“Did he hurt you, Daria?”
I flinch.
The reaction tells him everything my words don’t. I see it register on his face as something behind his eyes goes cold and still. It’s the same look he had in the grocery store when he grabbed Semyon’s wrist. The look of a man working out how much damage he could inflict if he chose to.
“That’s not—” I start, but he cuts me off.
“Don’t tell me it’s not important. Don’t minimize it. Don’t make excuses for him.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.”
I see the war playing out behind his eyes as the professional tries to stay objective while the man underneath wants to burn something down.
Then he abruptly stands and walks toward the fire escape.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to make a call.”
He steps out onto the fire escape before I can respond, pulling the window shut behind him. Through the glass, I watch him pace the landing with his phone pressed to his ear. His breath forms clouds in the cold night air. His free hand clenches and unclenches at his side.
I can’t hear what he’s saying—the glass muffles everything except the low rumble of his voice—but I watch his body language, the rigid set of his shoulders, and the jerky gestures. Whoever he’s talking to is getting an earful.
The call lasts about five minutes. When he climbs back inside, his expression is unreadable.
He crosses the room and stops in front of my chair, close enough that I have to tilt my head back to meet his eyes.
“Whatever happens next,” he begins, “no one will take Kira from you.”
I want to ask him how he can promise that without knowing the full scope of what Bogdan has built using my name. Pyotr knows about the federal investigation closing in, but he doesn’t know how deep this goes or how tangled I am in all of it.
But the look in his eyes stops the questions before they reach my lips.
It’s not bravado or false confidence. It’s the look of a man who has made a decision and will not be moved from it.
For the first time in three years, I don’t feel quite so alone.
13
Pyotr
The coffee in my mug has gone cold, but I keep drinking it anyway.
I’ve been sitting at the kitchen table for two hours, staring at my laptop screen while Daria teaches a piano lesson in the next room. The sound of scales drifts through the thin walls, punctuated by her gentle corrections and the occasional frustrated sigh from her young student.
I have nine days left to prove what I know in my gut but can’t yet prove on paper.
Last night, after Daria told me about Bogdan, I called Tony and asked him to dig deeper into the blocked number that’s terrorized her for three years. Most people assume blocked calls are untraceable, and for the average person with average resources, that’s true. But Tony isn’t average, and neither are the Kozlov resources.
The trick is in the metadata. When a call connects, it leaves a digital footprint regardless of whether the number displays onthe recipient’s screen. Cell towers log the connection, network switches record the routing path, and if you know how to access those records—legally or otherwise—you can work backward from the destination to the source.
Tony has contacts with three different telecom companies. Men who owe favors or need money or have secrets they’d rather keep buried. It took him fewer than six hours to pull the data I needed.
My laptop pings with an incoming file. I click it open and review the contents, my eyes moving faster as the pieces fall into place.
The blocked number is traced to a burner phone registered under a shell company called Mylar Holdings. On the surface, Mylar Holdings appears to be a legitimate import-export business operating out of Moscow. Standard stuff. The kind of company that exists in the thousands across Russia, moving goods and generating paperwork that nobody bothers to examine too closely.
