***
Six months after that first night in my penthouse, Douglas vanished.
Not dramatically. Not with explanations or goodbyes. He simply…stopped existing.
Messages went unanswered. Calls rang into the void. I showed up at his apartment—a tasteful two-bedroom in a renovated building near Patriarch Ponds—and found the dooranswered by a haggard landlord who informed me Douglas hadn’t paid rent in two months. The electricity had been shut off three weeks ago.
“Did he leave anything?” I asked, my chest already tightening with the first stirrings of dread.
The landlord shrugged. “Took everything. Clothes, computer, even the goddamn light bulbs. Place was empty when I finally got the locks changed.”
I stood in that vacant apartment, staring at dust motes floating through afternoon light, and felt the foundation of my reality begin to crack.
Back home, I opened our chat history with shaking hands.
Every message was gone.
Not deleted in the normal way—that would leave traces, metadata, timestamps marking absence. No, these were erased professionally. The kind of data sanitization you only saw in intelligence operations.
My stomach dropped.
I pulled up my personal system logs, telling myself I was being paranoid, that there had to be an explanation. Douglas had been my friend. My partner. He wouldn’t—
The logs didn’t lie.
Withdrawals from secret Bratva-linked cold wallets. Back channels I’d barely known existed. Accounts I’d set up as fail-safes, meant to be completely isolated, completely secure. All compromised. All drained. The patterns matched APT-style siphons—advanced persistent threats that lived in your system for months, learning, adapting, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
And every single withdrawal traced back to Douglas’s user account.
I sat frozen in front of my screens as the truth assembled itself like shards of glass forming a mirror that showed me exactly how much of a fool I’d been.
Douglas Maclanden wasn’t even his real name.
I found the documentation buried in financial records I’d been too trusting, too stupid, to verify earlier. The ‘investor’ identity was a façade, a shell company registered in Cyprus, connected to another shell in Gibraltar, all leading back to…nothing. Smoke and mirrors and expertly forged credentials.
The consulting work in Ukraine and Dubai? Couldn’t confirm it. The references he’d given? All burner emails that had since been deactivated. The story about making money in financial sector cybersecurity? A lie so perfectly crafted that I’d never thought to question it.
He’d played me from the very first conversation.
Every technical discussion had been reconnaissance. Every shared pizza and bourbon night had been him mapping my social vulnerabilities. Every teasing challenge about my inventions had been him probing my security protocols, finding the gaps, learning exactly where to place the knife.
And I’d welcomed him in. Shown him everything. Given him access to systems that could destroy me, destroy the Bratva, destroy everything I’d built.
I spent three days chasing digital ghosts across the internet, following traces that led nowhere, hacking into systems I shouldn’t have touched. Finally, I found it—a travel record, hastily erased but not thoroughly enough.
Douglas had fled to the United States.
Not just fled. He’d taken stolen credit card data—thousands of identities, harvested from god knew how many sources—and was apparently running some new game across the Atlantic.
I sat in my darkened penthouse as Moscow slept, staring at flight records that proved my friend had been a fiction, and felt something cold and ancient settle into my bones.
Vladimir called the next morning. His voice was ice wrapped in velvet. “Kirill. My office. Now.”
I knew what it meant. In the Bratva, when millions disappeared, someone paid in blood. Usually literally.
***
Vladimir’s office smelled like leather and old smoke. He sat behind a mahogany desk that had witnessed more confessions than a church, his steel-gray eyes pinning me in place like a specimen under glass.
