1. The Alter
The Alter
Fyodor
My name is not Nikolai.
Nikolai is asleep. He does that when things get too heavy—retreats somewhere behind my eyes and lets me carry the load. I don’t mind. He needed the rest, and I needed the quiet. We worked out an arrangement for these situations a long time ago, even if he never officially agreed to it.
The room was a mid-range motel, the kind of place that doesn’t ask questions about guests showing up after midnight with no luggage and paying in cash. I picked it for that exact reason. I know how to move through a city, how to shrink my footprint and stay invisible.
Nikolai was terrible at being invisible. He was the type of person who apologized to furniture when he bumped into it.
I turned the plastic bottle over in my hands. Water. Not because I wanted it, but because the body needed it, and the body was shared property. I have more respect for shared property than people give me credit for.
Outside the window, a dull slice of Moscow was dragging itself awake. Concrete, streetlights, an empty bus crawling through its first route of the morning. I’d been sitting in this chair for three hours staring at that view, thinking about the man whose name I refused to say out loud.
He had left Nikolai standing in the rain.
He’d made a promise, then sat in a room with a woman, letting the hours slip away while Nikolai waited out in the cold. I didn’t care about the woman—people make their choices, and she made hers.
But him.
I twisted the cap on the bottle. He’d looked at Nikolai like something he intended to keep.
I watched it all happen from behind Nikolai’s eyes, from the passenger seat the doctor loved to talk about.
I saw the way he carried Nikolai through a parking garage, brushed the hair from his forehead at two in the morning, and pressed his mouth to his while Nikolai slept.
Like he couldn’t stop himself. Like he’d already decided Nikolai was his.
And then he left him standing in the rain.
My phone was face-down on the nightstand. I’d flipped it over hours ago when the calls started coming through, his name lighting up the screen again and again.
Seven missed calls.
I looked away from the phone and back toward the window.
He could wait. Nikolai had stood in the rain for hours.
He could wait.
* * *
Days passed the way they always did when I was the one holding the reins: efficiently, without complaint.
The water ran out on the second day, the canned food on the third. I’d rationed it far better than a normal person would have, but our body still needed fuel. I wasn’t going to let us drop from something as stupid and avoidable as hunger.
I only left the room at four in the morning, that was my rule. Nothing after sunrise, nothing before the city started paying attention to itself. Plain jacket, baseball cap pulled low, taking shorter strides than my usual pace.
There were men posted on the corner outside the pharmacy.
They weren’t obvious about it, no suits, nothing that would draw eyes in a district like this—but I’d spent enough time in Zhenya’s world to spot paid watchers.
One of them kept flicking his eyes down to a photo on his phone, then back up at the street, scanning faces.
I didn’t stick around to see if it was Lai’s he was looking for.
I took the long way back. Cut through the courtyard behind the bakery, doubled past a construction site, and slipped in through the motel’s rear stairwell instead of the lobby. The night clerk hadn’t gotten a good look at my face on day one, and I intended to keep it that way.
I used the last of my cash to buy a cheap burner phone, just in case I needed a way to arrange supplies without walking back into a trap.
Nikolai stayed under the whole time. Good. He was better off sleeping. Some griefs are easier survived unconscious.
A week in, I finally turned on the television, low volume, mostly out of boredom. I’d stopped checking the news after the first day; none of it mattered to me, and I had zero interest in watching the Romanov family manage their image for the cameras.
I should have kept the TV off.
The report was quick. A society correspondent stood outside the White Manor gates, glossy and over rehearsed, with black cars and flower arrangements blurred in the background behind her.
“…the Romanov family confirming today that Mrs. Nadezhda’s funeral will be held next Saturday in a private ceremony, restricted to immediate family and friends—”
I froze.
Those vipers had set the date for his grandmother’s burial and hadn’t even bothered to inform him.
A sharp and involuntary pressure built behind my eyes—a sudden pulse I didn’t invite and couldn’t stop. I stood up. The television kept running, but the audio faded into background noise.
Babushka. The woman who had properly raised him. The only person who had ever held his face and told him he looked happier. Dead. And that family was handling her funeral like a corporate merger, cutting out the one person who actually cared about her.
I grabbed the cap, the jacket, and the burner phone off the desk.
By the time I realized what I was doing, my hand was already on the doorknob. It was an uncharacteristic lapse. I didn’t operate on impulse—that was Lai’s habit. He reacted; I calculated. But in that moment, the line between us felt razor-thin.
The motel corridor and stairwell were dead quiet. Outside, the street was buried under the cold, pale light of dawn. I stepped straight out into the chill, tugging the brim of my cap down to shadow my face, and shoved my hands deep into my pockets.
The penthouse was forty minutes away on foot. I set my pace and started walking.