Page 66 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
The plan was not complicated because complicated plans failed at the points of complexity.
The principle was simple: misdirection. Give Cruz’s people something that looked like cooperation—surface information, nothing precise, nothing that could be used to hurt anyone—while buying the time required to make myself genuinely hard to find. Not permanently. Long enough. Long enough for ‘what’ exactly, I was still working out, but the working out felt less urgent than the buying of time.
The execution was harder than the principle.
The information had to be real enough to satisfy without being actionable. Cruz’s people were not amateurs—they had been running assets for years, they knew the difference between genuine intelligence and a fed narrative, they had the context to cross-reference what I gave them against what they already had. Giving them something too convenient would register as deception. Giving them nothing would trigger the documentation release. The margin between those two outcomes was narrow and required precision I did not currently have because my knowledge of Viktor’s current operations was exactly what it should be, given that he had told me I was no longer inside his protection: limited.
Which was, from a certain angle, useful.
I could give them limited information credibly. I could give them the information of a woman who had been cut off—who had been told she was outside the structure—and whose access had therefore narrowed to what was visible from the outside. That was not a fabrication. That was true. The information I could provide was genuinely less than what theyhad been hoping for, which meant I was not constructing a lie but simply delivering the truth of my reduced position.
The trick was making the reduced position look like an asset still trying rather than an asset burning her own usefulness.
I spent several hours working on the framing.
I did not contact Isla. I had not been in contact with Isla for four days, which was the longest gap in our communication since I had started working at the Golovin Casino.
I also did not contact Elena.
Elena had sent two messages in two days, both in the tone she used when she was concerned but was choosing not to escalate—light in tone, heavily loaded in subtext.
“Mikhail is making borsch, which means he’s either stressed or nostalgic, I can never tell which. Are you eating? Tell me you’re eating.”
And then, twelve hours later:
“Viktor seems like he’s working a lot. Is everything okay?”
The careful innocuousness of those messages made them harder to ignore than direct questions would have been. I read them both, typed, and deleted three different responses and closed the thread.
I could not bring Elena into this. Elena was Mikhail’s, and Mikhail was Viktor’s brother, and whatever I was doing in the next 24 hours was going to have consequences that I couldnot fully map, and I was not going to route those consequences through Elena.
The isolation was heavy in a way I had not expected.
I had lived alone for years, had been self-sufficient as a structural component of daily functioning. I had been good at being alone. I had, at various points, preferred it. The preference had been real: the specific peace of a life that did not require management of anyone else’s needs or presence, that existed cleanly within its own parameters.
This was not that kind of alone.
This was the ‘alone’ of someone who had had something and had lost it—or broken it, or been part of breaking it, the causality still not fully untangled—and was now in the absence that followed.
I ate because I needed to eat. I slept in short intervals because my body required them. I worked on the plan because the plan was the only instrument I currently had, and instruments required maintenance.
The next meeting with Cruz’s network was all I had to look forward to, as ironic as that sounded.
*****
I went back to the penthouse on Friday afternoon.
I had been in and out over the two days. Technically, it was still where I was staying, the departure I had packed for on Wednesday night having been postponed indefinitely by the Monarch Club meeting and the subsequent reconfiguration of what was available to me. But Friday afternoon felt different from the ordinary returns. I came in through the lobby with mybag, and I stood in the entrance of the main room and looked at it.
The penthouse had always looked like Viktor, and I had thought that from the first night. I stood in it now with the awareness of someone visiting rather than inhabiting, with the regard of a person who understands that the context of a place has changed.
I almost hoped he would be there.
I missed him.
The plainness of that, the simple, specific accuracy of it, settled into my chest with the weight of something true. I missed the feel of a space when Viktor occupied it. I missed the footsteps I had learned. The coffee pot at its morning level. The study door that had felt like privacy and then felt like punishment.
I missed the forehead kiss. That was the most specific thing I was not going to examine too closely—that had been the most uncomplicated thing he had ever done with me.
