I stop cold when I reach the bottom drawer.
My fingers brush something hard and rectangular beneath a pile of lace and cotton. I pull it out and stare at the object in my hand.
A burner phone.
The screen is cracked in one corner, and the case is scuffed from use. Someone’s been using this phone for a while, which is odd, because it wasn’t here when I arrived ten days ago. Maybe she’d had it on her.
I power it on and wait for it to boot up with my heart beating a little harder than normal. The call history shows only onecontact, a blocked number. Daria’s personal phone goes off with a blocked number constantly, and every time, her face goes white.
I photograph the screen and keep digging.
The closet yields secrets, too. I discover a stack of bills behind her winter coats, shoved into the far corner. Brand new. Sequential serial numbers. Everything about it screams dirty money to anyone who knows what to look for.
I count it twice. There’s enough to live on for months if she stretched it.
Not only was this also not here during my initial search, but I have a hard time believing Daria let her daughter walk through the snow with holes in her shoes while this money sat untouched in her closet.
That doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense.
But I photograph the bills and move on.
A ledger page is tucked inside the romance novel on her nightstand. Smart hiding spot. No one searching would think to flip through a paperback with a shirtless man on the cover. The page contains a list of account numbers, and I recognize three from Dmitri’s file. Flagged accounts. The ones with Daria’s name attached.
I photograph that, too, and stand in the middle of her bedroom, trying to piece together what I’ve found.
The evidence is damning. If I report this to Dmitri, Daria’s fate is sealed.
But something feels wrong.
I’ve been doing this work for years. I know what planted evidence looks like. Real evidence is messy and hidden in places that make sense to the person hiding it. Scattered across multiple locations because criminals rarely keep everything in one place.
This is too neat. It’s everything an investigator would need to condemn her, gathered and gift-wrapped in her bedroom.
Someone wanted this found.
I sit on the edge of her bed and turn the burner phone over in my hands. The call history nags at me. Incoming calls only. Daria never dialed out from this phone.
If she was coordinating with conspirators, she’d need to contact them. She’d need to send information, ask questions, and confirm plans. But nothing is outgoing, just incoming call after call from the same blocked number.
I check the GPS history next, and my stomach drops further.
The phone was activated three years ago in Moscow, the same month Daria fled to St. Petersburg with her daughter. Someone gave her this phone right before she ran. Someone who wanted to be able to reach her no matter where she went or how well she hid.
The pieces are falling together in my mind. The blocked calls that terrify her. The man at the grocery store who grabbed her arm like he owned her. The bruises I saw on her skin. The way she flinches at sudden movements and checks locks until her hands shake.
Daria isn’t running an operation; she’s trapped in one.
But I can’t prove that yet. If I’m wrong, and I let my instincts override the evidence and she really is guilty, I’ll have helped a traitor escape justice.
I’ve made that mistake before. The cost was everything.
Syria had taught me that lesson in blood.
The mission briefing painted a clean picture: Extract a diplomat’s family from hostile territory. We had good intelligence and solid support—a team I would have died for without question. Everything looked perfect on paper.
But the intelligence was wrong. It wasn’t just incomplete but intentionally falsified. Someone sold us out and fed us information designed to walk us straight into a kill zone. Half my team died in the first thirty seconds of the ambush. I grabbed the diplomat’s daughter and ran while the world exploded around us.
We survived three days in bombed-out buildings, moving at night and hiding during the day. Lana was eight years old and scared out of her mind, but brave in a way most adults never manage. She held my hand through the darkness and believed me when I told her we’d make it home.
