13. Cara
CARA
Morning comes whether I’m ready for it or not.
Blue light fills the windows. Snow covers the ground outside. The same expensive blanket is over my legs, the same locked balcony sits beyond the reinforced glass, and I’m still in a country where I can barely ask for help. Nothing has changed.
Except everything has.
Yesterday, I fainted in front of the Pakhan, insulted him first, opened Patrick’s archive, and learned my brother may have reached into Dmitri’s life before he reached mine.
Today, one sentence keeps coming back.
Dmitri said I’ll work beside him.
That should scare me, and it does. But somewhere beneath the fear, the word leaves a small warmth I don’t know what to do with.
I sit up slowly, and the room tips only a little. My head feels heavy, my mouth feels dry, and right now, I’m not ready to face anyone after yesterday. On the table beside the bed, someone has left water, plain crackers, and a folded note in neat handwriting.
Eat before arguing.
No signature.
Mrs. Wentworth, obviously.
I stare at the note, then at the crackers.
“Everyone’s a tyrant,” I mutter and eat one anyway.
I get out of bed and feel the cold at once. I wrap myself in a shawl and pad toward the window. Beyond the bars, a silver-barked tree reaches up from the snow, and its bare top catches gold wherever the sun touches it directly. No walls around it. No one telling it where to stand.
A knock comes before I can decide whether to hate it.
A young maid enters and hands me a small card.
“Breakfast request,” she says.
This is new. I look from the card to her face, waiting for the trick.
“American breakfast.”
She nods as if I’ve passed a test and leaves.
Ten minutes later, the knock comes again. This time, she returns with a tray and a practiced smile. “Mrs. Wentworth sent American breakfast.”
She sets down scrambled eggs, buttered toast, crisp potatoes, grilled tomatoes, a small bowl of berries, and bacon. A silver pot sits beside a white cup.
“The coffee is especially brewed,” she says in a singsong voice. “Sugar on the side, for your liking.”
I stare at her. “Did Mrs. Wentworth say that exactly?”
Her smile brightens by one professional inch. “Almost exactly.”
The door closes softly after her, and I stand there for a second, suspicious of eggs. Then the smell gets to me. The first bite of toast and egg nearly makes me close my eyes. Warm butter, salt, crisp potato, coffee dark enough to argue back.
When I finish, my hands have stopped shaking.
I step into the small living room of the suite dressed in black pants and a soft sweater someone chose for what they thought prisoners like. At the door, I pause and wait for the familiar shape of men outside. The door just opens.
No guards stand in the hall. I look left, then right. Nothing.
Well, not nothing. Cameras remain tucked into trim, small and patient. At the far entrance to the north wing, two guards stand near the archway, giving me space without giving me freedom.
Even so, space counts.
I walk. The north wing looks different without men breathing down my neck.
Cream walls, dark runners, framed winter landscapes, side tables with fresh flowers, doors set far enough apart to imply secrets.
A maid carrying towels nods to me. An older staff member steps aside with a tray and says, “Good morning, Miss,” as if I am a tourist up here for breakfast.
My shoulders loosen before I can stop them. It scares me more than the locks.
The corridor opens into a small interior balcony above the reception hall.
From up here, the marble floor looks like a checkerboard people move across.
Two men in dark suits pass beneath me with files tucked under their arms, heading toward the legal wing without looking up.
At the far end, Mrs. Wentworth speaks to a young staff member beside a flower arrangement that screams RICHES.
Nobody stops me from looking. After a minute, I move on and find the library doors half open. No guard blocks them, so I step inside.
The shelves climb neatly along the walls, arranged with almost theatrical taste. Russian history. Romanovs. Soviet collapse. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. Pushkin in several editions. Folklore collections with gilt lettering. English translations lined beside Russian originals.
Everything is beautiful, and the room has life in it, but it still doesn’t feel personal. The books sit in clean rows by size and subject. No cracked paperback leans out of place, no old receipt marks a page, and nothing looks like someone grabbed it, used it, and shoved it back.
I walk to the rounded window.
Beyond the reinforced glass and black bars, the rear grounds stretch white under the winter sun.
Near the tree line, one rifleman comes off rotation with frost on his coat and dark gloves hooked around the strap of his weapon.
Another man steps into his place. They exchange a nod, then a few words I can’t hear through the glass.
Morning rhythm, Volkov edition.
My chest tightens, and I step back from the window before I can stand there feeling sorry for myself.
Someone coughs near the door.
Scar Chin stands there with his hands visible and his face almost polite. “Miss O’Connell.”
“Please tell me no one has filed a complaint.”
His mouth bends. “Antonov asks for you in the comms room. For work.”
Asks. Not orders. I hear the difference.
“You can come with me when ready,” he adds.
I look once across the books, then at the barred window and the guarded grounds beyond it. Elena has given me space, breakfast, and choices I can name. That doesn’t make me free.
“I’m ready,” I say.
The comms room looks different when I walk in, and the difference is the men. Yesterday, I was Patrick’s sister, dragged in with his mess attached to me and dropped on Dmitri’s table. Today, I can help them solve a problem, or I can make the problem worse in a way they’ll have to respect.
That suits me better.
I know rooms like this. Cold vents, hard light, screens nobody turns off, men mistaking tension for control.
This is work. Screens line the far wall, flipping between gates, corridors, route maps, access logs, and columns of numbers I don’t have enough time to read. My pulse steadies for the first time all morning.
A long table runs through the center covered with paper folders, encrypted drives, half-empty coffee cups, and keyboards worn shiny at the edges.
Petrov is there with two files open and one finger pressed against a date. Dmitri stands beside a chair, and when I come in, he pulls it out an inch. Every man sees it.
So do I.
He looks unfair in black.
Rougher this morning, with no sleep left on his face and all his control back in place. His shirt pulls across his chest and shoulders. His sleeves are rolled up, and his forearms are bare, all muscle and veins, with those big hands resting near the chair he pulled out for me.
I stare at him for one second too long.
After yesterday, I should be thinking about Patrick and the archive. Instead, I’m thinking about his hands, and that is a terrible idea.
His eyes meet mine. Blue. Guarded. Then his control slips just enough for me to see he noticed.
My face heats. Then my neck. Then the warmth slips lower, because some part of me remembers him before I’m ready to.
I look back at the screens before my body starts making choices I can’t explain later.
A man with hard green eyes stands near the screens with his arms folded.
Dmitri talks to him. “Abramov, status on the gate feeds?”
“Clean so far,” the man says. His eyes move to me once, then back to Dmitri.
Yuri sits at a side station with a terminal ready. His hair looks worse than yesterday, which takes real commitment. A second screen waits beside his keyboard, and a notes panel sits open in one corner.
He watches me as if he hasn’t decided whether I’m here to help, break something, or make his day longer.
I stop behind the chair. “So this is the kid table.”
Yuri glances at Dmitri before answering. “You can read the files and search them. You can write notes in that box. The notes stay on this machine. I can see what you type from my screen.”
He points to the side of the terminal. “The machine isn’t connected to the internet, outside drives won’t work, and copying is locked unless I approve it.”
“So I get a pencil in a padded room.” I cast a quick look at Dmitri.
Yuri’s mouth twitches. “A very expensive pencil.”
Dmitri’s gaze cuts to him, and Yuri discovers a fresh love for his keyboard. I sit in the chair Dmitri pulled out for me and don’t argue.
Abramov steps forward with a folder in one hand. His team must have worked all night. His shirt is fresh, but his eyes look tired.
“First target is Evan Mercer.”
My fingers stop on the chair arm.
Dmitri watches me, so I make my face go blank. Blank is safer than showing him I’m thinking about Kathryn and Mikhail in Boston.
“Kathryn’s boyfriend,” Abramov says. “We found a contact pattern between Mercer and Patrick O’Connell. Mercer’s messages were wiped from his side.”
My mouth goes dry.
“Kathryn has nothing to do with this,” I say, and the words come out faster than I mean them to.
Dmitri pulls the chair beside mine and sits close enough that I feel him there without looking. “Nobody is accusing Kathryn.”
“You say that, and then you open a file anyway.”
Petrov stands near the freight map with two pages in his hand. “Files are how we follow dead men and missing money.”
I turn to him. “Lovely.”
Dmitri sets his hand close to mine but not touching. “Cara.”
The sound of my name pulls me back to the call, and the memory comes with it.
Evan’s voice comes back first, then Kathryn’s kitchen, then the blue lunchbox. Kathryn knew what it meant because I taught her. Mikhail knew what it meant because I needed him safe. Evan should have heard it as preschool nonsense and left it there.
Instead, he carried it somewhere.
My fingers tighten on the chair arm. Dmitri sees it, so I keep my face flat and stare at the screen again.