7. Dominik
DOMINIK
The light from the street cuts across the carpet in a thin, dirty stripe. Ana sleeps on the bed, turned toward the wall, her breathing steady enough that I count it without thinking. One hand is tucked under her face, the other curled near her chest like she’s holding something that might be taken.
I don’t lie down. Night makes people bold. It also strips away noise. What’s left is easier to see.
I sit in the chair by the window and crack the curtain just enough to watch. Streetlights glow dully against wet pavement. Cars come and go, some hotel, some not. Past the lot, I clock the prefab structures where staff sleep between shifts. My eyes mark movements, and my mind keeps count.
The false text keeps replaying in my head. Come home. Now. It was short and familiar, but typed by the wrong hands.
Ana didn’t write it. Whoever sent it knew how I read urgency. They also knew which channel I trusted.
I frown, the pieces rearranging. Of the three people I trust, I booked the last residence through one.
His sister’s summerhouse, empty, safe, off-grid.
He’s never drawn attention before. But neighbors?
Someone saw us move in. Someone curious, the kind who watches.
Faces that watched too long, the ones that looked away too fast.
I pull out my burner and don’t look at the screen yet. I listen first. The building hums. Pipes shift in the walls. An elevator three floors down. A door closing somewhere. No one stops outside our door.
I check the phone. No new pings. That doesn’t calm me. If it had been me before, I would’ve already called Yuri. Then Pavel. Then Oleg. Three different lines, three different circles. Yuri watches wires. Pavel watches people. Oleg watches money. Within this circle, lies don’t breathe long.
I don’t call them yet.
Because someone is inside the pipes. The message didn’t arrive late.
It didn’t reroute. It didn’t fall back to the secondary path.
It came through the primary relay. That means the relay isn’t private anymore.
That means someone above street level is watching the infrastructure itself, not just the men using it.
The cafe wasn’t unlucky. It was chosen. And the burner wasn’t discovered. It was matched.
I close my eyes and rebuild the day.
Mikhail walks in like he’s early, not bold. Orders for her without asking. Knows the table. Knows the time. Knows I won’t be there.
That only works if someone tells him where I am not.
I unlock a second phone, older, heavier. No contacts saved. I dial from memory. Yuri answers on the third ring. No hello.
“Someone spoofed Ana,” I say. “Used my trusted line.”
“How fast?” he asks.
“Real time.”
He exhales once. “That’s possession more than spoofing.”
I nod though he can’t see me. “Can you see who touched it?”
“I can see who didn’t,” he says. “Give me ten.”
I hang up and don’t wait. The next number I dial is Pavel’s.
“Who benefits from sidelining me?” I ask, no preamble.
“Council,” he says without thinking. “Or someone pretending to be them.”
“Names.”
“Too early,” he says. “But if it was clean, it wasn’t a freelancer.”
Last call. Oleg.
“Any of Markov’s old accounts move?” I ask.
A pause. Fingers on keys. “One mirror woke up, then slept again.”
“Who saw it?”
“Everyone who still matters,” he says. “Which means someone wanted it seen.”
I end the call.
The mirror wasn’t for money. It was for me. They are watching me, testing my habits, and they learned something I don’t like.
I look at Ana again. She shifts, murmurs once, then settles.
I check the door, the lock, and add a wedge under the handle.
Her phone lies on the table near the drawer.
I pick it up. The battery’s low. I plug it in and wait for the screen to wake.
Out of curiosity more than permission, I flick it open.
It’s locked. I try her birthday. It works.
Plenty of incomings. Condolences, regrets in neutral language wrapped in polite timing. Some numbers I recognize from the Bratva. Some are masked. Some aren’t even trying to hide. Men who want to show respect, but not enough to tie themselves to anything that might turn against them later.
I scroll faster. None of them explains the text I received. Then my finger stops on a name. Irina. Ana’s personal attendant. Urgent, she texts. No reply from Ana.
I check Ana’s purse, pull out the burner, and flip it open. The inbox is almost empty. Just my messages. A few from this afternoon—Where are you? I’m getting bored. Is it the rain? Then nothing. She never sent the text that told me to come home instead of the cafe.
I don’t let myself drift, but the stillness pulls things loose anyway.
I knew Ana before men decided her life for her.
She was fifteen. I was sixteen. Same block.
Same cracked pavement. We held hands when no one watched, kissed fast, stupidly, like we were stealing something fragile.
She talked about flying planes. Said she wanted the sky because it’s so beautiful. I didn’t laugh. Because I believed her.
Then her father sold her. Clean transaction. His debt vanished, and with it, his daughter, traded for ledgers thick with ink and rooms that never stopped talking. Markov got a wife with a face that opened doors and a body that made men listen. Ana stopped talking about the sky.
My parents died not long after. I needed work. I ended up in Markov’s hall one gray morning, hair still long, body already trained from street scraps and borrowed discipline. Markov noticed both. He liked men who learned fast and didn’t ask why.
He kept me. I learned. I hated him, but I stayed.
Because Ana was there. She became the thing he displayed.
The proof. He took her to dinners, meetings, casinos.
He used her smile to grease contracts and her silence to close deals.
When she pushed back, he hit her. Not always with his hands. Eventually, she stopped trying.
I saw all of it. I didn’t intervene. I couldn’t without killing us both. I told myself proximity was protection. Sometimes, it was.
Yuri’s call comes just before dawn, catching me in a light doze.
“You were right,” Yuri says. His voice is flatter than before. That’s never good.
“Talk.”
“The route was clean because it wasn’t hidden,” he says. “It was cleared.”
I straighten slightly in the chair. “Cleared how?”
“Whitelisted traffic,” he replies. “Old protocol. Council-tier.”
I don’t speak.
“It went through three security checks,” Yuri says. “Anything fake would’ve been blocked. This wasn’t.”
He exhales once. “It didn’t slow down. It wasn’t redirected. It was cleared and sent through like it belonged there.”
“By whom?” I ask.
“Not a name,” he says. “A category.”
I wait.
“Administrative clearance,” Yuri finishes. “The kind elders use when they don’t want questions later.”
My jaw tightens. “So this wasn’t someone being clever.”
“No,” he says. “This was someone being official.”
“Timing?” I say.
“Intentional,” Yuri answers. “The message was released exactly when your presence would complicate things.”
“They wanted me compliant.”
“They wanted you absent,” he corrects. “Different thing.”
I exhale once through my nose. “Can you trace who signed off?”
There’s a pause. I hear keys. Then Yuri stops.
“I could,” he says slowly. “But once I do, I light myself up too.”
“Understood.”
“You should know something else,” he adds.
“Say it.”
“The same clearance window opened twice today,” Yuri says. “Only one was used.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning they practiced before they pulled you,” he says. “This wasn’t improvisation.”
I glance at Ana, still asleep, unaware of how neatly she’s being handled.
“They’re not moving the board yet,” Yuri says. “But when they do, it won’t be loud.”
He ends the call.
Ana stirs, rolls onto her side, then pushes herself up on one elbow and rubs at her eyes. Her hair falls into her face, loose and dark, still heavy with sleep. She looks at me by the window, then at the untouched bed.
“You sat there all night,” she says.
I don’t answer. Her gaze drifts to the nightstand. Both phones are there, hers and the burner I gave her. She straightens. “What are you doing with my phones?”
“Checking,” I say, keeping it simple. No use telling her lies.
Her mouth tightens. “You don’t trust me.”
“I do,” I reply. “I don’t trust who’s reaching for you.”
She swings her legs over the side of the bed and snatches the phones, fully awake now. She scrolls fast, eyes narrowed, face blank. Then she stops, thumb taps out a reply, almost too fast. She waits, watching the screen, her face scrunched. Then she types some more, fingers flying.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Seeing what’s urgent,” she says, already turning the phone off.
She doesn’t look at me when she sets it down.
Morning comes gray and thin. By the time I come back from a reconnaissance of the neighborhood, she’s dressed, scarf wrapped tightly around her face, goggles on.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“Irina wants to meet,” she says, already typing. “She says it’s urgent.”
“Send me the address.”
“At a hotel near Leninsky Prospekt,” she says.
“I’ll come.”
“No.” Her voice is sharp now. “She asked for me. Not you.”
She’s already at the door. “It’s just a couple of hours. I’ll be back soon.”
I study her for a second, weighing the risk against the fight it would take to stop her.
The lock turns. The door opens, then shuts.
That’s the last I see of Ana. The next call is from Irina. The phone rings once. I answer before the second vibration finishes.
“Madam has been taken,” Irina screams, voice breaking, breath raw like she’s running while she talks.
“But Ana went to meet you?” I ask.
“Yes,” Irina says, breath hitching. “I needed to tell her something urgent.”
“Where?”
“In the hotel foyer.”
“Calm down,” I bark into the phone, my mind already firing through scenarios, every possibility shredding into the next even as a part of me knew this was coming.
“Taken by whom?” I say once Irina catches her breath enough to speak clearly.