I nod though he can’t see me. “Can you see who touched it?”
“I can see who didn’t,” he says. “Give me ten.”
I hang up and don’t wait. The next number I dial is Pavel’s.
“Who benefits from sidelining me?” I ask, no preamble.
“Council,” he says without thinking. “Or someone pretending to be them.”
“Names.”
“Too early,” he says. “But if it was clean, it wasn’t a freelancer.”
Last call. Oleg.
“Any of Markov’s old accounts move?” I ask.
A pause. Fingers on keys. “One mirror woke up, then slept again.”
“Who saw it?”
“Everyone who still matters,” he says. “Which means someone wanted it seen.”
I end the call.
The mirror wasn’t for money. It was for me. They are watching me, testing my habits, and they learned something I don’t like.
I look at Ana again. She shifts, murmurs once, then settles. I check the door, the lock, and add a wedge under the handle. Her phone lies on the table near the drawer. I pick it up. The battery’s low. I plug it in and wait for the screen to wake. Out of curiosity more than permission, I flick it open. It’s locked. I try her birthday. It works.
Plenty of incomings. Condolences, regrets in neutral language wrapped in polite timing. Some numbers I recognize from the Bratva. Some are masked. Some aren’t even trying to hide. Men who want to show respect, but not enough to tie themselves to anything that might turn against them later.
I scroll faster. None of them explains the text I received. Then my finger stops on a name. Irina. Ana’s personal attendant.Urgent, she texts. No reply from Ana.
I check Ana’s purse, pull out the burner, and flip it open. The inbox is almost empty. Just my messages. A few from this afternoon—Where are you? I’m getting bored. Is it the rain?Then nothing. She never sent the text that told me to come home instead of the cafe.
I don’t let myself drift, but the stillness pulls things loose anyway. I knew Ana before men decided her life for her. She was fifteen. I was sixteen. Same block. Same cracked pavement. We held hands when no one watched, kissed fast, stupidly, like we were stealing something fragile. She talked about flying planes. Said she wanted the sky because it’s so beautiful. I didn’t laugh. Because I believed her.
Then her father sold her. Clean transaction. His debt vanished, and with it, his daughter, traded for ledgers thick with ink and rooms that never stopped talking. Markov got a wife with a face that opened doors and a body that made men listen. Ana stopped talking about the sky.
My parents died not long after. I needed work. I ended up in Markov’s hall one gray morning, hair still long, body already trained from street scraps and borrowed discipline. Markov noticed both. He liked men who learned fast and didn’t ask why.
He kept me. I learned. I hated him, but I stayed. Because Ana was there. She became the thing he displayed. The proof. He took her to dinners, meetings, casinos. He used her smile to grease contracts and her silence to close deals. When she pushed back, he hit her. Not always with his hands. Eventually, she stopped trying.
I saw all of it. I didn’t intervene. I couldn’t without killing us both. I told myself proximity was protection. Sometimes, it was.
Yuri’s call comes just before dawn, catching me in a light doze.
“You were right,” Yuri says. His voice is flatter than before. That’s never good.
“Talk.”
“The route was clean because it wasn’t hidden,” he says. “It was cleared.”
I straighten slightly in the chair. “Cleared how?”
“Whitelisted traffic,” he replies. “Old protocol. Council-tier.”
I don’t speak.
