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“We charge in there tonight and she dies tonight,” I answer, unflinching. “So we don’t do it like that.”

“This is all your fault,” Maksim shouts again, and this time I have no answer for him, because he’s right. She was taken as leverage against me, and against nothing else, as dispensable to them as a spent casing.

I curse under my breath as my old pinky starts throbbing, the way it always does before something ugly. I force every feeling I have down beneath the surface, past the pressure climbing up my spine, because only a plan gets her out of that building alive, and grief has never once saved anyone.

Yuri sets up the satellite imagery on the wide screen, the abandoned factory rendered in cold, ethereal gray light. There is a river running along the east side, a highway to the west, and an old rail line curving in from the north.

“Power to the building is cut,” Yuri reports. “Igor’s people are already inside, confirmed, and they have backup on the road. At least three cars went in through the south gate, and none have come back out.”

Igor’s involvement doesn’t surprise me in the slightest; the old racketeer has never stayed out of a fight Yelena started. Whatever his daughter does, he backs it, because to that man she is the one precious thing left in the world.

“Eight men, maybe more,” Yuri goes on. “That is what I can count from the heat, and I would plan for more.”

Maksim grabs his coat off the chair and pivots toward the door.

Yuri steps in front of the door, blocking it with his whole frame. Maksim demands he move, then outright implores him.

“She is not waiting for the man who loves her,” I interrupt. “She is waiting for the one who can actually get her out of there alive. That is not you.”

The air in the room freezes solid. Something dark flickers there, in my brother’s eyes.

“You bastard,” Maksim spits, low. “You chose Yelena at sea. You swam past her. And now you stand here drawing your little diagrams while she bleeds in a chair.”

“Hate me all you want once she’s safe, and I’ll let that slide,” I say, and I walk right up to him. “Tonight, you do what keeps her breathing.”

Maksim tries to push past Yuri, and Yuri has him pinned to the wall with an ease that says he could do it in his sleep. Maksim strains and squirms against the hold and cannot break it.

“Calm down. Yuri went easy on you,” I tell him, though I’m nowhere near calm myself.

Maksim roars back something wordless and furious, petulant as a boy.

“One wrong move out there kills Delaney and the baby both,” I say. “So stop indulging every wayward impulse that runs through you. This is not about what makes you feel like you are helping.”

Maksim goes rigid all at once, and then the fight drains out of him, his shoulders caving, and he stops struggling. Yuri releases him. “What is the plan?” Maksim asks, hoarse.

I turn the tablet toward the two of them.

“They demanded I come alone, so I come alone,” I say. “Yuri, your first team moves up the rail line through the drainage ditches, here. Slow and dark.”

I drag my finger down to the water. “Second team along the river, holding for my signal. No signal, or the first gunshot, whichever comes first, means you move immediately.”

“I’m going in with you,” Maksim says.

“You are not,” I say. “You are a slicked-up suit running numbers. You have no combat experience at all, none. You have never held a gun in a room where people shoot back, and you will get her killed and yourself with her.”

I look at Yuri. “He stays with you. If he goes rogue, if he tries to run at that building, knock him out and leave him in the car.”

“I will knock him out,” Yuri deadpans.

Maksim’s eyes waver, running through angles that don’t exist, and then he agrees, tremulously.

The car stops two blocks from the factory, and I let the autumn air bite at my skin. Yuri checks the comms one last time, and then he and Maksim vanish into the dark toward the water.

I drive the rest of the way alone. A guard in a high-vis vest steps into my headlights and signals me to stop, the muzzle of his rifle catching the light.

They search the car, and then the two men box me in and search me, thorough and unhurried, hands checking every seam and lining. When they find nothing, they wave me through.

The main door of the building closes behind me with a heavy sound. The only way out now is through, and the air inside reeks of rust and old grease.