“I know enough,” she said quietly. “To know I don’t want to know more.”
I looked at her. She looked back. There was something in her face—the particular steadiness of a person who had been surviving something difficult for a long time and had built their survival on very precise foundations and was not going to let someone kick them loose without an explanation.
“Do you know something about him?” she asked. “Specifically.”
The question arrived with the quiet precision of a woman who already knew the answer and was giving me the chance to confirm it.
Every true thing I had wanted to say for weeks was right there—the file, the operation, Nikos, the USB drive sitting untouched in my jacket pocket while I’d stared at her father’s computer in the dark. All of it. She deserved all of it.
I thought about what happened to people who knew their fathers were under Interpol investigation before the arrest was ready. About men like Ivan who treated information as leverage and people as assets. About a woman with no independent resources, no exit prepared, living inside a security system I had mapped and could move through and she could not.
Telling her now, without the infrastructure, without the protection—it didn’t keep her safer. It made her a variable her father could use.
I pulled back.
“Men like your father don’t build lives like this without cost,” I said. “To other people. I want you away from it before those costs come due.”
She looked at me for a long time.
“That’s not what you were going to say,” she said.
“No.”
“But it’s all you’re going to say.”
“For now. Yes.”
The warmth of the last hour had cooled. Not gone—I could still feel it in the space between us, the particular quality of ease that had been building between us over weeks—but something had moved in front of it, a shadow neither of us could name from her side of the information.
“I need to think,” she said finally. Her voice was even. Professional, almost, the way it got when she was managing something difficult. “I need you to go.”
I wanted to argue. Ran the argument in my head—every version of wait, let me explain, give me a way to tell you this that doesn’t blow apart the operation and put you in his crosshairs before we can protect you. There was no version. I had checked.
I got up. Dressed in the dark. She sat with the sheet pulled up and watched me and didn’t say anything, and the watching was somehow worse than if she’d been angry.
At the nightstand, I stopped. Took the burner phone from my jacket pocket and set it down beside her regular phone. She looked at it.
“Don’t use your regular phone for me anymore,” I said. “Use this one.”
She looked at it for a long moment. Her face was unreadable in the city light—not blank, just held, the expression of a woman absorbing information she didn’t have the full context for and filing it precisely anyway.
She picked it up. Her thumb moved over the casing once, thoughtful rather than hesitant.
“Go,” she said quietly. Not unkindly.
I went.
The balcony door stuck on the third try, same as always, and I stepped out into the cold and pulled it closed and stood for a moment in the dark with the city spread below me and the weight of everything I hadn’t said sitting in my chest like something that had been there for a long time and was finally tired of pretending it wasn’t.
She knew I was holding something back.
She had taken the phone anyway.
I didn’t know which of those facts frightened me more.
Chapter 15
Polina
