You don’t send the queen into attack until the rest of the pieces are in place. And in this game, I had pieces Volkov didn’t even know existed. Forty minutes later, Zhora called and said the specialist was ready.
His name was Timur, and all I knew about him was that three years earlier he had helped a serious man from the capital solve a similar problem involving blackmail material, after which that man personally vouched for him to me. In my world, a recommendation means more than any résumé. Timur got on an encrypted app and explained what he needed.
The phone number of the kid who had filmed the video, the model of the device, and, if possible, the login details for the cloud account. Zhora had already gotten the phone number through people at the cell carrier. The model of the device had been identified from security footage outside the station, where Denis had been seen fiddling with it during a smoke break.
That left the cloud account, and Timur said that wouldn’t be a problem if we had the phone number, because most people tie their cloud storage to their primary number. While Timur worked, I turned to the second task, just as important as the first. I needed to know how deep the rot went and exactly who was standing behind those young thugs in uniform.
Zhora had already given me the name of Deputy Prosecutor Peshkov, but I had a feeling it didn’t stop with him. When young wolves hunt this openly, it means there’s a whole pack behind them making sure nothing happens. And that pack needed to be uprooted, not just scattered, so that no one in uniform would ever again dare lay a hand on anyone I considered mine.
At one in the morning, they brought Alina home. Zhora had sent two reliable men to wait outside the station, and they picked her up when she was released. They let her out at 12:30, dumping her on the front steps like something used up.
When she came into the house, I was standing in the foyer looking at her, and it took every bit of self-control I had built over decades not to show her what was happening inside me. She was wearing someone else’s jacket, one of my men’s, because her own clothes were no longer fit to wear. She wasn’t crying anymore. The tears had run out, and what was left in their place was emptiness, which frightened me more than sobbing would have.
She stopped three steps away and looked me in the eye, and in that look I read the question she couldn’t bring herself to ask out loud. Why did you leave? I walked over, put my arms around her, and she grabbed my shirt the way she used to as a little girl when she woke up from nightmares.
Only this time the nightmare was real, and I couldn’t tell her, “It was just a dream, sweetheart, everything’s okay.” So I told her something else. I said, “I know everything. No one is ever going to see that video. Not one living soul. I promise you.” She pulled back, looked at me, and for the first time that night I saw something like hope in her eyes.
She whispered one word: “Really?” And I nodded, because in that moment it wasn’t just a father making a promise to his daughter. It was a sentence passed on four men in uniform and everyone standing behind them. I took Alina to her room, called our family doctor—the one man I trusted completely—and asked him to give her something to help her calm down and sleep. When he had done what he needed to do, and Alina had finally fallen into a heavy medicated sleep, I went back downstairs to my office and got to work. Real work..
