His to protect

The waiting Game

Chapter 6:

I didn’t go back to Jenna’s apartment.

After the standoff with Adrian on the corner, I was too afraid to put her at risk again. He was right; staying was stupid, but running felt like admitting defeat. I was exhausted, bruised, and still wearing the same blood-stained clothes, but my mind was clearer than it had been in days.

I needed a place to hide. A place no one would ever connect to Adrian Volkov.

I remembered a conversation Jenna and I had last summer about a remote cabin her uncle owned, three hours outside the city, deep in the Adirondacks. No cell service, no Wi Fi, just a landline connected to a party line. Perfect.

It took a frantic twenty minute drive on Jenna’s battered truck, a few tearful pleas, and the promise of a lifetime supply of my famous homemade lasagna, but she agreed to drop me off. We told her uncle I was detoxing from the stress of nursing school finals.

“If anyone asks,” I instructed Jenna, holding her hands tight before she drove away, “you haven’t seen me. You don’t know where I am. You just know I was stressed and took off.”

“Be safe,” she whispered, her eyes wide with fear. “Please, just… don’t do anything stupid.”

I watched her drive away, the truck’s taillights disappearing down the gravel road. Then, silence. Heavy, cold, and absolute.

The cabin was exactly as described: small, rustic, and unsettlingly quiet. The only heat came from a stone fireplace, and the furniture looked like it had been salvaged from a 1970s garage sale. It was lonely, but it was safe.

For forty eight hours, I did nothing but sleep and stare at the fire. The phone Adrian had given me was useless here, a dead weight in my pocket. The silence was deafening, broken only by the crackle of wood in the hearth. I was completely, terrifyingly alone.

On the third day, I started to pace. My anxiety, held at bay by sheer exhaustion, began to claw its way back. I was trapped. Adrian was out there, fighting a war he’d drawn me into, and I had no way of knowing if he was alive or dead.

I decided to clean. Cleaning was structure. Structure was sanity. I scrubbed the ancient linoleum floor, wiped down dusty cabinets, and reorganized the few books on the shelf. In a fit of desperate nesting, I even started sorting through the clutter in the small, unused desk.

That’s where I found them.

A stack of manila folders, tucked deep inside a drawer under a pile of old tax documents. They weren’t Uncle Bob’s. They were new, the tabs labeled in Adrian’s distinctive, crisp handwriting.

VOLKOV: THE CORPORATION

MIKHAIL K. VOLKOV: PERSONAL

THE FIRM: OPERATIONAL ASSETS

My breath hitched. Adrian hadn't just arranged for the cabin; he’d used it as a safe deposit box. He’d left me his secrets.

My instinct told me to slam the drawer shut, to call Jenna’s uncle and demand he come get me, but my fingers were already pulling out the files. I laid them on the kitchen table, the light from the single bulb illuminating the black, damning text.

The files weren’t just financial records; they were a history. Adrian’s history.

I learned the depth of the Volkov organization. It was a global entity disguised as a legitimate shipping company, involved in everything from arms trafficking to human smuggling. Adrian wasn't just a businessman; he was the Chief Operating Officer of a transnational crime syndicate. His face stared back at me from old, grainy security footage and surveillance reports.

The file on Mikhail detailed the rivalry I’d already witnessed: brothers turned enemies, a split in the empire that was turning into a blood feud.

Then I saw it. Tucked inside the MIKHAIL K. VOLKOV folder, paper clipped to a background check report, was a photograph.

It was old, faded, taken in a sun drenched park. A man, laughing, his arm around a young girl with dark braids. The man looked familiar. The eyes, the set of the jaw, even the faint line of a scar above his eyebrow.

It was my father.

And the report stated he was currently confined to a private estate in upstate New York, listed as a “guest” of the Volkov organization. The date on the report was six months ago.

I thought my father was dead. He’d disappeared ten years ago, an unexplained, unsolved missing person case that had gutted my mother and defined my entire adult life. The police had assumed he ran, or was murdered.

But he was alive. And he was Adrian’s prisoner.

The man who had saved my life, the man I felt a terrifying, confusing loyalty to, was the same man whose family had held my father captive for a decade.

The door shuddered.

Not a knock. Not a draft. A heavy, insistent thud against the wood.

I froze, the photograph slipping from my numb fingers. I didn’t breathe.

The sound came again. THUD THUD THUD.

I scrambled off the chair, stuffing the files haphazardly back into the drawer. I backed up, my eyes glued to the door, suddenly realizing the gun Adrian had carried was no longer in his possession. I had nothing but a rusty fire poker.

THUD THUD THUD.

Closer now. The sound was not a fist. It was heavier. Something being used as a battering ram.

I clutched the fire poker, my knuckles white.

A volley of gunfire erupted outside. Loud, close, shocking. The air vibrated.

Then, an impossible sound: the wood of the door splintered, tearing away from the frame with a horrible screech, and the door itself exploded inward.

Gunshots outside, door explodes inward.