Irina’s POV

I found Roman in the east corridor.

He heard me before he saw me.

"Miss Irina." He didn’t turn around. "Is there something you need."

Not a question. The specific not-a-question version that meant *please have a short answer.*

"I want to help find Katerina," I said.

He turned around.

The look on his face was—complicated. The polite professional surface was there. Underneath it, several other things that he was keeping buttoned down with the same discipline he applied to his jacket.

"The search is ongoing," he said.

"I know. I want to be part of it."

A beat.

I kept my voice even. "I know things about her. Where she goes when she’s upset. What name she’d use. The kinds of places she’d look for to feel safe." I met his eyes. "She’s my stepsister. I grew up in the same house. That’s information your people don’t have."

Roman looked at me.

The polite surface didn’t change. But something underneath it shifted—barely, just a fraction—the look of a man who had just been handed a reasonable argument and was annoyed about it.

"You’d be an asset," I said. "Not a complication."

"I didn’t say you’d be a complication."

"You were thinking it."

His mouth tightened.

"Come," he said. "I’ll show you what we have."

---

The room they were using for the search was small. Three monitors. A map on the wall with markers on it. Two analysts who looked up when I walked in and then looked very carefully at Roman to determine how they were supposed to feel about this.

Roman made a small hand gesture. *Normal. Continue.*

They continued.

"She left through the east service gate," Roman said. He pointed at the map. "On the morning Maxim’s delegation arrived. Her mate, Petrov, filed for a forty-eight hour personal leave three days prior—personal event, approved through standard channels. No one flagged it as unusual because there was no reason to." His jaw moved. "In retrospect."

"She planned it," I said.

"Yes."

"She knew Maxim was coming."

Roman looked at me. "Did she tell you that."

"No." I looked at the map. "But she knew. She has sources—she’s lived here for almost two years, she knows people. And she would have started planning the moment she knew, because that’s how she thinks. Always three steps ahead. Always the exit before the room."

He was quiet for a second.

"Where would she go," he said. "If she wanted to disappear."

I thought about it. Not the surface answer—not the obvious one. The real one. The one you’d only know if you’d watched her long enough to see the pattern underneath the performance.

"Small. She’d go somewhere small." I looked at the northern edge of the map. "She hates cities. She always said—" I stopped. It felt strange, talking about her like this. Useful-strange. "She said cities were for people who didn’t know how to be alone with themselves. She’d go somewhere she could see the sky in every direction."

"Rural."

"Probably."

Roman made a note.

The analyst on the left started typing something.

"She has money," I added. "She’s been here two years, she’s been saving. She’s careful with money. She’d have enough to stay off the main transit lines for months."

Roman’s pen stopped.

---

It took three hours.

Three hours of the map and the monitors and the two analysts and Roman asking questions and me answering them—some easily, some only after I’d had to sit with them long enough to dig up something I didn’t know I’d filed away. Katerina at sixteen, refusing to take the family car anywhere because she didn’t like being driven. Katerina at twenty, the one time she’d talked about where she’d live if she could live anywhere, the brief detailed description of a town near the northern coast that she’d dropped and then deflected from so quickly I’d almost missed it.

I hadn’t missed it.

I hadn’t known I’d kept it. But there it was.

Roman wrote down the town name without reacting, but he underlined it twice.

The analysts cross-referenced transit records. Then property records. Then a secondary database I didn’t ask the origin of and didn’t particularly want to know.

A flag came up on the third monitor.

Roman leaned in. Read something. His expression didn’t change, but I’d spent three hours watching his expression and I could see the small shift—the very specific shift of someone who had just found what they were looking for.

"Voronova," he said quietly.

I looked at the screen.

A name. A registration. The northern coast town I’d mentioned. Two weeks ago.

She was there.

She was already there before she left. She’d set it up in advance, while she was still in this building, while she was still filing her husband’s leave forms through standard channels.

While she was handing me a vial in the garden.

I pressed my mouth flat.

"Thank you," Roman said. He was looking at the monitor, not me, but the words were directed at me. Clear and deliberate.

"It’s fine," I said.

"It’s not fine." He straightened. "It was—useful. What you provided."

I looked at him.

His face was doing a complicated thing. The professional surface was still there. But underneath it—just at the edges—something that was trying to recalibrate.

"You don’t have to say it like you’re in pain," I said.

His mouth twitched.

That surprised me. I hadn’t expected a twitch. He’d been so committed to the professional non-expression the entire time.

---

I went to her rooms after.

Hers and Petrov’s. The warrior quarters in the north residential block—smaller than the main palace rooms, cleaner, more practical. Two chairs. A table. A narrow window that looked out over the training yard.

She’d left it neat. Of course she had. Katerina always left things neat. Like she wanted the record to show she’d been organized about it.

I stood in the middle of the room.

The bed was made. The closet was cleared. The small dresser had two drawers left open—empty, but open, like she’d pulled them out in a hurry at the end and hadn’t had time to push them back.

That was the part that didn’t fit.

Everything else was careful. Those open drawers weren’t.

I crossed to the dresser.

Looked at the drawers. Then at the top of the dresser. A water glass. A candle, burned down to nothing. A book face-down—I turned it over and looked at the cover and didn’t recognize it.

And under the book.

An envelope.

White. Unsealed. My name on the front in her handwriting—that precise, deliberate script she’d had since she was fifteen, each letter exactly the same height.

I picked it up.

My hands were steady. I’d been surprised by that before and I wasn’t surprised now. The body had a way of going calm for things it had already decided to do.

I opened it.

---

The letter was four pages.

I read all of it.

Standing there in the middle of her empty room, the afternoon light coming through the narrow window, the sound of the training yard somewhere below—I read every word.

She’d written it before she left. I could tell from the first line. She’d written it before she came to the garden, before she sat across from me and said *this isn’t your life.* She’d had the letter ready and she’d still come to say it in person.

That was Katerina.

She wrote about our father.

Not what I expected. Not defense of him, not explanation. Just—truth. The kind of truth that comes out when someone is leaving and knows they’re not coming back and has run out of reasons to keep it small. She wrote about what she’d seen in that last year. What she’d told herself. What she’d told herself to tell herself. The specific, elaborate logic of a person who’d chosen herself and needed to live with it.

I tucked the letter into my jacket.

"I think I need to see my father."