Delaney's apartment. 11 PM.
Victor couldn't sleep.
He lay in the guest room bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the apartment. The refrigerator humming. The radiator clicking. And Delaney, moving around in the living room.
Still working. Always working.
He got up quietly. Padded to the door. Opened it a crack.
Delaney sat at her laptop, bathed in blue light. Multiple windows open. Her face reflected in the screen—tired, drawn, focused. She hadn't changed out of her clothes. Hadn't stopped since dinner.
Victor watched.
This is what he did. Watched. Learned.
In Sofia, before the fire—the scandal that burned his parents' world to ash—he'd watched his father. The Bulgarian diplomat. His adoptive father. The man didn't explode in anger; he smoldered. He would sit in his leather chair by the window, a cigarette always between his fingers, the ash growing longer and longer like a silent accusation. He'd watch the smoke curl toward the ceiling, his eyes fixed on some distant point of policy or failure. Victor learned to read that sign: the deeper the ash, the colder the silence, the more the room filled with a toxic, invisible cloud. He learned to hold his breath.
But that man also taught him chess. Took him to football matches. His large, steady hand on Victor's shoulder felt like an anchor. He was loved. In his own smoky, distant way.
With his mother, it was watching her extinguish. The way she'd open windows, her smile tight as she waved away the smoke. The way she'd polish silver that didn't need polishing, trying to cleanse something she couldn't see. Her love was an air freshener in a house on fire, but it was still love. She sang to him. She packed lunches with little notes. She was safe.
They were his parents. They chose him. That mattered, even in the smoke.
With Amore, he'd watched the performance of family. The camera was a lighter, flicked on to create a warm, bright glow. Off-camera, the flame went out, leaving only the smell of spent fuel. There were no lunch notes. Only cue cards.
Everyone had patterns. Everyone showed their truth if you watched long enough.
Delaney's pattern was work.
But underneath—fear.
He could see it in how she sat. Shoulders hunched like she was protecting her core from a chill. In how her hands moved—typing, then stopping, then cleaning with sanitizer, then typing again. A ritual of purification. Scared of contamination.
Victor opened the door wider.
Delaney didn't notice. Too focused.
He walked into the living room. Stood there in his pajamas, notebook under his arm.
"You not sleep either," he said.
Delaney jumped. Turned.
"Jesus—Victor. I didn't hear you."
"I know. You very... задълбочен... absorbed."
"Absorbed. Yes." She looked at her laptop, then back at him. "You should be asleep."
"Should. But not." He sat on the couch. Far end. Giving space. "You should too. But you working."
"I have a deadline."
"Always deadline." Victor opened his notebook. Started drawing. "Amore say you have deadline when she call. My father at embassy—deadline. State dinner—deadline. Scandal in the papers—deadline."
Delaney's jaw tightened.
"Work doesn't stop because it's inconvenient."
"No. Work stop because you choose stop. You not choose."
He drew carefully. The apartment. Simple lines. Windows. Furniture. A figure at a laptop. He drew tendrils of smoke around her, not from a cigarette, but from the laptop itself, curling up to form a cloud on the ceiling.
Delaney watched him.
"What are you drawing?"
"You. Now. This moment." He added details to the laptop figure. Hunched shoulders. One hand on keyboard, the other rubbing her own arm as if cold. "So I remember."
"Remember what?"
"How you look when you are... замърсен? Contaminated. By your own thoughts."
"I'm not contaminated. I'm busy."
Victor glanced at her. "For my father, busy was also smoke screen. To not see house burning down around him. But house was also... home. Was complicated."
Delaney closed her laptop. Rubbed her eyes.
"You know what? Fine. You want to psychoanalyze me? Go ahead. What else do you see?"
Victor continued drawing. Added texture to the cloud—not screaming faces, but fragmented, happy moments: a chess piece, a football, a lunchbox. Things lost in the smoke.
"I see person who very alone. Who push everyone away. Who work work work because if stop, have to breathe in the... the quiet. And quiet is worse."
"Very insightful."
"I see person who—" He paused, choosing words carefully. "—who remind me of man from... my father's world. Not diplomat. Journalist. He come to our apartment many times. He bring toys for me. Good toys."
Delaney's expression shifted.
"What journalist?"
"Man who talk very smooth. Very... clever? Yes. Clever words. He bring bottle of good rakia. He say 'I am friend. I expose truth. I protect people from powerful men like your father.'" Victor's pencil moved faster, shading the cloud darker. "My father like him at first. They drink. They talk late. Man say 'we understand each other. We both see how system is rotten.' I like him too. He ask me about my football team. He remember my friends' names. Plamen. Krasi. He felt like... maybe uncle."
He looked up at Delaney.
"But was not friendship. Was... Инфилтрация. Infiltration. Man want information. Want secrets. Want to use my father's smoke to create bigger fire for his newspaper. The toys, the questions about my friends... was all to make door open."
Delaney had gone very still.
"After article come out—very bad article, pictures, private things—my father not leave his chair for week. Just smoke. Whole apartment like fog. Mother cry. That was the real fire. The one that burns from inside."
Victor's pencil stopped.
"My friends at school... they stop talking to me. Their parents tell them to. The journalist, he did not just burn my father. He burned my football team. He burned my school. He burned the bakery where we got banitsa, because he wrote the owner was my father's cousin. Everything... covered in ash."
The silence stretched, thick and uncomfortable.
"Why are you telling me this?" Delaney asked quietly.
"Because." Victor set down his pencil. Showed her the drawing. "You do same thing. With your work. With people you write about."
The drawing showed Delaney at her laptop, the smoke from it now forming grasping hands that reached toward the fragmented happy memories in the cloud, turning them gray.
"I hear you sometimes," Victor continued. "On phone. With your sources. You say 'trust me.' You say 'I will tell your story with care.' You say 'the world needs to know.'"
He met her eyes.
"Is same words. From journalist who destroyed my father. He also say 'world needs to know.' But he not care about truth. He care about... пожар. The blaze. The bigger story. And he did not care about the good things that burn with the bad."
Delaney's face had gone pale.
"You not bad person," Victor added, his voice softening. "My father... he was not all bad person. He was weak. He did bad things. But he was also my father. He loved me. The journalist, he made him only bad thing in story. Made me only sad orphan in story. But it was not whole truth. It was... simple truth. Easy to understand. Easy to burn."
He pointed at her laptop.
"I see sometimes. When you work. I not read good English but I recognize patterns. Files on people. Their families. Their children's schools. Their friends. You collect them. Like my father collect cigarette boxes. Empty things that once burned. You look for the bad thing—the corruption, the lie—and you blow on it. To make flame. For your work. You tell yourself you are burning the bad. But fire does not choose. It burns everything around it too."
"It's research. Context," Delaney argued, but her voice lacked force.
"Journalist say same. 'Deep context.' But context was weapon." Victor picked up his pencil again. He drew a small, detailed picture in the corner of a boy kicking a football with two other boys, all smiling. Then he drew a light layer of ash over the top of it, blurring their faces. "You take people, find their corruption, and light the match. You tell yourself you are making light. But you are really making ash. And ash gets in lungs of everyone nearby."
Delaney stood abruptly.
"That's enough. You're eleven. You don't understand the importance of holding power to account—"
"I understand ash." Victor's voice stayed calm, unbearably patient. "I understand how it gets in everything. Clothes. Books. Lungs. You breathe it for years after fire is gone. Your work, it makes ash. You think you make light, but you make ash. And you do not see the people breathing it. The friends. The bakery lady. The son."
He started a new page. Drew two figures. One holding a magnifying glass, focusing a beam of sunlight on a single, dry, rotten leaf on a vast, living tree. The other figure is the tree.
"Journalist, he need my father to burn. To make big story. Your work, it needs people to burn too. Not because they are all bad. But because fire is your... your material. And you do not care about the tree. Only about proving the one leaf is rotten."
He looked up at Delaney, his gaze clear and devastating.
"My father weak man. He do bad things. But he was also my father. The fire, it burned away the man, left only the bad things for everyone to see. Is that justice? Or is it just... good story for newspaper? A simple story. An orphan story."
"Stop." Delaney's hands were shaking. She looked at her own hands, at the invisible ash she was always trying to clean away.
"You are making orphan stories," Victor said, not accusingly, but with the plain tone of describing a weather pattern. "You find the rot, and you burn the whole tree. And you call it truth. But it is not whole truth. My truth is... smoke and chess and lunch notes and love and bribes and shame. My truth is complicated. Your truth is simple. And simple truth is... it is a lie that burns better."
Delaney sank back onto her chair, the fight gone out of her. She stared at Victor's drawings—the fragmented memories in the smoke, the ash-covered friends, the tree about to be ignited for a single leaf.
"Your parents," she whispered. "You loved them."
"Yes," Victor said simply. "They loved me. They were flawed. They were mine. The fire took them. The journalist took everything else."
He closed his notebook.
"I am not angry at you. I am... озадачен. Sad for you. Because you sit in your own smoke, and you do not see you are burning yourself. You think you are cleaning the world. But you are just making more ash for people like me to breathe."
He stood. Walked toward his room. Stopped at the doorway.
"The journalist who wrote story," Victor said, not looking back. "Two years later, he win big award. I see picture in magazine. He is smiling. My father is dead. My mother is sick. My friends are gone. He has award. The ash does not stick to him. It only sticks to people in the story."
He disappeared into the guest room. The door closed softly.
Delaney sat alone in the blue laptop light.
Her hands found the sanitizer. She pumped it once, twice, rubbing her hands together fiercely, under the nails, across the knuckles.
Trying to wash off the ash.
She opened her laptop. Looked at the file for her current subject, "The Fighter." She had tabs open for his estranged sister, his daughter's private school, his favorite bar. Context. Connections. The whole picture.
But it was a picture she was framing. A tree she was ready to set alight for the crime of one rotten leaf. To make a simple, burning story.
Her phone buzged.
Marshall
Still on Elena's building. No movement. Should I stay until morning?
She stared at the message. Elena had a son. A quiet boy who liked dinosaurs. She'd included that in her notes. Humanizing detail.
Victor's words echoed. The ash does not stick to him. It only sticks to people in the story.
She typed: No. Go home. Stand down.
She sent it before she could think.
Then she opened a new document. The cursor blinked.
She didn't write a story.
She wrote a single line, just for herself:
***When did I become the one holding the magnifying glass?***
Then she closed everything. All the windows. All the files.
She sat in the darkness, the ghost of chemical lemon on her skin, and listened to the quiet.
It was worse.
And for the first time, she understood that the quiet wasn't empty. It was full of the ash of every story she'd ever burned, and it was finally settling on her.
> Chapter complete. Continue to next chapter? [Y/N] █