Page 53

But if he’s a lion, I’m the goddamn dragon, and I’ll burn him to a fucking crisp. For now, I’ve got to bide my time. I let my head loll, grinning at him with red teeth. “What fun would that be?”

Once more, his first catches me across the jaw. My skull snaps sideways and the room sloshes on its axis. Worth it. Because that’s the tell under the tell: a man only asks what’s bait once he’s already choked on some. They’ve spent a year buying us through this sad sack and his leash, and somewhere in that pile is the rot we planted on purpose, and they can’t tell which piece it is, and the not-knowing is eating them from the inside. I couldn’t have found that fear with a year of files.

Ray just handed it to me for the price of a split lip.

Here’s the part he’ll never get, though—the part that’s funnier than anything I whack him with: the truth is uglier than my silences. The truth is we never had a goddamn clue who any of you were. Not even a face to try to pin a name to. We salted the well of information because we were blind and it was the only move left, and it caught precisely no one. So when I rasp, “We’re closer than you’ll ever sleep through again, pal,” I’m lying through every loose tooth in my head.

He’s relentless. And I can’t decide if it’s because he is, or he’s that desperate. If someone has him this fucking terrified.

But I can take it.

He runs out of breath, or nerve, or maybe just vodka, eventually. He’s never getting more from me. I don’t get a shot to be smug about him giving in first, especially without my hands.

The door at the far end of the room opens.

Another man steps through it, and Ray heaves up out of the chair to make room like he’s clocking off a shift.

I take the second man in before I take in his face. He’s a reedy looking one, like a grasshopper turned into a young man. I’ve got the worst feeling that I already know him. Like his name is stuck behind my teeth that won’t come loose. I know this man. From a file, a hallway, some grainy frame I scrubbed through at three in the morning. A year I’ve spent with both families’ faces fanned across my table, and I cannot put a name to this one, and the failing to is its own small, sour wound—because knowing our people is the whole of what I’m for.

He drags a crate over with his boot and sits, unhurried, like a man with a train to catch and time to kill before it.

“My name is Oleg Sharapov,” he says. “I belong to the Zakharovs.” A beat, dry as a struck match. “Or I did.”

And the name behind my teeth comes loose all wrong. The ghost I’ve chased across two cities for a year —through dead numbers and burned routes and my own men curdling with suspicion —has a face after all, and it’s sitting four feet from me on an upturned crate, looking like the least remarkable man alive.

“You,” I get out. My voice is wrecked. “It’s been you. The whole fucking time.”

He doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t gloat, either, which is worse. Just tips his head, conceding it like it cost him nothing.

“You don’t know me.” Bitter, and dead certain of it. “I watched you try. Your little files, your interviews. You looked straight through me more than once.” Almost a smile. “Don’t take it hard. You were never built to see a man like me.”

“By all means,” I rasp, “keep monologuing. My brothers do love a head start.”

“Let me ask you something first.” He folds his hands between his knees. His eyes are tired in a way sleep doesn’t touch. “Do you remember every person you’ve ever killed?”

I don’t answer.

I don’t have to. He reads it off me clean, because the honest answer is no. They blur. After enough years they’re a single grey front at the back of a man, a pressure you stop feeling because it never lifts. I couldn’t give you their names. I’ve never once called that a flaw. It’s mercy. It’s how you keep walking upright.

“No,” he says, soft, supplying it for me. “Neither does Anton Zakharov.” The name comes out like something gone off in his mouth. “He doesn’t keep a list either. They blur for him too. You’ve got that much in common with the Pakhan.”

“If you dragged me down here to make me weep for Anton, you wasted a kidnapping.”

“I don’t want you to weep for him. I want you to do the math.” Something moves under the flat of him. “There was a man called Kuznetsov.”

The name is nothing to me. Of course it’s nothing. And he watches it be nothing, and I watch what that costs him.

“Why would it land.” Barely a question. “He was nobody to you. An enforcer, South Boston routes, before your families crawled into the same bed.” He turns the crate a quarter-inch beneath him, restless. “And I’ll say it plain, because I won’t make a saint of a dead man —he stole. Six months of skimming, never more than a grand at a go. Cards. He owed the Italians, and he was a coward about the hole he’d dug, and he thought a family that size could hide one frightened man inside it.”

“Couldn’t,” I say. “Let me guess.”

“It couldn’t.” His jaw works. “Anastasia’s people caught it. Viktor laid the books on the table. And Anton gave him a trial —sat at the head like a king, heard it out, named the sentence.” The acid sharpens. “And then he didn’t pass it down the chain the way it’s done. He walked Kuznetsov into the alley behind Sullivan’s himself, and put the gun to the back of the man’s skull himself, so every soldier in that room would carry the story home for him. For a grand. For cards and a grand and the stupidity of thinking he mattered.” His voice drops, gentle, which is the worst it’s been all night. “He pulled me up out of the dirt when no one else would look at me twice. The only man in that whole rotten house who ever taught me a thing that wasn’t how to die quiet.”

I keep my mouth shut. Not from mercy. Because I can see where this walks, and there’s no firm ground waiting at the end of it.

“Now set him beside the Pakhan’s own brother.” Sharapov spreads his hands, an awful, reasonable gesture. “Viktor Zakharov spent two years building a second empire behind Anton’s back. Ports, routes, a throne in New York his own Pakhan knew nothing about. Treason, by every law your families keep. And then he stole your sister and married her. Your bitch sister, the enemy’s blood, a bow on the whole betrayal.”

“Careful,” I grind out.