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Marka finds me at noon. He’s got the afternoon schedule and the face he makes when the schedule is bad.

“Queens,” he says.

“I know.”

“Supplier.”

“I know about the supplier. I’ve known for two weeks. I was letting him get confident.”

He gives me the look that means he would’ve done it differently but won’t say so. “Lorenzo wants a preliminary read on the wolf-crown inquiry before the formal meeting.”

“Tell him I’m working it,” I say.

“He wants a timeline.”

“Two weeks,” I say. “Tell him two weeks and make sure he buys it. I don’t want him breathing down my neck.”

Marka writes it down. Lorenzo will accept two weeks from me because Lorenzo knows I don’t bullshit him about what I know, and what I know right now is not enough to bring to a Crown meeting without embarrassing both of us.

I spend the afternoon in Queens standing in a room with two men who are too proud to back down in front of their people, and I wait them out. That’s the whole job sometimes. Just being the thing in the room that everyone knows won’t move until it’s done. Lavro was better at the part before this, the part where you make people feel like they chose to back down instead of being made to. He had something in his face I’ve never had, some ease with people that I don’t carry, and it worked faster and left less damage. I’ve got the standing there part. It works. It just takes longer.

Once the situation is under control, I drive back in the dark with Dmitri’s report sitting in my chest like a coal.

Someone outside the organization is asking questions about Berezin’s second layer of accounts. Knows it exists. Doesn’t have what’s in it, or they wouldn’t still be asking. They’re working blind, which is slower and louder. Evelina got out of that apartment with something we’ve all missed, and they’re trying to find it through other means but are coming up short.

Two people working the same problem from opposite ends. My wife from the inside with the actual material, and someone I don’t know yet from the outside with nothing but the knowledge that the material exists.

I don’t know if she knows about them. I don’t know if they know about her. I don’t know if she sent them, which is the thought I can’t rule out and the one I like least, because if she’s running external contacts while running her operation on me from the inside, then I’ve got a bigger problem than I thought and I’ve been letting it sleep in my bed.

I won’t rule it out. That’s the deal I made with myself when I let her in. I knew what she was. I knew she was working an angle, but I let her in anyway. I don’t get to stop being honest about that just because last night went sideways.

I get out of the car and stand outside in the cold. Brooklyn at night, the estate dark except for the bedroom light on the second floor. Lavro liked this neighborhood, said it had the right amount of ugly for people like us. I never agreed with him and never said so, but I’ve been standing outside my own front door most nights for ten weeks, and I’m starting to see his point.

I go inside, but I don’t go up just yet. Instead, I pour a drink downstairs and think about the three things I don’t know yet, the things I need to find out.

The name. The external inquiry. My wife upstairs with the drive. Three things I need to untangle before I move on any of them.

I’m not telling her yet. I want the name first.

15

Evelina

The transfer dates go back further than I expected.

Three hours at the desk, the drive open, the decrypted layer spread across my screen in fragments I’ve been stitching together one string at a time. I cracked the third encryption layer two nights ago and what came through looked like noise at first, long rows of numbers and routing codes and abbreviated company names that meant nothing until I started cross-referencing them against the shell structures I’d already mapped. Then they started meaning something and I wished they hadn’t.

The routing thread I flagged an hour ago runs through four shells before it lands, which is unclear on purpose. What’s different about this thread is the source. The money isn’t coming from outside the Bratva’s network. It’s coming from inside it, routed out through my father’s shells before landing in an account I’ve never seen referenced anywhere else in the files.

My father wasn’t just moving money for someone else. He was taking a cut.

I write that sentence in my notes and look at it for a long time. It doesn’t get smaller.

He was skimming from the Bratva. From Volkov’s operation, from the organization that put a bullet in him when they found out, and apparently doing it for long enough that the thread runs back nearly two years. Small amounts each time, pulled sideways before the main routing completed, small enough that a cursory sweep wouldn’t flag them, large enough that over two years they added up to something real. My father was a careful man, I knew that, but careful in a way I understood as love and am now having to reframe as operational discipline, and those two things are not the same.

I get up and stand at the window. Brooklyn at night, the estate quiet, a light on downstairs that means Volkov is still there. I let myself feel the full weight of what I just read for exactly as long as it takes to breathe in and out twice, and then I go back to the desk because the alternative is to keep feeling it and I have more to get through.

There’s more.