Page 37

Buried deeper in the same layer, past the transfer threads, there’s a communication log. Fragmented, some of it corrupted, but enough intact to read. An exchange between my father and a contact identified only by a string of numbers I haven’t cracked yet. The dates run over several months, the content mostly coded, references to meetings and handoffs I recognize from the other layers.

Then one entry stops me.

A date. A location. A reference to a meeting with some faction called Sadalsky that my father confirmed as viable, arranged, and passed upward to the numbered contact. Three weeks before the ambush in which I found out Volkov’s brother was killed.

I read it three times. Then a fourth, because I need to be certain I’m reading it correctly and not building something out of wishful misreading.

I’m reading it correctly.

My father didn’t just launder money for whoever was running this. Volkov was right. My father sourced the venue and confirmed the location. He was the logistics for the ambush that killed Volkov’s brother, and the communication log in front of me is the record of him doing it knowingly.

Volkov put a bullet in him for it. Based on everything in this file, Volkov was right too.

I sit back in the chair and look at the ceiling.

This is the part where I should feel something uncomplicated. Grief, or fury, or the clean certainty of a verdict delivered. What I feel instead is a mess I don’t know how to process and sort, which is new for me because I’ve always been able to organize my feelings into something workable. Right now they’re sitting in my chest all at once, the love I had for him and the facts on the screen and the specific damage of finding out that the man who called every Sunday at ten was capable of something like this.

I don’t cry. I put all of it in the drawer where I put everything I’m not dealing with tonight, and I go back to the files.

The thing I keep turning over is the numbered contact. My father was the logistics, the venue, the cover. But the communication log is one-directional: him confirming, reporting, and waiting for the next instruction. He wasn’t directing this. Someone above him in the chain made the decisions, and my father carried them out, and that someone is still unidentified and still out there.

I’m certain that Volkov has been looking for that name since the night his brother died. I’ve been working toward it from a completely different direction for different reasons, and without me realizing, we’ve both been circling the same gap in the record.

I close the transfer thread and open the contact log again. The numbered contact gave my father instructions for three years. Nothing in the files points toward Bratva or Crown, or at least not in any way I can confirm yet. I don’t have nearly enough information on the Crown yet to be able to confidently say they weren’t a part of the conspiracy. But whatever and whoever they are, they’ve been running operations through my father for a long time.

I wonder how long is long. Was my father a part of the new or the old order? Could he be connected to other deaths?

Old Bratva, Volkov said. Pre-Crown. Forty, fifty years back.

I think about the wolf-crown symbol and the financial operator who died with it above his body, and the routing in my father’s files, and whether these threads actually connect or whether I’m pattern-matching because I need there to be a pattern. I’ve practiced enough law to know the difference between evidence and wishful inference. What I have right now is a strong pattern and a numbered contact I can’t crack yet. I’m going to keep pulling on it because I have nothing else and because my father is dead and I am sleeping every night, sharing the bed with the man who killed him. I need this to lead somewhere real.

I save everything and close the drive.

My father helped arrange the ambush that killed Lavro Nazarov. Volkov killed my father for it. Both facts are true, but neither one gives me the name of the person who issued the order, which is the only thing that matters now, because whoever that is has been running this for a long time and my father was not the first piece they moved and probably isn’t the last.

I put the computer away and get into bed. I lie on my side facing the wall, and I hear him on the stairs maybe twenty minutes later, his footsteps the same pattern they always are. He gets in on his side without a word and doesn’t touch me.

His body heat reaches me from a foot away, and I’m aware of it the way I’m always aware of it now, a physical fact I’ve stopped being able to ignore even when I want to, which I do want to, very much, especially tonight. I keep my eyes on the wall and think about my father, which is what I owe him.

The thing that won’t leave me alone is that my father knew what that meeting was for. He confirmed the location and passed it up the chain, and then three weeks later Lavro Nazarov was dead, and somewhere in that sequence is the truth about who my father actually was, not the man I knew on Sundays and in Chicago, but the man who spent three years taking instructions from someone dangerous and never told me any of it.

Maybe he was protecting me. That’s the version I keep building because it’s the only one I can carry. Maybe he kept me out of it because he could see exactly how it ended and he wanted me somewhere else when it did. Or maybe he just made choices I’ll never fully understand and decided I didn’t need to know, and the distance I always thought was love was actually just distance.

I don’t know which version is true. I’m not sure I’ll ever know.

I don’t sleep for a long time. When I finally do, I dream about my father’s hands flat on a chessboard, waiting for me to move, but I can’t see his face.

16

Volkov

“Berezin was skimming,” Marka says, and puts the folder on the table.

“How much?”

“Four hundred thousand over two years. Pulled sideways through shell routing before the main transfers completed. Small amounts, nothing that flags a standard sweep. Our analysts only caught it because I told them to look for irregularities specifically.”

“What made you tell them that?”