Maybe. Probably. I don’t care.
I pack my desk in silence: the notebooks I’d filled with observations, the cheap coffee mug I’d bought my second week, the folder of zoning maps I’d been studying. Everything fits in one small box. Weeks of work, of hoping I’d finally found a place where I mattered, reduced to objects I can carry in both hands.
My best friend Diana meets me outside the building, summoned by a text I sent somewhere between Marissa’s office and the elevator.
“What happened?” she asks, taking the box from my arms.
“I got fired.”
“What, why?”
“I was stupid enough to think a man like Dimitri Rudenko saw me as anything more than a distraction he could dispose of when convenient.”
Diana’s expression hardens. “He got you fired?”
“Not directly. He just made a phone call and let other people do the actual work of erasing me.” I laugh, and it sounds bitter even to my own ears. “Very efficient. Very clean. No fingerprints.”
“Oh, Janice.”
“I need to go home.”
She doesn’t argue. Diana hails a cab and rides with me back to my apartment in silence, her presence the only thing keeping me from completely falling apart.
***
The heartbreak lasts approximately forty-eight hours.
Then it calcifies into something harder. Sharper.
Anger.
I replay every moment—the way he’d touched me like I mattered, the careful attention he’d paid to my pleasure, the promises implicit in every kiss. The note he’d left that reduced all of it to nothing. The phone call where he’d dismissed me like I was a problem he’d finally solved.
You were a distraction. Entertaining for a while, but ultimately inconsequential.
The words loop through my mind on repeat, stoking fury that burns hotter with each repetition.
He doesn’t get to do this. Doesn’t get to rearrange my life to suit his convenience and walk away without consequences.
If he can change the course of my life, I can change his too.
I start digging.
Not out of curiosity this time. I dig because I want ammunition. I want leverage. I want to hurt him the way he hurt me.
The research starts with public records—property transfers, LLC filings, development permits. Dimitri’s name appears on dozens of projects across Brooklyn and Manhattan, each one following the same pattern: acquire property in gentrifying neighborhoods, push out existing tenants throughrenovationsor sudden rent increases, demolish and rebuild luxury housing that sells for triple the original market value.
It’s not enough. I need more.
I expand the search, cross-referencing shell companies and ownership structures. The more I dig, the stranger things get. Properties bought and sold through LLCs that exist only on paper.
Money moving through accounts that disappear after single transactions. Names that never appear in public filings despite clearly having decision-making power.
A pattern emerges. Dimitri isn’t just a developer; he’s a front. I already knew it, but now I’ve got proof.
Someone—or something—is using his legitimate business empire to launder money, hide assets, move resources without attracting attention. The deeper I dig, the uglier the picture becomes.
Real estate transactions that coincide with arrests of rival developers. Projects that proceed despite community opposition so fierce it should have triggered government intervention. Permits approved in record time despite missing required environmental assessments.
