Page 31 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

For reasons I couldn’t explain, I recalled Daniel saying R.T. mid-conversation. I think it was about who controlled the upper level of the financial chain or something like that. But I remembered clearly that he’d mentioned that acronym.

So, I rewound the tape, trying to find the exact moment he’d said what I knew he said. While at that, my eyes fell on the same acronym scribbled down somewhere on the top of the opened page in my notebook

R.T.

I’d written it down at the time with a question mark. But when? Considering the nature of my handwriting, I must’ve jotted it down so quickly so I’d follow up on it later. This was probably before or while fleeing the café through a side door.

Now I sat with it at two in the morning and felt something cold slide down the back of my neck.

R.T.

I opened a new document and started doing what I always did when something felt important and shapeless. I built a timeline.

Every account number Daniel had shown me. Every shell entity name I memorized or half-glimpsed before he’d snatched the paper back. I laid them out in a column and started drawing lines between them the way I had for two months now, except this time I had a new variable to test against everything else.

R.T.

Two initials. That was all I had. Two initials and the specific, particular weight with which Daniel had said them. Not casually, not in passing, but with the same flattening of tone people get when they’re naming something they’d rather not be naming out loud.

R.T., what was that? A company name?

A person?

It was most likely the initials of a name.

Whatever it was, I was going to figure it out tonight.

I went back through my own research files first. Three months of notes, cross-referenced, color-coded, organized with an obsessiveness that had occasionally made Iris ask if I was building a murder board, which, in fairness, I sort of was. I searched for any prior mention. Any initials. Any name that fit.

Nothing direct.

That was the frustrating part. Nothing in any public filing, any registered agent document, any customs record I’d pulled used those two letters explicitly.

Whoever R.T. was, his name didn’t appear anywhere that mattered on paper. Which told me, more than any direct mention could have, exactly how careful he was.

So, I switched tactics and started searching adjacent to the financial structure instead of inside it. Society pages. Business journal mentions. Anything that put a name near the periphery of Meridian, near the holding entities, near Chicago’s specific, insular world of old money and new money pretending to be old.

It took forty minutes before I found it.

A charity gala writeup from eighteen months ago, the kind of fluff piece that exists purely to list attendees and their outfits, buried three pages deep in a business journal’s events section.

A photo caption, mostly incidental: Rodion Tarasov, financial strategist, pictured with members of the Chicago business community.

I stared at the photo for a long time.

It wasn’t a great picture—slightly out of focus, taken from an angle that caught him mid-turn, half his face in shadow under the gala lighting. But the build was right. The dark, precise hair. The particular stillness of someone who looked composed even in a candid shot, like the camera had simply failed to catch him in a single unguarded moment.

There was no way to recognize who this man was. And a part of me believed he’d avoided the camera intentionally. Powerful men like that were masters of the shadows. They were only seen or spotted when they wanted to be seen.

Rodion Tarasov.

“R.T.,” I whispered under my breath.

I sat back from the laptop, my fingers combing through my messy blond hair. It was almost like things were starting to come together, and I just might actually be on the right track at last.

This doesn’t really prove anything, you know, my voice of reason said. Initials aren’t a name, and if they were, what makes you so sure that R.T. means Rodion Tarasov? I mean, it could mean anything—Richard Thompson, Raymond Timothy. The list goes on.

I thought, scratching the back of my head as I stared at the image on my screen.