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He answers on the first ring, the way he always does when he knows the call is coming.

“The Marchetti faction made direct contact,” I say. “They want the northern routes in exchange for leaving her alone. I refused.”

“Understood.”

“I want a full operational plan on my desk in seventy-two hours. Every asset, every position, every weakness in their structure, we can exploit. We’re done playing defense.”

A brief pause on Roman’s end, the kind that means he’s recalibrating everything he was planning to do this week.

“Seventy-two hours,” he confirms.

I end the call. Look at Celine, standing in my office with the city dark behind her, carrying my child inside a danger neither of us asked for, and something settles in me that has nothing to do with strategy.

“It ends soon,” I tell her. “One way or another.”

“Promise me something,” she says.

“What?”

“That when it does end, you tell me how. Not after. You tell me while it’s happening.”

I look at her for a long moment.

“Yes,” I say.

I mean it.

29

CELINE

Alexei callsmy desk at eleven.

“The amendment language needs the original incorporation records,” he says. “Before digitization, nineteen ninety-one structure. They’ll be in the archive cabinet in Zane’s office, third drawer if memory serves. I need them confirmed against the new clause before I send anything to print.”

“I’ll get them this afternoon.”

“Today, if you can. The printer needs forty-eight hours.”

I tell him today works. I hang up and finish the email I’m writing, and at two o’clock I walk down the corridor to Zane’s office, which is empty; he’s on a call two floors down, and I let myself in with the key Roman gave me weeks ago for exactly this kind of errand.

The third drawer sticks, as it always does. I have to pull it twice before it gives.

The incorporation records are right where Alexei said they’d be, a thin folder near the front, tabbed in his own handwriting.

I pull it out. Behind it, pushed back further than the rest, is a second folder. No label on the spine. Just a date written in pencil in the corner, eight months before the job posting for Volkov Holdings ever existed.

I should put the drawer back. I have what I came for.

I open it instead.

Four pages.

The first page is a summary sheet, my name typed at the top, and a compilation date that confirms what the pencil mark already told me. Below that, a list of prior employers, dates, and titles I gave during my interview, almost word-for-word, except that this document predates that interview by months.

The second page is financial. Account numbers I don’t recognize as having been shared with anyone, a single line item that makes my stomach drop before my mind catches up to why.Outstanding medical balance, L. Varas, $—.The exact figure from that month, the one I did the math on twice every morning because I couldn’t believe it was real.

The third page is Lena. Diagnosis date. Treatment center. A note in the margin, not typed, handwritten, three words.Stable income required.