Page 6 of Secret Baby of the Bratva
The storage room sits at the end of the corridor under a ceiling camera with a tiny red LED that always looks accusatory to me, like a constant reminder that the building watches even when people don’t. I badge in.
The lock answers with a soft click, and the door opens onto rows of shelving, labeled crates, rolls of bubble wrap, and the kind of neat chaos that makes sense only if you live in it every day. I do.
This space is mine as much as the pristine halls are, maybe more, and my breath steadies as soon as I step inside.
I set my clipboard on the packing table and slide the top stack of invoices toward me. The paperwork is all numbers and titles and initials that should soothe me with their order, but the sheet for Lot Sixteen isn’t where it belongs.
I press my lips together and start my ritual. I trace the path the piece took today: intake desk, property inspection, temporary placement, secure transfer before the auction, final storage.
People pick things up with the intention of putting them right back, then forget and leave them in ridiculous places. The invoice didn’t leave the building. It’s here, flattened under a roll of tape or slipped between protective foam and an empty glove.
I check the corners of the table, then slide open a shallow drawer where someone hid a box cutter last week because it made them nervous. The drawer gives up nothing but pencils and a lonely lint roller. I crouch to look under the table; the dress doesn’t cooperate; the hem whispers against the floor.
The main hall’s noise has mellowed into a warm murmur, present and far away at the same time. I scan the nearest shelf, pull a few files free, fan them, and reshelve them in the right order.
A small, fussy satisfaction flickers through me as cardboard aligns and labels face the same direction.
Raised voices drift down the corridor.
I freeze with my hand still inside the shelf. The sound carries strangely back here, skimming the hall and catching on the edges of the doorframe. It isn’t laughter or the fuzzy argument of two donors who had one glass too many. The cadence is wrong. I slide the file home and straighten, listening. The voices overlap briefly, then separate into a pattern that pushes a line of cold down my spine. One voice is low, steady, and unhurried. The other carries the brittle pitch of a man who knows he’s out of moves.
Security handles problems. I know this. We have protocols and people who live for the chance to enforce them.I should step back into the main hall, get the attention of the nearest guard, and let them deal with whoever wandered where they shouldn’t.
My hand finds the clipboard out of habit. Curiosity tilts the scales anyway. Curiosity has teeth, and they catch on me often.
I ease into the corridor, pull the storage door slow so the handle doesn’t bump the wall, and follow the sound. The service wing lights are softer than the galleries; they pool on the floor in neat ovals and leave stretches of hallway subdued.
My heels barely whisper on the carpet runner. The air feels cooler against my skin, not cold enough to raise goose bumps, cold enough that my lungs notice. I slide a glance up at the nearest camera. The tiny red LED still burns, blank and patient.
The voices grow clearer toward the far end of the hall. I make the corner and see a door sitting a sliver open, the hinge side holding it at an angle that reads careless if you don’t know how careful careless can be. Light slices across the corridor from the gap; it has that stark utility tone I associate with break rooms and maintenance closets. I step closer.
The faint smell of gun oil rides under the starch of industrial cleaner and the dusty dryness of cardboard. My breath pauses.
An image surfaces so fast it feels like a memory pushed up from another life: my father at the kitchen table, a metal piece he wouldn’t name spread out on a cloth, his hands moving with careful respect, a smell on the air that matched this one.
The language resolves as I reach the door. Russian. I don’t need the words to understand tone. The deeper voice is ice over moving water, smooth and hard at the same time, not raised andnot gentle. The other voice answers in bursts that stumble and break.
I angle myself toward the narrow view and look.
The room holds a work table, two folding chairs, a crate shoved against the wall, and a drain set in concrete that someone pretended was a coincidence when the building plans were drawn. Harsh light washes color out of everything. The man who controls the air is the one I spent the afternoon trying not to think about.
Dimitri Sharov stands easy and ready at the same time, shoulders straight, jacket closed, jaw clean. The room bends a little around him the way it did in the main hall, an adjustment you notice first in the way other people move.
A second man kneels at his feet with his wrists bound behind him. Sweat has already found his hairline. His eyes flicker, not to the floor like a man remembering the steps to a prayer, but toward the door like he feels a draft he can’t place. I press my fingers to the wood to steady myself and pull my breath in quiet.
There’s cologne under everything, crisp and cold, the kind that smells wealthy without trying. The gun oil uses it to carry the shape of danger into the hall. The kneeling man speaks again; the words tumble and tangle, and his throat catches on the end of a sentence.
Dimitri replies in Russian with an evenness that reads as absolute. I can’t understand the vocabulary, but I can read his patience as clearly as if it were printed. He asks for information. He gives the other man room to answer.
He lets the babbling panic finish so there’s nothing left in the plea but air.
I should back away. I should close the storage door and pretend I realized I had the wrong corridor. Security can review cameras later and tell me I nearly walked into something I shouldn’t, and I can pretend I made a sensible choice.
My legs don’t cooperate. They never do when my brain splits between fear and the bright need to know what people are when the masks come off. If I leave now, I carry a question back into my life that will scratch at me whenever the room is quiet.
I’ve lived with enough scratches. I hold still.
Dimitri doesn’t fill the space with noise. He fills it by denying the other man any foothold in the silence. He tips his head a fraction when an answer doesn’t satisfy. He watches with eyes that feel colder in this light than they did in the galleries.
