A man in a navy work jacket passes the corridor mirror with the box tucked to his ribs, hat pulled low, scarf high, profile turned to the varnish so the lens gets nothing but a jaw and a shadow. The timecode matches the lift stall. The badge on his chest is real enough to fool a glance and wrong by one letter if you know our ledger.
"Same gait as the ‘electrician' from the parish-florist-curb loop," Misha says. "We are not guessing."
"We pulled the service camera and the delivery slip, then walked the timestamp to the pantry vent. Sasha took the grate off while Katya held the light." Misha lifts a small nightlight plug to the light in a tweezer. "It listened to ourrooms, swallowed what moved through the air, and passed it to a car waiting at the curb," he says. "When the car pulled away, the little plug went quiet and pretended to be furniture."
Sasha runs the outside lens and returns with a partial plate under road salt and a driver in the same navy, hands bare in the cold, someone who doesn't mind leaving fingerprints when he plans to disappear.
Misha lays the key log on the table.
"The lock to her room?" I ask.
Katya tilts the pulled cylinder under the lamp. Her hands work with the cool speed of a surgeon. "Fresh scratches here and here," she says. "Not a tired master. A cousin key cut too close to ours after someone held the real thing long enough to trace it."
Misha reads from the log without looking up. "The steward signed the master out for polishing two months ago, held it nine hours, one past the limit." He scoffs. "The polisher's other client sits behind a dentist's door that later received a parcel for a name tied to one of Aleksandr's short leases in New York."
Katya's mouth goes thin. "Your prince could not wire a lamp," she says. "He brought boys who could."
We bring in the steward. His freckles go to chalk, he speaks of delays, and I tell him he was careless. Careless men don't last under a roof held by vows.
Katya stands back, boots square, red hair bright as a warning flare, and watches me choose the next cut. Shethinks vows are nonsense. She also thinks I keep the house breathing. Both can be true.
"I will take the burn," I say. "Truth is not a thing you ration when a life is at stake."
Katya's mouth softens. "There he is," she mutters. "The man who throws himself between a knife and a hymn."
There is one urgent thing I must do before I begin. I find her in the small sitting room off her corridor, a place with green tiles and a window that throws pale winter light across a table with a vase that holds nothing. She sits with her hands folded on a closed book.The Book of Vows. The cover is worn where a child once traced vines with a fingertip.
"Walk with me," I say.
She rises, doesn't touch my arm, follows me down the hall where icons hang between doorways like sentries that will not take sides. The chapel breathes lamp oil and old wood and the scent of tapers trimmed for the Vigil. I cross myself at the door and step into the hands of the saints. She bows. We stand before the low table where the crowns sleep in velvet and the red thread lies coiled, a single drop of color that knows how to bind a city.
I don't explain first. Explanations are for after the work begins. "We will practice the last line," I say. "Not because a priest asked, but because I ask, and because the house needs to hear us ask."
Her mouth tightens. "You want me to perform."
"I want you to anchor the roof," I say. "Men are trading our name over fish and strong talk. They are measuring whether this house is still a house. If you and I speak the final line,the message travels faster than any rumor. Altar words will hold."
She looks at the crowns, then at my throat where the cross lies under cotton. "You are asking for more than practice," she says.
"Yes," I say. "I'm asking for assent. Not to me. To the vow."
Her hands move to the book, then fall. "Read it," I say. I show her the page we marked. Old letters. A translation written in her grandmother's hand below, darker ink at one clause as if the older woman pressed hard there.
She sets the page on the stand. She draws in air once, slowly, on a count I know from training and from music. Her gaze finds the line. She traces it with a fingertip, mapping vines into meaning.
"To bind our fate to each other, before God and man," I say first, very low, so the syllables strike the wood and rise again. I say it as I mean it, and I mean it as if the floor were a witness.
She reads the line. Her lips shape the words. Her eyes don't leave the page. Sound doesn't arrive.
I let the silence hold. She is not refusing. She is testing whether her voice belongs to her. She lifts the page, sets it down again, then lowers her hand. Not today. I nod. Once.
"I hear you," I say. I step back. "We will finish when you are ready to speak and not read."
She closes the book. The lamplight finds her lashes and sets a thin gold on them. I want to ask for more. I don't. The house doesn't need me to plead with its future. It needs meto hunt the man who thinks Christmas Eve is a stage for treason.
I leave the chapel and let the corridor take me. The air tastes of myrrh and snow that has learned our steps. I turn toward the stairs, already pulling the next thread in my mind. Drivers to tail. Accounts to check. Guard schedule to shift without telling a soul. A decoy package with a canary word that will sing in the ear of any man who steals it. My phone buzzes once in my pocket. I don't like the time. I lift it to my ear.
A voice I trust because it has eaten out of my hand and bitten me when honesty demanded it speaks without preface. "Vetrov is planning something for Christmas Eve," my informant says. "You need to move now."
