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ARTEM

Driving to the second property takes eighteen minutes, and I spend every one of them running the same two possibilities in a loop that refuses to close.

Either the front desk handed her the wrong key by pure accident, and I’ve just put a cleaner in a car with her wrists zip-tied because I panicked over nothing… Or someone put her there on purpose, wanting to know exactly what I keep behind that door, and everything about her story is built to survive a few easy questions.

I keep coming back to the fight. A scared cleaner who wanders into the wrong apartment doesn’t go for a man’s wrist when he’s got a gun on her.

She freezes, or she screams, or she begs. She doesn’t plant her feet and drive an elbow into his jaw hard enough to ring his ear.

Whatever she is, she’s had real hands on her at some point, someone who taught her to move like that, and that detail sits wrong against everything else about her.

The scuffed sneakers. The name tag somebody’s gone over twice with a pen so it wouldn’t fade.

None of it reads like a professional plant, and all of it reads exactly like what a good one would look like if the people who trained her knew what they were doing.

That’s the part that keeps me from relaxing my grip on the wheel.

The Sokolovs have used women before, low profile, easy to overlook, the kind of person nobody questions twice because nothing about her raises a flag.

If I let myself believe the tired story just because it’s the more comfortable one, I’m exactly the kind of target they’d want me to be.

She’s slumped against the passenger door, head lolling with the turns, out from the dose I gave her. I glance over once at a red light and catch myself checking that her chest is still rising and falling in a steady rhythm, which is not a thing I need to be doing. She’s breathing fine.

I already knew that. I make myself look back at the road and don’t check again until the next light, and then I do anyway.

I don’t call it in.

If I loop in the wider organization now, this becomes an incident on record, something Yuri’s people log and my father’s old contacts hear about within a week, whispered over in rooms I’m not in.

If it turns out to be nothing, I’ve made a nobody into a story that follows her for the rest of her life, the kind of thing that doesn’t come off a person’s name once it’s attached. If it turns out to be something, I want to be the one who finds out first, on my own terms, before anyone else in this organization gets a say in what happens to her.

I tell myself that’s tactical. It mostly is.

My second property sits behind a gate that doesn’t announce itself from the road, set back far enough that headlights from the street never reach the house, a place I keep for exactly this kind of problem.

Nobody hears anything they shouldn’t out here. I carry her in through the side entrance, past the dark kitchen, down the hall to the room I use when I need somewhere secure and nobody around to ask why.

I set her down in the chair bolted to the floor and get the restraints on her, checking the fit twice, loose enough that she’ll keep circulation, tight enough that she won’t work a hand free before she’s fully awake.

Her pulse is strong and even under my fingers when I check it, I hold her wrist a second longer than the check requires before I catch myself .

I let go, straighten up, look at her slumped there with her head tipped to one side, hair falling loose from the clip, and for a second the whole scene looks less like an interrogation and more like something I should be apologizing for.

I don’t let that thought finish. I’ve got a security failure to account for and a woman who put two solid hits on me in under a minute, and neither of those things leaves room for guilt I haven’t earned the right to feel yet.

Yuri’s headlights sweep the driveway twenty minutes later. He comes in already talking, the way he always does when he’s been given too little information to work with over the phone.

“You said a woman got into 12A.” He stops in the doorway, takes in the chair, the restraints, her slack face, and doesn’t react to any of it the way a normal person would, because normal reactions stopped being useful to either of us a long time ago. “Who is she?”

“That’s what I need you to find out.” I pull the name tag off her caddy strap, the one I brought with me from the apartment, and hand it to him. “Cleaning contractor. She says the front desk gave her the wrong key card for 12A instead of 12B.”

Yuri turns the tag over like it might have more to say on the back. “You believe that?”

“I don’t believe anything yet.” I nod toward her phone, sitting on the counter where I left it after pulling it from her jacket pocket. “That’s hers. I want everything on it, and I want everything the cleaning company has on her: employment records, scheduling logs, whoever she’s talked to in the last month. If someone put her here, it’ll be in the details somewhere. Sloppy work always leaves a seam.”

“And if it’s not sloppy work? If it’s clean?”