24. Ruslan #2
In the back seat, Mila knocks on the window. “Mama?”
Zoya turns immediately and opens the rear door.
Mila looks up at her. “Are we in trouble?”
“No.”
Nadia asks, “Did bad people go to our house?”
Zoya pauses.
That pause is enough.
Nadia’s face changes. Mila goes still.
Zoya crouches slightly so she’s at eye level with both of them. “Listen to me. We’re not going home right now. That’s all. We’re just changing plans.”
Mila frowns. “But my frog pajamas are there.”
“I know.”
“And my green toothbrush.”
“I know.”
Nadia says, “Is this because of him?”
Zoya closes her eyes for half a second, then opens them again. “Get your seat belts on properly.”
They do.
Of course they do. Even frightened, they do exactly what she says.
She closes the back door and turns back to me. “Start talking,” she says.
So I do. I give her all the details I have.
She groans. “There goes my deposit.”
“I’ll reimburse you,” I say.
She scowls at me. “Did they follow you?”
“No.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t.”
She looks past me, down the street, then back at the school. She’s calculating now. I can see it. Home is gone. Parents are too risky. Karina is too obvious if anyone knows about her. She’s doing the work of survival in real time, and I know that look because I taught it to too many people.
I say, “You can’t go back there.”
She gives me a look that could skin a man. “Don’t tell me the obvious like it’s useful.”
“That apartment is done,” I say. “If they came once, they can come again.”
“I know.”
“No, you know it. I need you to understand it,” I say.
“You’re the one who brought danger to my door. Now don’t stand there, lecturing me.”
From the back seat, Nadia lowers the window an inch. “Mama?”
Zoya turns. “Window up.”
“Where are we going?” Nadia asks.
Mila says, “Can we at least get snacks if we’re fleeing?”
Zoya presses one hand to her forehead. “Get in the car,” she says, “We’ll figure something out.”
I hesitate. I didn’t plan this part. “I don’t want to endanger you.”
“Ruslan, you’re injured. I don’t—” Her voice cracks. “I can’t leave you here.”
I search her face. There’s something about the way she says it, as if that’s not the only thing she wants to say to me. And I feel the same.
I hobble to the side and get inside.
By the time we leave the school behind, I know three things.
First, the apartment is gone.
Second, the girls can’t go back to their normal routine, not tonight and not tomorrow.
Third, if I make one wrong move now, I don’t just lose Zoya again. I lose all three of them.
Zoya drives with both hands tight on the wheel. Mila has gone quiet in the back, which is worse than crying. Nadia is watching the road in the mirror like she’s trying to memorize every turn in case she has to explain this later to herself.
I keep my voice even. “Take the ring road, then cut west.”
Zoya doesn’t look at me. “Where?”
“Not somewhere tied to me directly.”
“That inspires confidence.”
“It should.”
She laughs once, bitter and tired. “Nothing about you inspires confidence.”
“There’s a cottage outside Blackwater,” I say.
Zoya turns her head sharply. “No.”
“It’s not what you’re thinking.”
“That sentence has never improved anything in my life.”
“It belonged to my mother’s brother. He died years ago. No staff. No cameras. No paper trail back to me now unless someone goes through family records from fifteen years ago.”
“Who else knows about it?” she asks.
“My mother. Me.” I pause. “Possibly one dead property lawyer.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I’m not trying to be.”
She drives another block before asking, “And if your people do know?”
“Then we leave again before nightfall.”
“You say that like moving children around armed threats is an inconvenience.”
I look at the back seat. Mila has leaned her head against the window. Nadia is still alert, too alert for her age.
“I know exactly what it is,” I say.
That gets Zoya to look at me, just for a second. Then she looks back at the road.
I take out my phone and send three messages from three different routes, all short, all bait.
One goes to Pavel, one to a man who answers to Stepan, and one to a number only Lenkov should have had through a closed chain. Three false locations. Three different stories. If any one of them leaks, I’ll know which branch is rotten.
Zoya notices the screen glow. “What are you doing?”
“Tightening the net,” I say simply. The quicker I find the traitor, the quicker this ends.
She exhales through her nose. “I hate that this means something to you.”
“It’s survival.”
“For you.”
“For all of us now.”
By the time we hit the outer road, the girls have both drifted into that strange half sleep children fall into when the day has scared them more than tiredness can fix. Zoya drives slower. The anger is still in her, but the panic has narrowed into planning.
I can work with planning.
I tell her where to turn. A narrow road, then a longer one through trees, then a gravel drive hidden behind an old stone wall that looks like it belongs to no one.
When the cottage finally comes into view, it is dark, quiet, and forgettable in exactly the way I need. Small. One floor. Shutters closed. No neighboring lights.
Zoya pulls to a stop and doesn’t get out. “This is the place?”
“Yes.”
She studies it like she expects armed men to step out of the trees. I do the same.
Nothing moves.
I get out first, pain ripping through my leg, and sweep what I can from the porch. Old lock. Dust. No forced entry. No footprints recent enough to worry me in the dirt by the side wall.
When I open the door, stale air and disuse come out to meet us.
Good. No one has touched it.
We get the girls inside without waking them properly. Zoya takes Mila. I take Nadia because she wakes enough to insist she can walk, then immediately falls asleep again against my shoulder, light and warm and trusting in a way that makes my chest hurt.
Zoya sees it. She says nothing.
Inside, the place is basic but usable. Old furniture.
Dry blankets. Bottled water still in date.
A gas stove. A working lock on the back door.
I check the windows while Zoya settles the girls in the larger of the two bedrooms, then I drag a chair to the front window and sit with my leg stretched out and my gun across my lap.
Zoya comes back out a few minutes later. “They’re asleep,” she says.
I nod.
She folds her arms. “What now?”
I look at the dark outside, then at the dead signal on one of the bait phones, then back to the quiet road beyond the trees.
“Now,” I say, “I have to figure out which one of my men betrayed me.”
Before time’s up. But that part I don’t say out loud.