Igor jerked as if from a blow, but not physical.

He pulled Igor harder, and he staggered, then suddenly twisted away. The movement wasn’t so much an attempt at resistance as a desperate gesture—as if a man were trying to shake off someone else’s fate.

“I didn’t steal anything!” he shouted, looking not at the men, but at Vera. “Do you hear? Nothing!”

The silence that followed that scream was so thick that it seemed as if it could be pushed apart with one’s hands.

“Then why did you…” Vera began, but didn’t finish.

Igor looked away. His shoulders slumped, as if he’d suddenly become smaller, lighter—almost transparent.

“I just took it,” he said quietly. “I took it to give it back.”

The men exchanged glances. The one holding Vera frowned slightly.

“To whom?” he asked, no longer as tired as before, more attentively.

Igor was silent. His lips pressed together, and a thin trickle of blood appeared again on the broken skin. Vera suddenly understood: it wasn’t about fear of these people. The fear was deeper—it touched something that couldn’t be named without destroying it.

Somewhere below, outside the windows, a distant siren sounded. At first faint, almost inaudible, it gradually grew louder, weaving itself into the fabric of the scene like a strange but inescapable thread.

The man in the cloak swore quietly.

“Here we are,” he said. “Now things will be different.”

But Vera was no longer listening to him. She looked at Igor, and there was neither reproach nor fear in her gaze—only concentration, an almost painful clarity.

“You don’t have to explain it to them,” she said. “But you do have to explain it to me.”

Igor looked up at her. And at that moment, something changed—not abruptly, imperceptibly to an outsider, but perceptibly, like a shift in the wind before a thunderstorm.

“There…” he began, stumbling. “There’s a boy there. He’s worse off than me.”

The siren got closer.

Vera nodded slowly, as if that was the only thing that mattered.

“Then we won’t let you go alone,” she said.

And there was no heroism in these words. Only a simple, difficult decision to stay.

The men exchanged glances—quickly, almost imperceptibly—but in that brief exchange, doubt flitted across their faces, like the shadow of a cloud. The one in the cloak, Renat, loosened his grip on Igor’s collar slightly, as if for a moment he no longer felt confident in his right to hold on.

“Don’t bargain now,” he said quietly. “It’s not the right time.”

But his voice no longer held the same icy inflexibility. A crack had appeared—thin as a spider’s web, but enough for humanity to seep through.

The siren outside the window approached, spread across the yard, hit the walls of the houses and returned as an echo, as if it didn’t know where to go.

Igor stood with his head bowed. His fingers trembled—not from the cold, not from fear, but from an inner tension that had long sought release and finally found it in these words, dropped almost by accident.

“He…” Igor swallowed. “He’s from a boarding school. There… there, no one looks after him. He owes money. Not his own.”

Vera felt something shift inside her, as if her familiar picture of the world had tilted slightly, revealing another layer behind it—less comfortable, less understandable, but more real.

“And you decided…” she didn’t finish, and there was no need to.

“I just couldn’t watch,” he replied sharply, and there was more pain in that sharpness than defiance. “Do you understand? I couldn’t.”

The second man holding Vera slowly released her elbow. His arm dropped to his side, and he took a step back, as if the invisible line separating him from what was happening had suddenly widened.

“You tell it beautifully,” he muttered, but without mockery. “But debt—it’s not a fairy tale. It gets paid back.”

Renat ran his hand over his face, wiping away the rain and fatigue.

“How much?” he asked shortly.

Igor hesitated. This question was harder than all the previous ones.

— I don’t know exactly… There… are a lot.