“This is east wing,” she says. “You stay here unless you have a call.”
“From him?” I ask.
“From him,” she says. “Or from Vladislav.”
From the start, there’s no confusion about rank. Sergei is the center. Vladislav runs security. Everyone else spins around them.
I meet Sergei’s men one by one. Vladislav, solid and steady, sharp eyes behind a tired face. Kirill, younger, fast with his hands, faster with his radio. Galina in the kitchen. And a quiet technician with narrow shoulders and a calm voice who lives in the server room. Mikhail. He’s polite. Soft-spoken. Good at his job. That’s all I know, and it stays that way. Names and functions. No flags yet. That comes years later.
Nights, I sit in the small glassed-in office beside Sergei’s, screens glowing. He reads physical files at his desk or works calls in low tones. The city rises and falls behind him.
One of the first nights, he steps into my space without knocking. The door’s open. He still feels like a force crossing a line.
“How’s the ghost?” he asks.
“Busy,” I say.
I flip one screen toward him. The gaps in the estate feeds line up now, highlighted by the tools I built in an hour and refined over days.
“Courier touched the north service door twice last month,” I say. “He skimmed the camera long enough to cut faces. He didn’t enter. He just tested the reach.”
“Why touch a door and walk away?” Sergei asks.
“To see how fast you respond,” I say. “To see who you send. To see how you patch.”
“You give him a lot of credit,” he says.
“He earned it,” I say.
“So did I,” he says.
I meet his eyes.
“Yes,” I say. “You did.”
We look at each other longer than we should. The room’s quiet, only fan noise and a distant laugh from some guard on the night shift.
“You should sleep,” he says.
“You should,” I answer.
He sits on the edge of my desk instead.
“Tell me how you’d catch him,” he says.
I half laugh.
“With more access,” I say.
He shakes his head, but his eyes are warm.
“You’ve been here a week and you already want my vault,” he says.
“I want his trail,” I say.
He studies me.
“You remind me of myself when I started,” he says.
