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“Maybe,” I say. “Either way, I need to know what she has. Pushing her into a corner gets me nothing. She came in here with a proposal, and she’s still here, which means she needs something from me to get where she’s going. She can’t act on what she’s found alone.”

“And if she won’t talk?”

She’s in this house because she chose to be, and she hasn’t finished what she came to do. She needs me whether she’ll say so or not.

“She’ll talk,” I say. “I just need to give her a reason to.”

Marka picks up the folder. “I’ll keep Dmitri on the inquiry.”

“Do that,” I say. “And pull everything on operations that went quiet or got shut down without explanation over the last twenty years. The edges of all five organizations.”

“That’s a lot of ground,” he says.

“Start tonight,” I say.

He goes. I sit with the empty table and think about the architect still breathing somewhere in this city while I’ve spent eleven weeks pointing at the wrong man. I get up, pour a drink, and go upstairs.

17

Evelina

Volkov comes into the bedroom at half past ten, still in his shirt from the day, and he doesn’t say anything for a moment. Just stands in the doorway looking at my closed laptop, the desk, and me sitting in front of it with my hands folded like I’ve been doing nothing more interesting than reading.

“My office. Bring the drive,” he says. “Don’t insult me by pretending you don’t have it.”

He walks back out.

I sit with that for three full seconds. He’s known since before I arrived, probably, or figured it out inside the first week, and he’s let me work in his house for three weeks without saying a word. The only reason a man like him does that is because he needed me to get further along than his own people could. I’ve been useful. That’s why I’m still here with the drive intact instead of handing it over at gunpoint on day two.

It doesn’t make me feel better about any of it. It makes me feel like a chess piece that moved itself into exactly the square he needed, which is an irritating conclusion I set aside because I have a decision to make. I pull up the files I’m willing to show him on the laptop, grab my notepad from the desk drawer, and leave the drive exactly where it is. Then I go downstairs.

His office is at the end of the east hallway, a room I’ve walked past a dozen times without being invited into. The desk is large, old wood, covered in folders open at pages that matter, a legal pad with handwritten columns in Cyrillic, two empty coffee cups that tell me he’s been here since before he came upstairs to find me. I pull the chair across from him, put my back to the wall the way I always do in this house, and set my laptop and notepad on the desk.

His eyes go to them, then to my face.

“That’s not the drive,” he says.

“No,” I say. “But it’s what I’m sharing.”

He looks at me for a moment, and I hold it, and then he nods once and pushes the first folder across to me. Not approval. Not argument. Just acceptance, which tells me he expected exactly this and decided it was enough to work with.

The shell company structures hit me on the second page. Four-layer routing, clean terminal gap, the same pattern I’ve been working on pulling apart from. My throat does something I push back down before it reaches my face. My father didn’t design this. He was handed it by someone who’d already been running it for years before he ever touched a dollar of Bratva money. I suspected it, but suspicion is different than proof, and right now, it’s sitting right here in Volkov’s analyst notes like it was always going to end up in front of me.

“Your analysts traced this routing to a DeLuca-adjacent operation,” I say. “Shut down years ago.”

“Before the Crown formed,” he confirms.

“My father’s structure matches it exactly.” I open my laptop, pull up the relevant transfer threads, and turn the screen toward him. “Same four shells, same gap at the end. He didn’t build this from scratch.”

Volkov leans forward, elbows on the desk. He reads fast, eyes moving down the columns without hesitation. His jaw tightens halfway down the first page and stays there.

“How far back do your files go?” he asks.

“Three years of active communication,” I say. “An unidentified contact issuing instructions, my father confirming and executing. The skimming ran alongside it, the transfers timed to Bratva operational noise to cover the lateral pulls. The last confirmed instruction in the log is the venue for the ambush.” I keep my voice even. “After that the thread stops.”

The word ambush sits in the room. Neither of us touches it directly, which is its own kind of acknowledgment.

“The contact,” he says. “Unidentified how?”