The next week blurred into smoke and silence. Jake felt stretched to breaking, pulled between two fronts of a war only he could see. Every hour was a balancing act between politics and paranoia, between the revolution's stage lights and the city's shadows. One wrong move in either could end him.
By day, he played the loyal soldier in the party's inner meetings. The "protector" of Comrade Orlov. He listened, nodded, offered insights in the right tone at the right time. His mask was perfect: steady eyes, calm voice, a man weighed down by duty. He dropped careful lines into conversation—phrases about the Okhrana's latest plots, about vigilance, about solidarity with their "embattled" hero.
He whispered to Stepan Shaumian that Orlov seemed distracted, shaken by the rumors. "He needs support," Jake would murmur. "The enemy thrives on our doubt." Each word strengthened his image. Not an agitator, not a brute—a strategist. A man who thought in systems, who understood the unseen. The same men who once mocked him now sought his counsel. He could feel the slow, steady accumulation of power—thin and poisonous as arsenic.
By night, the mask changed. He and Kamo shadowed "Giorgi Beria." They lived out of filthy rooms, eating stale bread, drinking bitter tea, sleeping in shifts. Yagoda was nothing like the careless informants of Tbilisi's taverns. He was sharp. He varied his routes, doubled back without warning, studied reflections in shop windows to spot tails.
Twice, Jake and Kamo barely escaped notice—once by ducking behind a garbage cart, another time by plunging into a cellar doorway. Yagoda never saw them, but Jake could feel the man's awareness like static in the air.
They logged everything: the bakery, the laundry, the meetings with comrades who seemed genuine. Yagoda played both sides with precision—part revolutionary, part betrayer. He was no simple snitch. He was a spider in the web.
The tension hollowed Jake out. The bread turned to dust in his mouth. Sleep came in shallow bursts, haunted by faces—Orlov's smirk, Kato's eyes, Yagoda's reflection in a shop window. "Soso" wasn't a disguise anymore; it was becoming his skin. The soft voice of Jake Vance, history teacher, was fading. What remained was watchfulness, calculation, a constant weighing of threats.
Kamo was the only person who shared his hours, but even that bond was built on lies. Kamo trusted a man who didn't exist.
One night, the weight of it all became too heavy. Jake found himself walking to Kato's building, clutching a small parcel—a loaf of real bread, a wedge of cheese, a few rubles from one of Kamo's "expropriations."
She was mending a shirt when he knocked. The candlelight made her look both older and impossibly fragile. She accepted the parcel with quiet gratitude.
"You should eat," he said. The words came out dry and foreign.
She looked him over, her expression softening for just a moment. "You should," she said. "You look half-dead. What are you doing all night, Soso?"
He wanted to tell her everything—to spill the truth until there was nothing left of the lies. But in this world, the truth was a contagion. To protect her, he had to keep her blind.
"Party business," he said. "It's… complicated."
Her gaze didn't waver. She didn't press, didn't accuse. She just looked at him with quiet sorrow, as if she were mourning him in advance. "Be safe," she whispered, and turned back to her sewing.
He left feeling colder than when he'd arrived. The silence between them was worse than anger—it was the silence of two worlds drifting apart. He walked back into the night with the grim comfort that work, at least, demanded no honesty.
The breakthrough came a week later, on a night so dark the city seemed swallowed whole. They followed Yagoda through twisting alleys until he reached the old cemetery. The air was brittle with frost. Between the leaning stones and cracked angels, Yagoda stopped before a marble crypt.
He wasn't alone for long. A man appeared out of the dark—tall, elegant, unmistakably upper class. His coat was rich wool, his fur hat immaculate. A government official. Far above the rank of any Okhrana grunt.
Jake and Kamo crouched behind a mausoleum, barely breathing. The two men spoke in low tones. After a moment, the official handed Yagoda a thick envelope, clapped him on the shoulder, and left the way he'd come.
Jake felt the chill crawl deeper into his bones. This wasn't just espionage. It was coordination.
But then, another shadow moved. From the opposite end of the cemetery, a second man approached the crypt. His stride was confident. Familiar.
Orlov.
Jake's heart stopped. Kamo swore under his breath.
They watched as Orlov greeted Yagoda—not as adversaries, but as colleagues. The two men exchanged words, quiet and friendly. Yagoda laughed.
The truth hit Jake like a blow.
Orlov and Yagoda weren't on opposite sides. They were partners.
The plot he'd spent weeks weaving, the entire delicate machine he thought he controlled, was a fiction. The real game had been running beneath it, vast and invisible, and he had been nothing more than a pawn moving according to someone else's design.
The hunter realized, with sickening clarity, that he had been the one trapped all along.