Chapter 13 Maksim
MAKSIM
Morning bleeds in slowly, pale light seeping through thin curtains. I stir awake with the warmth of Ivy pressed close beside me.
Her hand is curled near my chest, the backs of her fingers brushing lightly against my skin. For a moment, I allow myself to stay still, and memorize the quiet rhythm of her breathing beside me. Her hair tickles my arm, the faint scent of her mingling with the ghost of what we did last night.
It’s dangerous how much I want to freeze this point in time. To save it from being corrupted by the outside world. But if we stay here, locked in this small little bubble, our child will never be rescued.
That alone is enough to get me out of bed and ready for the day.
A knock comes at the door only a few minutes after I’ve slipped a pair of pants and a shirt over my head. The floor is cold under my feet as I cross over to the door and slip into the hallway to keep from waking Ivy.
Matvey is standing there with an expression I’ve only seen once on his face before. His hands are tucked behind his back like a soldier, his shoulders pulled tight with stress. He looks more worried than I’ve ever seen, and that alone is enough to scare me.
“I need to show you something,” he says. He doesn’t wait for an answer, just pivots on his heel and starts down the hallway.
I follow him into the living room. Outside, the last gray of daylight leaks through the street-facing windows, thin and ghostlike, turning the whole space into a somber kind of mood.
Matvey takes his seat behind the monitors, gesturing to the chair he’s already pulled up beside him. “Sit.”
I arch a brow but obey, lowering myself slowly. “What’s going on?”
He doesn’t answer me at first. Instead, he turns to face forward, his fingers quickly moving over his keyboard to input his password.
The system unlocks with little flourish.
Dozens of windows bloom across the monitors, some stacked on top of each other, spilling over like waves of code and graphs and lists.
The sheer volume of information makes my eyes ache.
As I lower myself into the chair next to him, my eyes catch a familiar name up at the top of one of them.
Mine.
“What am I looking at?” I ask.
“Your phone’s call records.” His finger taps once against the screen, a crisp sound against the soft hum of the computer. He highlights a single line. The timestamp from last night glows there like a flare. An outgoing call to a number I don’t recognize.
My brow furrows. “And?”
Matvey doesn’t reply. Instead, he clicks on another file. Up comes a map that he slides into view. A series of red dots blink in sequence across a digital landscape. Each point is a trail leading to a facility name that means nothing to me, to a company I’ve never even heard of.
The cursor hovers there, steady as a sniper’s sight.
“Matvey. What is this?”
“I traced the number back to this location.” His tone is calm, but there’s an edge underneath that surprises me.
“Cross-referenced the carrier and the cell tower it was pinged from just to make sure this wasn’t a false mark.
” He flicks his wrist and another window appears, this one full of corporate filings.
“The facility connected to the outgoing number is a company registered to Mikhail.”
My eyes widen. How the hell…?
“You said it was a number that was called from my phone?” I manage.
“Yes.” His eyes cut to mine.
I lean back slightly, bewildered. “How is that possible? I don’t know any number associated with Mikhail other than the one burner he’s called us from. But that hasn’t been active in weeks.”
Matvey exhales sharply through his nose—a sound halfway between a sigh and a hiss.
The faintest flicker of emotion crosses his face before it’s smoothed out again.
“I caught Ivy talking to someone last night when she was supposedly taking a shower. I believe she’s the one who made the call from your phone. ”
My stomach drops. Denial hits me instantly. “That’s not possible.”
His gaze doesn’t waver. It pins me in place, unblinking. “It happened. I checked a dozen times before I came to you about this.”
For a second, I can’t think. My mind claws for logic, for some kind of explanation that would make more sense than the obvious one Matvey’s implying. Then, like pieces slotting together in a puzzle I never wanted to solve, the truth begins to form.
Ivy… I’d felt her stir in the middle of the night and get out of bed.
With my hazy vision, I’d seen the silhouette of her moving around the room, searching for something.
My mind had been too exhausted to call out to her before she’d slipped out the door.
It wasn’t until she’d come back a little while later with faint condensation still clinging to her skin that I realized she’d taken a shower.
The words snap out of me before I can stop them. “She has no reason to call him. There has to be another explanation for this.”
Matvey doesn’t even flinch. He lets out a long, tired sigh, the sound too old for someone his age. “Look. The records don’t lie, Pakhan. You can believe what you want, but these are the facts.”
He’s right. The facts don’t care how much I want this to be a misunderstanding. It’s just data—names, times, signal traces, carrier tags. None of it is personal.
The implication hangs in the air.
I swallow hard. Sudden flashes of finding Ivy stumbling on the streets hit me.
She’d been without our son, and at the time I’d believed what I wanted to believe—that she had escaped, fought her way out just to find me in order for us to come together and get our son back. That she was brave for overcoming everything she went through and still survived at the end of it.
Now, questions fill my mind. One I never bothered to ask until now.
How did she get out?
Why did she leave Leo behind?
Why didn’t she bring him with her if she’d had the chance?
None of it makes sense, unless… she wasn’t allowed to take him with her. Unless Mikhail had promised to return him in exchange for a favor if she cooperated. Could it be that this entire time, she hasn’t been free at all?
She’s been leveraged. Used. Held captive on a leash with a monster holding onto the other side of it.
My jaw clenches, hard enough that I feel my knuckles crack. “She’s being forced, Matvey. Blackmailed.”
He doesn’t react. Not visibly, anyway. While he doesn’t agree, he doesn’t argue either. He simply sits there with the light from the monitors washing over his face in shifting shades of blue and gray. “Blackmailed to do what? She’s barely left that room since she got here.”
I can hear the unspoken questions in his voice. If she’s being blackmailed, what’s the objective? Why the avoidance? Why hasn’t she made any moves yet?
My teeth grit. “Is there a transcript of what was said during the call?”
He shakes his head.
I close my eyes for a moment. Behind my lids, I force myself to picture Ivy the way she looked just a few hours ago curled up beside me in our bed. That’s the woman I’ve held, the woman who’s whispered our son’s name in her sleep. She’s given me no reason not to trust her.
No reason but Matvey’s screen and the hard, ugly facts glowing back at me.
If what he’s found is true, if she’s indeed communicating with Mikhail, then everything I thought I knew about the last few days becomes a minefield.
She may not want to be doing it, she may have no choice, but if she’s reporting back to him about what we’re planning, then every step we take is already compromised.
Every move we make brings us ten steps behind.
I let out a slow breath through my nose.
Moving forward, we’ll have to be smarter than we’ve ever been.
I’ll have to plan with one eye on our enemy and one on the person lying next to me at night.
We’ll have to keep Ivy ignorant, not because I want to, but because it’s the only way to see who’s pulling which strings.
“Update the others when they’re up. I’ll keep Ivy occupied for the time being. We’re going to treat this like an infiltration. Since we know where the facility is now where he’s staying, we’ll send soldiers to stake it out and report back.”
Matvey nods once, fingers already twitching toward his keyboard. “I’ll see what I can do about getting eyes inside.”
“Thank you.” I rise from the chair, my knees stiff, my body already moving on autopilot. But as I turn to leave, his voice cuts through the hum of the monitors, halting me mid-stride.
“You’re still going to trust her?”
I stop as the question hangs in the air.
It’s a valid one, the kind I’d be asking my other generals if we were in another timeline and they were the one in my shoes.
Unfortunately, in a situation like this, there are no real right answers.
None that will satisfy the both of us. My heart can’t simply erase the feelings it has for the woman only a few yards down the hallway.
Yet at the same time, my brain cannot erase the facts staring me down on Matvey’s screen.
In the end, I draw in a slow breath and say, “I don’t believe she’s betraying us. She’s protecting our son. There’s no other reason for her to do something like this. She’d do anything to protect him.”
His brow furrows, the faintest crack in his mask bleeding through. “You just said it yourself… she will do anything to protect him. That includes betraying you, Pakhan. That includes killing you if she believes it’s the only way to keep him breathing.”
A breath leaves me, almost a laugh, but it’s far too hollow sounding to be called one. I let my mouth curve into a smile, though, small and humorless. Something in it makes Matvey blink. “If it comes to that, I would rather die by her hands than anyone else’s.”
His eyes blow wide, surprise flickering across his features. For once, Matvey is speechless. In all the years I’ve known him, he’s never once looked so… fearful. He’s seen more horrific things than most people and yet now he’s staring at me like this is the worst one yet.
Perhaps it is. A Pakhan willingly accepting death driven by the hands of their significant other. To anyone else on the outside, it would look horrific, but on the inside, it’s rather poetic.
I leave him with that, the silence between us louder than any argument he could start up to try and get me to change my mind.