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I wait. Count to thirty. Nothing happens.

I continue.

By the time I log out, it’s past two in the morning. I’ve been working for over twelve hours, and my eyes feel like sandpaper. I save my work, close the environment, and sit in the dark for a long moment.

The job is done. The data is extracted. Ethan will have his preliminary results by morning, and I’ll have completed the most challenging—and most unsettling—contract of my career.

I can’t shake the feeling that something followed me out.

***

Ethan calls at 8:00 a.m.

I’m on my second cup of coffee, still processing the night before, when my phone lights up with his name. I answer on the second ring.

“Davina. I’ve reviewed your preliminary extraction.” His voice is calm, professional, the same measured tone he used in our meeting. “I wanted to tell you personally that your performance has been classified as exceptional beyond expected parameters.”

“Thank you.” I pause, cradling the phone against my shoulder while I reach for my coffee. “Though I have some questions about what I found.”

“I’m sure you do. We’ll schedule a debrief later this week to go over the details.”

“The financial patterns I traced, they suggest money laundering on a significant scale. The system architecture is designed to obscure the movement of funds through offshore channels. Whoever built this isn’t just hiding money. They’re building infrastructure to make it invisible.”

There’s a brief silence on the other end. When Ethan speaks again, his tone hasn’t changed, but there’s something underneath it. Satisfaction, maybe. Or confirmation.

“You’ve confirmed what our intelligence suggested. The system you accessed belongs to an organization with significant resources and sophisticated operational security. Your extraction has given us our first real look at how they function.”

“Who are they?”

“I’ll provide more context during the debrief. For now, I need you to understand that this information is highly classified. You cannot discuss it with anyone, including your colleague.”

Sienna. He means Sienna.

“I understand.”

“Good. You’ve done excellent work, Davina. Rest today. We’ll be in touch about next steps.”

The call ends. I set my phone down and stare at the wall.

The system I spent hours navigating last night—the one that moved and breathed and watched me—belongs to someone. An organization with enough money to require that level of infrastructure, enough sophistication to build it, and enough paranoia to make it adaptive.

I pull up my personal notes, the ones I didn’t store in the secure partition. The observations about the system’s behavior, the way it seemed to guide me, the moment where it flickered and I thought I’d been caught.

The name. Gromov.

I type it into a search engine and hit enter.

The results are sparse. A few business registrations in Eastern Europe, a shipping company that appears to be defunct, some property records in locations I can’t pronounce. Nothing that connects directly to the financial system I accessed. Nothing that explains the scale of what I found.

Except there’s something else. News articles, mostly in foreign languages, that mention the name in passing. Crime syndicates. Political corruption. Violence that never gets officially connected to anyone.

I translate a few of the articles. The picture that emerges is fragmented but clear enough. The Gromovs are organized crime. They’re not street-level thugs, but something bigger. Something with reach and resources and the kind of power that doesn’t show up in public records.

I close the search results and lean back in my chair.

The coffee has gone cold. Outside, the city is waking up—cars honking, people walking to work, the ordinary machinery of a day that doesn’t know what I just found.

I should feel satisfied. The job is done, the client is happy, and I’ve proven myself on a level I never have before.