“We can’t be seen here.”
It shuts me up for a second.
Because of course. Of course, he thought beyond the meeting itself. Of course, he didn’t plan to sit on the roadside talking under the Markov wall like some lovesick idiot waiting to be discovered by a patrolling guard and a bad flashlight.
I had thought—stupidly, maybe—that I would get into the car, tell him about the guard, tell him what I saw, maybe ask a few questions about the shooting, and then get back before anyone noticed how long I’d been gone.
But the moment the car turns away from the property and picks up speed, I realize I have entered his world again without meaning to.
I sit back and look at him in profile.
The city lights catch and lose his face in pieces. His jaw, the line of his mouth, the dark shape of him behind the wheel. He looks calmer than I feel. He always does. But it’s not real calm. Not the kind ordinary men have. It’s attention under control.
That’s different.
I realize suddenly that he doesn’t trust the people around him completely.
Not even now. Not even here, with this car and this plan and the road opening ahead of us. He arranged this meeting himself. He waited instead of sending someone. He parked where he could leave fast. He chose movement over stillness the second I got in.
I don’t say any of that.
I only say, quieter now, “You really thought I might not come.”
He gives the smallest shrug. “You were late.”
“I nearly didn’t.”
That gets his attention.
He looks at me briefly then, just long enough for me to wish he hadn’t.
“Why?”
“I don’t understand it myself,” I say. “I just knew I had to get the information to you somehow.”
He takes me to an apartment building on a quiet side street with no doorman in sight and no obvious sign that anyone important lives there at all. The lobby is clean, anonymous, and forgettable. That’s probably the point.
We go up in silence.
My nerves start climbing again somewhere around the third floor.
By the time he unlocks the apartment, I have fully registered that I have just left my father’s property in the middle of the night to come to a hidden flat with Roman Sokolov, a man I once ran from because I learned too much about him all at once and never quite recovered from the knowledge.
“This is a safe place,” he says as he lets me in.
The apartment is not large, but it’s finished with the sort of careful understatement that tells me it cost more than most people’s houses. Dark wood floors. Neutral walls. Clean lines. No photographs. No clutter. A sofa, a dining table, a kitchen that looks used but not lived in. It feels less like a home than a place someone keeps ready for the moment they need four walls and no questions.
Roman closes the door behind us and locks it.
I turn slowly, taking everything in.
Then another man steps out of the hallway, and my pulse jumps before I can stop it.
“Mikhail,” Roman says. “This is Katerina.”
I know immediately that he’s not the kind of man who wastes movement, quieter too, dressed simply enough that you couldmiss him in a room until he decided you shouldn’t. His face gives away very little, but his eyes are taking in everything at once, including me.
“Katerina,” he says, with a slight nod.
