May 2017, Moscow, Russia

Flying turned out to be annoyingly uneventful once the first heart-stopping jump into the air was behind Volya. The afternoon hours rose and fell into the evening like sea waves, before spitting him onto a gigantic bed. A multi-lane bridge dotted with the headlights of the speeding cars stretched beyond the window. Farther down, the Kremlin's wall was backlit, its towers topped with the golden eagles. He was far away from home, in Moscow.

Volya collapsed, his mind too sluggish to think. Too much had happened in one day. Sleep claimed him as soon as his head hit the pillow, both deep and restless from the emotional depletion. And what could he possibly dream about after a day like this? Nothing his imagination could conjure beat his reality.

The next day, however, was dedicated to gritty realism.

Marina dragged him away from coffee and seared veal to the hallowed halls of Russian bureaucracy.

Every façade downtown spotted fresh coat of paint, but inside the buildings were indistinguishable from his orphanage. The familiar teal shade shared the walls with the off-white. The furniture was sturdy and shabby. The faucets leaked, leaving a rusty trail on the porcelain. Leaking must have been part of the design specifications for the faucets nation-wide.

If only Marina didn't push the iPad into his hands whenever there was a lull in the proceedings, he'd feel right at home here. And there was lots of waiting, punctuated by Marina's clipped orders.

Wolkov, pick this form. Sign your name there.

Look up. They're taking your passport photo. Sign your name.

Don't squirm. Did you finish Unit 4? Sign your name.

The sheer number of forms should have numbed him to the emptiness that confronted him from every piece of paper slipped in front of him.

Father: unknown.

As far as the family trees went, Volya's was not a bushy one.

Full Name: Volya Pavlovich Wolkov.

Mother: Taina Pavlovna Wolkova. Maiden Name: Wolkova. They shared the patronymic name, so he might have had a grandfather named Pavel. Women often did that when the father was unknown. The custom to include the name of the father into the person's name added a spoonful of bitter medicine for a fatherless kid like him... and motherless too.

Well, Tatiana Pavlovna, wherever you are—wait a minute!

Volya did a double take and his neck sweated under his collar. Things had been going so smoothly so far, but the stupid spell check must have screwed up his mother's name on the form.

Should he keep his mouth shut? Would anyone even notice the tiny error like that?

Of course, they would, and it would come to bite him in the ass at the worst possible moment. Everything else always did.

"Marina, I think there is a typo," Volya said with a resigned sigh. Better suffer now than later. "My mother's name is misspelled. It should be Tatiana here, not Taina."

He tapped his finger on the misprint. Tania, short for Tatiana, was a common name. It sounded close enough to be mixed up with taina but why the heck did the document use the short version in the first place?

Taina wasn't even a proper name, just a word that meant secret.

The corner of Marina's contoured lips lifted as she scanned the form.

"Oh, no, Volya. This one is filled correctly. Your mother's name is T-AI-na Wolkova, not Tatiana."

"Oh." Volya stared at Marina.

She put the inflection wrong in their last name, too. Well, not wrong exactly, just not the way most people would have said it. When the interpreter pronounced his mother's first and last name together that way, it sounded weird. Like, there was a not-so-hidden message in the name.

If his mother's name was a secret, then her first and last name together said, secret of the wolves. In turn, if he pronounced his last name the way Marina did, it meant—

Then another thing occurred to him. His jaw dropped at that revelation. Marina sounded so damn sure about his mother's name, as if she knew her.

"You knew her?" Volya's voice jumped to a little girl's pitch, then broke off. "You knew my mother?"

Taina or Tatiana, whatever her name was, Marina had to have known his mother! Unless she was just pretentious.

"No." Marina dashed his hopes with one word.

A knockout punch.

He tried to hide his disappointment behind a cough, but he fooled no one.

Marina's hand patted his in consolation. "I didn't know her, but I've known of her for a while. She was a remarkable woman."

"Uh-huh." Volya hiccupped. "Was? Is my mother dead?"

"I'm sorry, I don't know." Marina knitted her fingers. Two of her nails had weird symbols. A spiral and something like two loops used to signify infinity in math.

"It must be hard on you." She patted his hand again. "But we're nearly done here, and we won't be doing the visas till tomorrow morning, so you'll have the afternoon off to... ah...."

She trailed off, obviously unsure what a guy could be doing for fun, save for cramming the Unit 4. Compassion came hard to her, but he appreciated her trying.

"I'll take a nap," he muttered to bail her out of the uncomfortable silence. The woman earned that much.

***

Volya crawled into his posh hotel room and scoffed from the threshold. The décor was still marvelous, in rich autumnal hues and off-setting crisp whites. The room was still huge yet inviting. It was cleaned to perfection during his absence. The view still enticed him to visit the sights.

But one thing was off: a thoughtful hand deposited two tiny chocolates on Volya's pillow—thoughtful where other people were concerned, that is. Chocolate was poison to him, like all carbs. It was particularly annoying, given how the hotel staff was so attentive to his special needs at breakfast. Heck, they almost made him believe it was okay to be a carnivore.

Fuming, Volya went to sweep the two golden foil wrapped truffles off his pillow, then realized that the candy sat on a note rather than on a napkin.

He frowned, scooped the chocolates and put them in the nightstand's drawer for the next guest—he couldn't just throw away food and these were fancy Evening Bells truffles—and perched on the edge of his bed. The note was written on a lined page from a school notebook. Handwriting was cursive, but rounded, almost childish.

Don't trust the American. Whatever you think you know, you don't understand a fraction of it. Keep the secret hidden.

"What the heck?" Volya inquired of the pillow. "What effing secret? What the actual heck?"

When the pillow didn't shrug its pudgy shoulders or produced any other response, Volya re-read the message.

Item one, he didn't trust Liam anyway.

Item two, if anyone kept secrets, that was Liam, not Volya. Volya's only private and confidential info was how he felt about Toshka, but he doubted his love life concerned anyone. Besides, Liam figured out his deepest heart desire after knowing him for thirty minutes. He obviously didn't hide his feelings well.

Item three... now that was a definite maybe. Marina had told him his mother's name was Secret. Was this a clue? Did someone warn him not to talk about his mother with Liam?

Volya crumpled the note in his fist, looking around the room with suspicion. But the velvet curtains didn't move; the giant round bathtub was empty; and the closet door was firmly shut.

A stranger must had walked into his room. They left him the kind of message that should self-destruct after reading. And they took a risk for nothing. He didn't get their drift. Good thing they didn't instruct him to swallow the note for conspiracy's sake! He ended up ripping it into tiny pieces and flushing it down the toilet.

That act from a spy movie done, he dropped his face into the pillow and wallowed.

The wallowing went much nicer in the privacy of a luxurious room, than in the blind corner between the two buildings back at the orphanage that had been the place to hide his sorrows for many years. Probably that's why rich people whined so much: they had proper facilities to do so.

So, Volya sulked. The stupid forms made him hate his nobody-wanted-you birth, and now he received this good-for-nothing warning. It had to be about his mother, too much of a coincidence otherwise with her name being Secret. The joke was on the perpetrators though. He knew nothing about his mother either.

He even wished that he had kept his mouth shut instead of asking Marina. Then he'd just ignored this message as a stupid prank.

And he wouldn't have been beset by worries about writing his mother's name incorrectly. Nobody had ever questioned him when he wrote Tatiana before. Who cared anyway? Certainly, he didn't. Why would he?

He knew kids like Toshka, who'd come to the orphanage after a long stay in a hospital and would never talk of their parents.

On the other end of the spectrum, there were some who'd broken into filing rooms in search of information, hoping to discover something exceptional about their ancestry. Those clowns ended up bitterly disappointed.

He was smart enough not to look, nor care, nor question it for all these years.

Well, today he'd paid attention, and what did it get him? Nothing but hurt.

Yeah, his family favored weird names for two generations. And, oh! His mother's name was a big fat secret he was supposed to keep hidden. A secret of the wolves. Frigging A!

Volya heaved a mighty sigh. He understood nothing, and Liam with his handmaiden Marina piled up more and more mysteries on him. It was all connected to his family somehow, since genetics was involved, but other than that he got a big, fat nothing. Why wouldn't anyone explain anything to him?

The phone rang, drawing Volya away from his flattened pillow.

Liam's creamy 'good afternoon' poured out of the receiver. Then the voice of the auto-interpreting software took over.

"Get up, we're going out," it grated, and Volya's heart bounced in his chest. "Meet me at the lobby in five. Tell no-one."

"But..."

Liam had already hung up.

Had he just legit teleported into a spy movie?

Don't trust the American. Ha!