RAINA
Idon’t remember leaving the control room, only the metallic taste in my mouth and the map burned behind my eyes. Vera’s cottage. Nadia’s safe place. Not safe anymore. Sergei’s men move as if the floor is on fire—radios spitting orders, weapons pulled from hidden drawers.
Someone shoves a coat on my shoulders. I barely notice. My body is here, in his mansion, but my mind is already on that narrow lane lined with birch trees, imagining fresh tracks in the snow where none should be. Every nightmare I have parked outside that gate feels closer right now.
The courtyard is a blur of headlights and exhaust when we hit the front steps. Snow slants sideways, catching blue-white in the security lamps. Four SUVs idle in formation, black metal hulks waiting to move.
Sergei strides ahead of me, already on his phone, voice low and clipped as he speaks to a lookout near the cottage. He doesn’t rush. He never raises his tone. His words come contained and exact. The crew adjusts instantly. His voice is the spine thewhole formation stands on. I should have found comfort in it. I couldn’t. Not with Nadia on the other end of the line.
“Front with me,” Sergei says, jerking his chin toward the lead SUV. Snow clings to his hair, dusting the silver at his temples. The fine lines beneath his eyes show the lack of sleep, but his movements waste nothing, a man pared down to function.
He opens the passenger door himself, not waiting for anyone. The small courtesy unsettles me more than shouting ever could. I climb in, cold air trailing after me. The doors thud shut. The world narrows to glass, leather, the low growl of the engine, and the coordinates pulsing red on the screen between us.
We roll through the inner gate, then the outer, metal teeth sliding open on hydraulics. Beyond the fence, Moscow is a smear of lights and white. Streets half buried in snow. Neon bleeding under snow. The convoy falls into formation without a word, two SUVs behind us, one trailing at a distance.
I watch Sergei from the corner of my eye as he speaks low into the radio, confirming routes, calling in favors from patrol cops who owe him more than their salaries. There is no siren, but every cell in my body screams like one, loud, steady, impossible to switch off inside.
The city thins faster than it should. One moment, we are between apartment blocks, concrete stacked on concrete, then we are on the ring road, then past it, sliding onto the narrower highway that cuts toward the woods. Snowbanks rise higher here, dirty at the base where plows have given up. My hand will not unclench from the grab handle above the window. I force my fingers to relax, then they lock again when an oncoming truck throws slush across our windshield, momentarily erasing theworld. I see Nadia's face in that white blankness instead, and my lungs forget to breathe.
“Talk to me,” Sergei says quietly. “What are you seeing?”
“My daughter on the porch,” I say, eyes fixed ahead. I don’t add the rest. My best friend on the floor. A box on the step. The thoughts pile fast, tripping over each other. I shove them aside.
I shift my gaze outside. Birch trunks flash past in streaks of white and black.
“We’re not too late, Raina,” Sergei assures me. “Hold on.”
I glance at his hands. His fingers clamp the steering wheel, tension humming through the tendons. He drives because he trusts his own reflexes, but his knuckles have gone pale against the leather. “You don't know that,” I say, the words trailing into the space between us.
“No,” he answers. “I refuse to know anything else.” For a moment, it feels like he’s making room for hope, something he’s never used as a guide.
The closer we get, the worse the pressure in my chest becomes. I know this road. I counted its potholes from the passenger seat of Vera’s beat-up Lada, heavily pregnant, fingers pressed to my ribs every time the baby kicked. I know the turnoff to the lane before it appears, feel it in my bones, an angle of silence where cell reception dies.
Sergei slows, flicks the headlights once, a signal to the car behind us. No one speaks. The trees converge, stark trunks and heavy snow bending over the track until the road behind narrows into a tunnel. The branches stoop too low, too tight, as if the forest is closing up behind us.
The cottage appears suddenly, like something out of a storybook. A fairy tale of low roof, smoke from the chimney, light leaking from the kitchen window, its perfection intact. Like any winter morning when Vera drinks her lemon tea and Nadia builds a fortress out of couch cushions, the little cottage feels untouched by the world outside.
Then my mind loops, the way it does when something feels wrong. Soon it spirals, replaying every rule we ever set for this place. No familiar footprints. No cigarette butts in the patch of bare earth where the guards usually grind them out. I know I should breathe, stay calm, analyze, but a part of me is already three steps ahead, picturing every way this could end badly.
“Stay in the car,” Sergei says, reaching for his door handle.
“If you think I’m staying put, you hit your head,” I snap, fingers fumbling with my belt. Fear has stripped my patience to the bone. He eyes me once, then gives a short nod that feels like a small victory and no comfort. “Behind me.”
We step out into air that cuts like glass. The snow under my boots squeaks, packed hard. Vera’s curtains twitch. A second later, the front door opens, and she fills the frame, Nadia hitched on her hip.
Nadia sees me first. Her eyes spark, storm-grey and bright against her pale face. “Mama,” she says, and the sound almost buckles my knees. I cross the yard in three strides and take them both in, one arm around Vera, one hand on Nadia’s back, feeling the solid warmth of her through her little sweater.
“What happened?” Vera kisses my hair. She smells like soap and woodsmoke and the faint tang of gun oil that never leaves her skin.
“Later,” I say. “We have to go. Now.”
Her body goes still. She nods once. No questions.
Sergei hangs back on the path, letting us collide first. When I look over, he's watching Nadia with that same unnerving stillness he uses before he decides to kill someone. Assessment, not affection. I want to hit him with the nearest object. The instinct is stupid and loud.
He reaches slowly into his coat. I close my eyes. But he only pulls out a small knitted bear, brown yarn, one ear flopped. He kneels, his big frame softly folding down until his eyes are level with hers. “Zdravstvuy, Nadia,” he says, the Russian soft around the edges. He holds the bear out by its stitched paw. “I'm a friend of your mama’s.”
She considers him, serious, thumb resting near her mouth but not in it. Nadia has always met the world head-on, weighing people. Her gaze drops to the bear, then back to his face. “Do you know his name?” she asks.
