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“Why would she give Nora another name?” I took the document without letting the edge touch the rumpled bedding. “Could she have used it to travel with her?”

“I don't know.” Anika pressed both hands to her forehead. “I had an emergency cesarean. Something went wrong, and I lost enough blood that I didn't wake up until the next afternoon. Alina stayed at the hospital. She told me she'd handled the forms because the staff kept bothering her while I was unconscious.” Her hands dropped, anger replacing the shock. “I thought she meant she filled them out for me. The nurse brought another packet before we left, and Alina intercepted it. She claimed the hospital had printed Nora's name wrong and already fixed it.”

Roman carried the certificate to his laptop in the dining room, and we followed without wasting time on clothes beyond what decency around our guards required. He entered the serial number, then opened the hospital's archived record.

“This certificate was issued six hours after Nora's birth and withdrawn the following day.” He pulled the current record beside it. “Nora Petrova replaced Nora Belova before the hospital transmitted its monthly registry. Anyone accessing the original admission would find Belova. Anyone searching legal records would find Petrova. The identities don't connect electronically.”

Anika gripped the back of his chair. “She created a dead end.”

“Between Nora and anyone searching your name after the masquerade.” The anger inside me changed direction. “Alina protected both children. Very badly, and without giving you a choice, but she protected them.”

Roman enlarged the physician field, then began searching. Six months after Nora's birth, the delivering doctor resigned without notice, closed his accounts, and disappeared from every licensing database.

Kirill leaned over Roman's shoulder. “Doctors rarely vanish. Change jobs, yes. But credentials are difficult to fake, and coincidence is a shit show we need to shovel.”

Roman used the doctor’s name to pull up his medical license, then his driver’s license. From there, he took the picture through one of his programs, letting it do the search for him. The computer dinged that it had found a match, and he opened a recent security photograph from a private medical facility. The man crossing the lobby had aged, changed his hair, and grown a beard, but the facial comparison left no doubt.

“He didn't disappear.” Roman rotated the screen toward us. “Nora's delivering physician works for Sokolov.”

26

ROMAN

I sent Nora's delivering physician two photographs and my phone number. The first image showed the birth certificate Alina hid in the blue box. The second showed him entering Sokolov's private clinic three days earlier under the name Doctor Lebedev. His call came forty-seven seconds later.

“What do you want?” The voice shook even as he tried to sound unaffected.

I smiled, letting it fill my tone and slide through the space as I spoke. “The truth.” A tap of the keys on my laptop, and a security photograph filled one side of my screen while the live search for Nora and Mikhail continued on the other. “Dr. Reznikov died five years ago. Lebedev can do the same unless you meet me before Sokolov learns we found you.”

Silence stretched between us, punctuated by his breathing and the faint hum of equipment on his end. He hadn't left the clinic. The overnight receptionist had logged out twenty minutes earlier, and the security guard assigned to the rear entrance spent every Thursday morning sleeping in his car.

“Four o'clock. My office.” A small sound followed, like glass tapping against wood. “You come alone.”

“No.” I closed the photograph. “Anika Petrova comes with me.” The line went dead as soon as I finished saying her name.

Maksim paced to the end of the safe-house dining room and back while Kirill checked the magazine in his pistol. Anika stood beside my chair wearing the black leggings she'd found in the closet, her damp hair twisted into a knot. She'd gone pale when I repeated the conversation, but her hands remained steady.

“He'll run.” Maksim stopped at the table, palms planted beside Nora's certificates. “We take him before he reaches the clinic.”

“He chose the clinic because leaving his routine will trigger whatever safeguards Sokolov put around him.” I opened the building plans. “If we take him off the street, Sokolov knows. If Reznikov believes he's the one calling the shots, we may have time before anyone notices.”

Kirill tucked his weapon into the holster beneath his arm. “Or he's inviting us into a trap.”

“Which is why our men will control the neighboring roofs before we enter.” I expanded the perimeter map. “Two teams in the clinic, three outside, and another waiting with the vehicles. We go in through the service entrance and leave the same way.”

Maksim moved into Anika's path. “You stay here.”

“No.” She pulled on a sweater without breaking eye contact. “He falsified my daughter's birth records while I was unconscious. With Alina’s help. If you talk to him, I'm going to be in the room.” She stepped close enough to force Maksim to look down at her. “You can protect me while I ask my own questions, or you can waste the next twenty minutes arguing while the doctor disappears again.”

I waited for Maksim to overrule her. A week earlier, he would've. The order gathered in the set of his shoulders, then left with a long breath.

“You wear armor.” He lifted her coat from the chair and held it while she slid her arms inside. “You stay between us, and if Roman says move, you move.”

Anika zipped the coat, grinning like she’d won the fucking lottery. This was almost better. Money couldn’t buy the look in Maksim’s eyes or the set of his mouth. Anika patted him on the chest. “I can live with protection.” Maksim's jaw shifted, but he nodded.

Three armored vehicles carried us across the city while another traveled far enough ahead to avoid joining the same traffic cameras. Rain streaked the windows and turned the empty streets silver beneath the lamps. Anika sat beside me with one hand clenched around the edge of the seat.

I covered her fist, and her fingers opened beneath mine. “He may lie.”