Mikhail waits in the storage room where I left him. Plastic cuffs on his wrists. Tape over his mouth. Two guards on either side, rifles steady. A camera in the corner, red light blinking.
I enter and shut the door behind me. The air in here is cool and still. The concrete floor holds the faint echo of earlier steps. Mikhail’s eyes lift at the sound.
He reads my face and flinches before I even speak.
I walk up to him, peel the tape off his mouth, and let it hang from my fingers.
“Something changed,” he whispers. His voice shakes.
“Something changed the moment you let the Courier walk into my walls,” I say. “Now it’s worse. Raina is gone.”
His face goes slack. For a second, I see real shock.
“Gone?” he repeats. “How?”
“If I knew how, you’d still be breathing because you’d be useful,” I say. “You lied about the bathhouse. You lied about the glitch. You lied about what the Courier asked for and what he took. You still have pieces you didn’t give me. I want them now.”
He shakes his head. “I told you everything.”
“You told me the part that kept you alive,” I answer. “You didn’t think he would take her. You thought he only wanted to make me run. You misread him. You misread me.”
“He always goes for the person who thinks they’re safe,” Mikhail says. His eyes flick past me to the door, to the camera, back tomy face. “You built a fortress in this city and you think a fortress is enough. It isn’t.”
“That sounds like a speech you rehearsed,” I say.
“It’s the truth,” he replies. “He doesn’t stand at your door with a gun. He stands in your pipes, in your files, in your guards’ pockets. You’re fighting a losing battle, Sergei. You can’t win against something that has no face.”
He says my name without permission. That almost bothers me more than the content.
“You thought the same thing when the old bosses came for you,” he goes on, voice growing stronger as he sees he still has room to speak. “You thought you could change a few pieces and hold the board. You cannot change the rules. You built this house on the same bones they did. He knows those bones. He was there. He watched you use the same tools. He knows you will react the way they did when someone touched their children.”
For a moment I see the terrified man who once sat in my basement with his hands on a keyboard, begging me for more time and more hardware while the city burned outside. He’s the same man. He just picked a different side this time.
“You’re right about one thing,” I say.
He looks up fast, hope sparking in his eyes.
“You’re right that he thinks I’ll act like them,” I say. “You’re wrong about everything else.”
I put my hand on his jaw and tilt his head back. His eyes widen. He opens his mouth, maybe to scream or to beg, I don’t know. I don’t give him the time.
I twist hard and fast. Bone pops. The sound is clean and final. His body goes slack in the chair. His head hangs at an angle that doesn’t belong on a living man.
My guard on the left flinches. The one on the right stands still.
“Get rid of him,” I say. My voice is steady again. “Use the old furnace. We don’t celebrate this and we don’t write it down. You remember what he did, but you don’t repeat his name to anyone who doesn’t need to know it.”
They nod. I step out and pull the door closed. The weight in my chest doesn’t ease, but it settles into something solid. There’s one less weak link between my house and the Courier.
15
SERGEI
Kirill meets me in the hall with a tablet in his hand. His eyes are tense.
“We scrubbed the camera feeds for the last thirty minutes,” he says. “There’s static in three points. The elevator camera, the service corridor near the guest wing, and the feed outside Nadia’s room. The static is clean. No artifact. No trace. I’ve seen this before.”
“Where?” I ask.
