Four days later, the world had shrunk to a single dacha deep in the birch forests outside Tver. Once a noble's summer retreat, it was now a forgotten safe house, creaking and dusty, part of the Party's hidden network.
For the first time in weeks, they were warm. For the first time in weeks, they weren't moving. The stillness felt unnatural, like silence after battle.
The house became a den — a place to rest and wait. Ivan and Murat claimed the main room. They stripped the hundred Mosin-Nagant rifles one by one, cleaning the metal with quiet focus. The air smelled of oil and cold steel. Their loyalty to Koba had hardened into something absolute. They weren't followers anymore; they were believers.
Pavel stayed outside most days, splitting firewood until his shoulders burned. The steady rhythm of the axe echoed through the trees. Each strike was a way to bury grief, to numb the betrayal that still bled beneath the surface. He obeyed Koba, but something in him had gone silent. He was a soldier who had learned his holy war was really a negotiation.
Inside, Koba turned the study into a command post. He and Yagoda worked over maps and train schedules until the candles guttered low. They argued, calculated, and redrafted routes through the Pale of Settlement. Forged Austrian papers. False identities. Safe crossings. Yagoda was the link to Party resources, but Koba dictated how those resources would be used. Every risk, every variable, was dissected. The room smelled of ink and paranoia.
Then the story's eye moved south. Across frozen plains, past quiet towns, until it reached Kiev — loud, alive, and dangerous.
There, in the maze of the Podil district, lived a ghost. Ekaterina Svanidze — Kato — no longer the soft-spoken woman from Tbilisi. Life had carved her down to steel. She lived under the name Olga Petrova, in a single rented room above a Jewish tenement. The streets below reeked of coal smoke, onions, and sweat.
She worked ten hours a day in a tobacco factory. The sweet, choking scent of drying leaves clung to her skin. Her hands were rough now. Her eyes, once bright with dreams, were sharp with survival.
Her thoughts kept her company. She replayed every turn that had brought her here — escaping Makar, the near-miss in Kiev, the desperate tip to the Okhrana that stopped a bombing but made her a target for both sides. The syndicate wanted revenge. The Okhrana wanted answers. She lived between their hunts, invisible, cautious, pragmatic.
One gray evening, walking home, she saw it.
A chalk mark on a bakery wall — a circle with a line through it. A child's doodle to anyone else. To her, it was a spark. A message. A code only she and Ioseb had shared.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. He was here. He'd found her.
She kept walking, face calm, mind racing. The rules said not to look again. Two more blocks. She checked the crowd. Nothing. Another sign — a small triangle on a trough. Then a cross, scratched into a tavern door. The trail led her to an alley behind a tailor's shop.
The dead-drop.
Her fingers dug at a loose brick. It shifted. Behind it, an oilcloth packet waited. She stepped into the shadows and opened it.
A folded note. A thick bundle of rubles. Her breath caught. The handwriting — his. The familiar slant of each line. Their private code — Georgian phrases, old poems, nicknames only they knew.
My little bird.
She read quickly, translating in her head.
I am alive. The hunter is a lion, not a jackal. I have wounded him, but he lives. His rage is the rage of the state. The way to you is closed.
Then came stranger words:
A door has opened to the West. To refuse is death. To accept is power.
And finally, the blow that shattered her.
Do not wait for me in this cage. The lion hunts there. Use this sun — their word for money — and fly. Go south, to Odessa or Constantinople. Forget the ghost who haunts you.
The last promise came like a knife wrapped in silk.
The vow under the Tbilisi sun still stands. When I have conquered the world that hunts us, I will find you again. Wait for me in the sun of a new world.
She stood frozen, tears cutting clean tracks down her dirty cheeks. He was alive. Relief and grief collided. He had told her to live — without him.
She folded the note with shaking hands and tucked it into her coat beside the money. There was no more waiting. She would find her own way out.
Kato stepped from the shadows, already planning the path to Odessa. The cold air stung her lungs as she reached the mouth of the alley.
Two men stepped forward.
Her breath caught. Grigory's thugs? No — too neat. Their coats were fine, their posture disciplined, their eyes sharp.
The bearded one spoke first, his tone calm and official.
"Ekaterina Svanidze?"
Her real name. Spoken aloud. The illusion of safety shattered.
"Prime Minister Stolypin sends his regards," the man said, his expression unreadable. "He has many questions for the Ghost's wife."
The alley seemed to close around her. The world went silent again — just like the moment before a storm.