They followed him and waited until he pulled into the courtyard of his apartment building, a dark, quiet place in a residential neighborhood with no cameras. There they took him out of the car cleanly, took his phone, keys, and wallet. Denis tried to yell and wave his badge, but when they showed him a picture of my daughter and asked, “Recognize her?” he went silent and turned so pale you could see it even in the dark.
They didn’t hurt him physically. Not yet. They put him in a car and drove him to a place known only to my men, a place with walls thick enough to swallow sound.
The phone was brought to me at five in the morning. I handed it to Timur, who had come in person, and in front of me he pulled everything off the device, checked the message history and apps. Alina’s video had not been sent anywhere.
Denis either hadn’t gotten around to it or hadn’t planned to send it right away. He was building a collection and using it as needed. That was the only good news of the night.
And when Timur confirmed that the video had existed only on the phone and in the cloud, which was already gone, I took my first full breath in hours. Timur took the phone apart, removed the storage chip, set it on the desk, and looked at me. I opened my desk drawer, took out a hammer, and brought it down on the chip until it shattered.
Then I gathered the pieces, dropped them into a metal ashtray, and set them on fire. They didn’t burn well, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was dead.
The video no longer existed anywhere in the world, and no force on earth could bring it back. When dawn began to show through the curtains in my office, I went upstairs and looked in on Alina. She was sleeping, and in sleep her face looked as peaceful as it had when she was little and I would stand over her bed and pull the blanket up around her shoulders.
I stood in the doorway and promised her, while she slept, that she would wake up in a world where justice still existed. Maybe not the kind that comes from a courtroom or a prosecutor’s office. Maybe the kind that comes from a father who spent twenty years building his empire for one reason only: to keep his daughter safe.
At six in the morning, I went back to my office and called Zhora again. The first part of the plan was done. The video was gone. Denis was isolated. But that was only the technical part, the preparation.
Now came the second part, and everything depended on it. I needed to make sure Volkov and his men were not merely punished, but destroyed by the very system they trusted. They hid behind badges, credentials, and the name of the state, and I intended to use that same state as a weapon against them.
They thought the uniform made them untouchable. I was going to show them that a uniform is just cloth, and that the only real protection is power. In this town, the power was mine.
Zhora gave me the update. Volkov and the two remaining men were still at the station. Their shift ended at eight in the morning.
They still didn’t know Denis was gone, because Denis had left for home and his absence didn’t raise any alarms. We had about two hours before they started looking for him and realized something was wrong. Two hours to place the remaining pieces on the board.
I sat at my desk, poured myself some tea, and thought. The pawns were in place, the rooks were positioned, the bishops had their lines. All that remained was the queen’s move.
And in this game, I was the queen. At eight in the morning, Volkov finished his shift and walked out of the station with his two sidekicks. Their names were Igor and Maxim, two former athletes who had joined the police not to uphold the law but to enjoy power over people weaker than themselves…
