alarm clock and lost, and he makes eggs while I read.
Neither of us pretends to need conversation until the food is in front of us.
Then we talk about various things, including airports, political systems, and which regional pizza style is objectively wrong.
Anything that doesn’t involve bodies or sealed motions or what my ex-husband did to my sister.
Josef watches from the far end of the kitchen when he’s on rotation.
He doesn’t eat when I eat. He stands near the counter and watches with the careful appraisal of a man assessing my usefulness to his nephew’s operation, and every time I catch his eye I look away first on purpose because I want him to think I haven’t noticed.
I’ve noticed.
Nadia brings me a new disc on a Thursday afternoon. She sets it on the desk without ceremony. “Court footage. Zavid pulled it from the civil filing archive.”
I turn the disc over. “What case?”
“Grant Winters. Sealed motion, 2019.” She pauses on the next words the way someone handles evidence they know is contaminated. “The system labels it an accident review. That’s what the official file calls it.”
I lose my breath for a second. It’s nothing dramatic, just the small mechanical stall of a body deciding whether to keep functioning.
Mara didn’t have an accident. Grant strangled her, then staged the car to sell the accident story.
The file calls it something else because someone paid for it to be called something else, and I’m going to find out who.
“Accident review,” I repeat. “Why does this exist?”
“Zavid noticed Katya in the background when he was reviewing footage of the case. She was watching the proceedings.”
The court footage is sixty-three minutes of a preliminary hearing.
Katya appears in the background of three separate shots at different angles and distances, but her positioning is deliberate each time.
She’s seated in the public gallery, watching Grant’s attorney present the sealed motion to dismiss.
I watch the first thirty minutes without finding anything useful until the twenty-two-minute mark, when Grant’s attorney approaches the bench. Katya is in the upper-right corner of the frame. She places two fingers against the edge of the gallery railing and taps once.
I rewind and watch it again.
The same two fingers. The same single tap.
I learned that signal weeks ago in Nadia’s workroom, drilling recognition sequences until my hands remembered them without my brain’s permission.
Nadia called it a readiness marker. Katya used it in the training footage to signal before a high-risk handoff.
She used it before a high-risk moment, a warning that the stakes had changed.
She used it in a sealed courtroom hearing months before she disappeared.
I pick up the room phone and call Nadia’s extension.
“The signal.” I don’t wait for her greeting. “In the court footage. Twenty-two minutes, upper right. Pull it.”
Three minutes pass. Then Nadia’s voice comes back, sharply focused. “I see it.”
“Who is she signaling?”
“Zavid is running the gallery angle now.” She types. “There’s someone two rows behind her who looks away at the same moment.”
“Can you ID them?”
“Working on it.” Nadia’s voice stays level, but she’s probably already running three threads simultaneously. “Margot, if Katya was running signals in that courtroom?—“
“She knew about Grant and Kirill before she disappeared.”
Zavid confirms it twenty minutes later through Nadia’s relay.
The same signal appears in two additional pieces of footage from hearings connected to the sealed motion.
Katya didn’t stumble onto the Grant-Kirill connection.
She’d been tracking it. Maybe she went underground not to run but to protect what she’d found.