Love Destroyed

The Moscow correspondent.

The snow had teeth. It bit without warming first, tore at the ears, chewed fingers through gloves, and punished the unprepared with a kind of historical malice. But Catherine didn’t complain. She zipped her coat up to the chin and pressed on regardless, trailing after her father through the crowd outside Belorussky Station. Boots crunched in cadence behind his longer stride. He didn’t look back.

Simon Locke wasn’t a man who ever looked back.

He had a name, sure, but mostly he was a byline. Headlines followed him like ghosts. The man himself was a blur of half-smoked cigarettes, spiral-bound notebooks, and a beard that changed shape depending on the war zone. Always moving. Always elsewhere. Catherine, fifteen and nearly as tall, travelled with him like a second shadow—one with a heartbeat and questions he rarely answered.

She’d seen Beirut before her first period. Darfur before algebra. She knew how to lie to customs, how to fold a map so no one could see the red circles. Her geography teacher had given up trying. Her moral compass was still calibrating, half-set by the trauma of other people’s countries.

She adored him like only a daughter could.

And in his brittle, short-circuited way, he adored her back.

“Not much further,” he said, mostly to himself. His voice was dry, like chalk-on-board dry. Nerves or cold. Maybe both. Catherine couldn’t tell. He was always like this before meetings: wired, clipped, remote. But this was different today. There was a current beneath the silence, and it didn’t feel safe.

They turned into a side street that stank of diesel, piss, and secrets. The snow deadened sound, made the alley feel like it had swallowed the rest of the city. At the far end was a door—matte black, windowless, set deep into the wall like a tooth cavity.

Catherine paused. Her breath came out in fog.

“Wait here,” Simon said.

“No chance.” She said, but it wasn’t loud. She didn’t plead. She just straightened her back and locked eyes with him. “You promised.”

He hesitated. Just a flicker. Then a nod. A promise to a daughter meant something—even now. Especially now.

Inside, the flat smelt like boiled fear and old cigarettes. Yellow paint had turned the colour of teeth. A man sat hunched beneath a swinging bulb with a chipped glass of tea on the table, his eyes like wet pebbles. The kind of man who knew better than to ask for names. The kind who’d long since stopped pretending anyone ever told him the truth.

“Locke,” he said. No handshake. No smile. His Russian accent was smoothed by decades of disappointment. “And the girl?”

“My daughter,” Simon replied, eyes still scanning. “Ignore her. She knows better than to speak.”

The man’s gaze shifted to Catherine—measured, clinical. “Does she know where she is?”

Simon didn’t answer. The man shrugged.

“Then let’s talk.”

“They were in Moscow chasing a ghost. And this ghost had claws. It began in Tallinn, with a whisper from a man who drank his vodka through a straw and refused to name the year. An ex-analyst, I hear. Limping, dying, itching to confess. Russian units had been flipping foreign journalists, trawling their emails, poisoning their sources, blackmailing them into propaganda machines. A few disappeared. A few returned, smiling too wide, their stories fiercely loyal to Moscow. But then came something worse. Not surveillance. Not sabotage. Deployment.

One word had kept surfacing: Katabasis. It is ancient Greek, if you care to look it up. A descent into the underworld, maybe. Or madness.”

Catherine had heard the word whispered three times in as many cities. Each time, Simon’s face lost another shade of colour.

This man—the one with the tea—was the last thread dangling from the source.

He handed Simon a phone. No SIM. Just files. Satellite images. Faces, time-stamped. A facility in northern Siberia—nameless, sprawling, built where no questions reached its ears.

One of the photos showed Simon.

“You’ve been seen,” the man said, tapping ash into an old jar lid. “They know you know.”

Simon stared.

“They’ll erase you like a bug,” the man added. “And the girl too.”

“She’s not—”

“That doesn’t matter. She’s with you.”

Silence tightened around the room like a noose. Catherine, in her corner, didn’t flinch. But she saw it. The shift in her father’s shoulders. He hadn’t planned for this.

They left without another word. A cab with no meter, took them to a borrowed flat above a butcher shop, where the windows froze from the inside. Catherine didn’t ask questions. She just watched. She knew what real fear looked like now. And this was it.

That night, she found him folding clothes like he’d never wear them again. No jokes. No radio. No second notebook with the scribbled codes.

“What is Katabasis?” she asked.

Simon didn’t look up. “Something bad.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He zipped the bag shut like it was a coffin. “It’s a way of turning people into weapons. Not with loyalty. With leverage. They find what you love. And they hold it by the throat.”

Catherine’s voice dropped. “So… they found Mum?”

He paused. Too long.

“No,” he said. “They found you.”

That was when he knew. What he had to do.

The Next Morning, he woke her before the frost on the windows could soften. It was still dark—the kind of dark Moscow does very well, full of static and silence. Catherine’s breath fogged in the air as she sat up, hair flattened on one side, eyes trying to find him in the dim light.

“Where are we going?” she asked, voice thick with sleep and thirst.

“The airport,” Simon said, already dressed. “We’re getting out.”

Half-trues he said it like a man walking the plank.

They moved like ghosts through the city—two figures tucked into borrowed coats, dragging tired feet and even heavier thoughts. At Sheremetyevo, they checked in at a kiosk. Two seats. Heathrow-bound.

Catherine made a joke about the airline food. He laughed, too quickly. It sounded like a lie.

At the gate, he handed her a passport. Not her real one. Something new. Something cleaner.

She flipped it open. A different photo. Still her, still her name. Just… neater. Less traceable.

“What is this?”

“A gift,” he said. “From someone who owed me, big time.”

She squinted at it. “Why?”

“I’m putting you on that plane.”

There was a long pause. Long enough for boarding to begin. Long enough for something to shift behind her eyes.

“Alone?” she said.

He nodded.

Then, softly—too softly—he added, “I’ll follow.”

But she knew. Even then. Kids like Catherine always know before they admit it.

“No.”

“You have to.” He said.

“Tell me why.”

And there it was. The crack in the hull. He could lie. God, he’d lied for less. He could say it was temporary. That he’d meet her in London. That this was part of some bigger plan. But she’d smell it on him. That lie. And lies, once they took root, were impossible to weed out between people like them.

So, he gave her a different kind of truth. A more brutal truth.

“You’re holding me back. You are in my way. You are too needy. I need you gone.”

Catherine blinked. Her mouth opened. Then closed.

“You think this life is romantic,” he went on. “Like we’re in some spy novel. You think near-misses and code words and dead drops are fun. They’re not. They’re a slow-motion car crash. And you—you’re the dead weight I have to carry. You’re the weakness in my world. Also, the one thing I can’t protect. I can’t do my job anymore with you around.”

Her voice, when it finally came, was just a whisper. A tremor.

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do.” He stared straight ahead, eyes like slate. “You’re a liability. A child, one pretending to be brave.”

And that was the knife. Not the words. But the way he said them. As if she were already a memory to be discarded.

She slapped him. Not hard. Just enough to leave the air humming between them. Her face had gone as white as a sheet. She shoved the passport into her coat pocket and walked away without a single word.

He didn’t call after her. He didn’t watch her go. If he did, he’d break.

Three Hours Later, the plane rose into the sky like a wound being stitched shut. A silver fuselage swallowed by snowfall and airport noise. Inside, Catherine sat bolt upright in seat 14A, hands in fists, eyes burning and teeth clenched.

She hated him.

This was new. The hating. Heavy. Alive in her ribs like a second heart trying to get out.

She stared out the window until her reflection blurred.

Elsewhere, on the roof of a terminal building, Simon stood with a man in a long black coat. The same man from the flat with the same dead eyes.

“She won’t forgive you,” the man said.

“She doesn’t have to.”

The man lit a cigarette, then offered one. Simon took it. His fingers trembled.

“They’ll assume she didn’t know anything,” the man said.

“That’s the point.”

“And you?”

Simon shrugged. “I’m done, anyway.”

He looked smaller now. Not weak—just… spent. Like a book, too often reread.

The man exhaled smoke into the cold, damp air. “You were good at it. Better than most.” The man said.

“I was never that good,” Simon said. “Just faster and lucky.”

One evening they found him near the old railway yard, in a ditch meant for things no one wanted found. A bullet to the head. No wallet. No ID. His face swollen from the cold. In his pocket was a photo, water-stained but intact—a woman in a sunlit garden, holding a small girl who looked like she hadn’t learnt about heartbreak yet.

It took Interpol a week to notify the next of kin.

Catherine got the call in London, in the spare room of a friend’s house with floral wallpaper and no heating. She hung up, but didn’t cry right away. When it finally came, it was quiet. Days of it. Salt on her pillow, silence in her throat.

And still… something didn’t sit right.

There’d been a look. A hesitation. A softness under the cruelty. She replayed his words a hundred times. Every syllable. Every angle.

Eventually, she saw it. The shape behind the lie. The truth he couldn’t say outright.

He hadn’t abandoned her. He’d saved her.

But at a cost.

She would never forgive him.

But she would understand.

One day.