The Dog Who Knew Everything

The orange peel lay curled on the bar like a question mark. Elena stared at it, remembering how Viktor used to peel them in one long ribbon—his one party trick, his one moment of something resembling joy before he'd retreat back into himself. That was three years ago. Before Prague. Before she learned the man she'd married for eight years was a spy.

Now she sat in this same bar, opposite a man who introduced himself as Dmitri. He had bear-like paws for hands and eyes that held the calculated warmth of someone paid to extract information. "Your husband," Dmitri said, his voice low, "left something behind. Files. We need them back."

Elena signaled for another drink. "I burned them."

"All of them?"

"Enough."

This was a lie. She'd found the encrypted drive taped to the underside of their dog's bed—Buster, who now slept at her feet, thumping his tail at nothing. Viktor had always been gentle with the dog, the one living thing he seemed to genuinely love. That love had been real. She'd held onto that certainty through two years of interrogations, defector debriefings, her own recruitment by counter-intelligence. Viktor's love for Buster was her baseline truth, the one thing that couldn't be compromised.

"We can protect you," Dmitri said. "If he comes back—and he will—you'll need protection. He's not the man you knew. He's a professional now."

Elena looked down at Buster, whose golden eyes met hers with that unconditional, idiot faith that dogs somehow manage even when the world burns around them. She thought of the encrypted message she'd received that morning: a single line—*I'm coming for us.*

"You're wrong," she said. "He's exactly the man I knew."

She paid her tab and walked out into the street, the dog trotting beside her. Somewhere in the city, Viktor was moving toward her through the shadows, and she realized with something like horror that she still loved him. That was the price of spying, she supposed—you didn't just lose your secrets. You lost yourself, piece by piece, until you couldn't remember which lies belonged to the job and which belonged to you. Behind her, in the bar, Dmitri's phone began to ring.