Behind me I heard Volkov laughing, shouting something insulting after me, but I wasn’t listening anymore. All I could hear was my own heartbeat and Alina’s voice, barely above a whisper, saying, “Dad.” So quietly that the word reached me in the hallway like a knife sliding between my ribs.
She thought I had abandoned her. She thought her father—the man who had promised to protect her—had turned his back and walked away because he was scared. That thought burned inside me like molten lead.
But I knew I was doing the right thing. Because anger without calculation is just panic, and panic gets the people you love killed. I walked out to the front steps of the station and got into the SUV.
Mikhail looked at me in the rearview mirror and didn’t ask a thing. He saw my face and understood. I took out my phone and called Zhora.
By then he had already gathered information, and what he told me completed the picture in my head. Lieutenant Artem Volkov, twenty-five. Transferred from another region six months earlier.
He had brought three other young punks with him. In half a year they had established their own rules inside that precinct. The setup was simple and sickening.
They cruised the streets at night looking for attractive young women, pulled them over, planted drugs or wrote up fake reports, then dragged them into the station and did whatever they wanted. Everything was filmed. The videos were used for blackmail.
The girls kept quiet because they were terrified of exposure. Some of them even came back later on their own, just to keep the videos off the internet. It was an assembly line, a system.
And they felt untouchable because they were protected by the city’s deputy prosecutor, a man named Arkady Peshkov, who got his own share of pleasure and power out of the arrangement. Zhora said all four were still at the station, that they would probably release Alina in a couple of hours when they were done with her, and that the video was stored on the phone of the kid named Denis and might also be uploading to cloud storage. I listened and asked one question.
Did Zhora know a reliable electronics specialist who could remotely wipe the phone and the cloud? Zhora said yes, and that the man was expensive but clean. I told him money didn’t matter. The video had to disappear before dawn. After that, we would deal with those pups in uniform in a way every cop in this town would remember for the rest of his life.
I hung up and closed my eyes. Rain hammered the roof of the SUV, and in that sound I could hear a clock ticking down the last hours of Lieutenant Volkov’s free life. At that moment he was probably still in his office, smoking, laughing, thinking he had humiliated another helpless old man.
He didn’t know that old man controlled half the shadow money in this town. He didn’t know that three of the city’s five major players answered to me directly. He didn’t know that my word inside prison walls carried more weight than many court rulings.
He knew nothing, because he was young, stupid, and drunk on the tiny bit of power a badge and service weapon had given him. But he was about to learn. In this town, you can cheat people, humiliate them, ruin lives. That happens every day. But you do not touch my daughter. Everyone knew that rule except him.
I opened my eyes and said one word to Mikhail: “Home.” I needed to change clothes, drink some tea, and wait for the specialist’s call, because revenge, like a good chess opening, requires patience, and I’ve played chess all my life. I always play white.
I got home and went straight up to my office without even taking off my wet coat. I sat at the desk, set my phone in front of me, and waited. For most people, waiting is torture. For me, it’s familiar territory.
I spent a total of fourteen years behind bars, and if those years taught me anything, it was how to wait. Wait for your moment. Wait for your enemy to relax. Wait for circumstances to line up the right way. Chess teaches the same thing…
