Page 103 of The Bratva's Secret Baby
Offices line both sides of the corridor with doors half open, phones ringing and going unanswered. A muted argument carries from one room, and a woman walks past with a tray holding a kettle and chipped cups.
No one looks at us.
We take the elevator. It rattles once before moving, then climbs slowly. The numbers tick upward without urgency. I watch the mirror instead of the doors. Faces drift in and out. No one studies us.
When we step out on the fourth floor, the building feels different. The windows are gone and the doors are heavier, spaced closer together. A narrow sign lists departments in small black letters.Compliance. Legacy Review. Archival Processing.
Dominik keeps walking without slowing, and I stay just behind him. We turn once, then again, and the hallway tightens around us. The lights shift from white to a softer yellow. The walls are scuffed where carts have passed for years.
At the end of the corridor, a desk blocks the way. A woman sits behind it with a ledger open in front of her and her glasses low on her nose. A desktop monitor glows beside the book, the screen filled with rows of entries. She checks the clipboard, glances at the screen, matches the name, then gestures down a short side hall.
“Second door on the left.”
We thank her and move on.
The door we stop at has no label. The lock is newer than the frame around it. Dominik pauses long enough to listen, then opens it.
The room is smaller than the hallway suggested. No windows. Shelves line three walls, boxes stacked and labeled by year and category in the same neat hand. A desk sits in the center with a terminal and a stack of folders waiting to be processed. The air is cool and dry.
I look up first, scanning corners and ceiling lines. I don’t see a camera. Dominik steps inside and closes the door carefully behind us.
We don’t speak. I take in the shelves again, slower this time. The boxes sit squarely and evenly. The labels aren’t new. Nothing looks disturbed.
“There,” Dominik says. It isn’t a name. It’s a gap.
One shelf stays uniform until it doesn’t. The newer boxes stand out from the rest. Their labels are printed instead of handwritten, and the dates cover a shorter range than the volume suggests. The category readsLegacyConsolidation.
I step closer and read the codes without touching the boxes.Medical Procurement. Regional Logistics. Deferred Audits.
Dominik comes up beside me.
“Yelena used to route files like this,” he says.
“Not anymore,” I say.
There’s no sign she worked here. No nameplate. No extra chair pulled slightly out. No mug left behind on the shelf.
“They moved her,” I add.
“Or reassigned her,” he answers. “Same result.”
I open one of the newer boxes and shift the front folders just enough to see behind them. The paper inside is thick and older stock. The edges are worn from being handled more than once.
“These weren’t meant to be scanned and filed away,” I say. “They were meant to stay in circulation.”
Dominik watches the stack.
“He wouldn’t have left this on a server,” he says.
“No,” I say. “Too many people can touch that.”
Something about the room holds my attention. Markov never relied on obvious locks. He kept important things inside normal systems, the kind people stopped questioning.
I move along the shelves slowly, reading labels and watching for small differences. Most of the boxes match what’s printed on them.Contracts. Shipping Reconciliations. Audit Responses.
Then I reach a section that’s too consistent. The categories match the rest, and the codes follow the same pattern, but the folders inside are sleeved. Not for age. For control.
“This one’s tracked,” I say.
