“Twenty-two minutes ago. The blood trail disappeared at the ravine.”
Grisha takes a long swallow and sets the mug on the counter. “I served with Eduard outside Aleppo. If there’s a trail, he’ll follow it to hell and back. The man once tracked a supply convoy through a sandstorm using nothing but tire ruts and instinct.”
“That’s what I keep telling her,” Pyotr says.
Grisha looks at me again. “Ms. Lebedev?—”
“Kozlov,” I correct him. I stopped being Mrs. Lebedev the day I signed divorce papers in a courthouse bathroom with shaking hands and a bruise under my sleeve. “But you can just call me Daria.”
A dip of his chin. “Daria. We’re going to get this done. You have my word.” Then he picks up his mug, takes it back outside, and pulls the door shut behind him.
The minutes drag on. I count them by the ticking of Pyotr’s watch, a faint mechanical pulse I can hear in the quiet between radio check-ins. Finally, Pyotr stands to refill the kettle. He moves carefully, favoring his left side, and I watch the muscles along his jaw work when he reaches for the handle with his injured arm out of habit, then corrects to his right. Neither wince nor complaint leaves him. Just the adjustment and the forward motion, the same way he absorbs every pain I’ve seen him face. Quietly and without ceremony.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“Yes.”
One word, honest and unadorned. I think what I love most about this man is that he never softens the truth, for himself or for me.
The radio barks again, and this time, it’s Boris.
“Base, tracking team. We’ve located fresh prints heading northwest toward an abandoned hunting lodge that was covered by trees on the sat images. Grid four-seven-niner. Blood volume heavier than the last stretch. He’s losing steam.”
Pyotr grabs the radio before Boris finishes the last syllable. “Distance to the lodge?”
“A few hundred meters from our current position, which I’ll send you. Eduard’s scout has a visual on the structure. No movement outside. Smoke from the chimney. He made it inside.”
“Hold where you are. Nobody approaches until I give the word.”
“Copy. Holding. Boris out.”
The kitchen goes quiet.
I’m on my feet, though I don’t remember standing. Both hands are squeezing the back of the chair so hard that my knuckles have gone white, and my pulse is hammering in my temples, the hollow behind my ears, and the soft dip at the base of my throat.
Pyotr sets down the radio and turns to me.
“He’s done,” I whisper.
“Not yet, but he will be soon. Boris will confirm the layout and check for secondary exits while we head there. Once he’s satisfied there’s no way out, we move. An hour, maybe less.”
All of the bruises I lied about in emergency rooms, custody threats that kept me awake for months, and midnight calls that turned my phone into a weapon aimed at my sanity are funneling toward this single endpoint.
Something gives way inside me. Not a collapse or the numb shutdown I used to mistake for calm. This is more like the moment a held breath finally releases, when lungs expand and ribs open, and the body remembers what it was built to do. The thing wound tightly behind my sternum since the first time Bogdan closed his fist doesn’t disappear. I’d be foolish to expect that. But I feel the fibers loosen just enough to let something else push through.
Not relief. That belongs for later. To the phone call with Kira and the drive to Moscow, and the moment I walk through those gates and see my daughter sprinting toward me with Rex tucked under one arm and a gap-toothed grin splitting her face.
This is something smaller, like the first green bud pushing through frozen ground to signal spring is on the way.
Hope.
Pyotr stalks across the kitchen and wraps his good arm around me, and I press my face into his chest and breathe. His heartbeat thuds against my cheek, steady as every promise he’s kept since the night he sat on my kitchen floor and taught me what safe hands felt like.
“We’re almost there,” he mumbles into my hair.
I close my eyes. Out in the forest, the world is getting smaller around Bogdan the way it got smaller around me for years, except nobody is coming to save him.
The difference is that someone came for me.
