Page 4

My father deserves better than that. He deserves rage, not strategy. He deserves someone who would burn the whole thing down out of grief rather than build a case from inside it. But he also raised me to be practical, and the practical truth is that burning things down gets you killed, and I am not going to get killed before I find out the whole truth of what happened to him.

There’s no burial. The casket will be cremated. No grave, no marker, nowhere to go and stand and say this is where he is. They took him, and then they took that too, the concrete fact of him. I swallow it down with everything else, because that’s how I function, and grief doesn’t change the machinery, it just runs dirtier for a while.

The church empties. I stand in the quiet with the casket and the flower arrangements and the light coming through the high windows. I let myself have one breath that isn’t performance. Just one. Then I take my phone out.

The number took me two days to find. Not Volkov’s direct line, I’m not an idiot, but a channel that will reach someone who will reach someone who will reach him. I found it one thread at a time, through four degrees of separation, leaving no trace. I don’t know what these people do with a request like mine. I’m about to find out.

You could still leave, the part of me that isn’t angry says. You could still get on a plane and never say his name again.

That would probably be the smarter choice. But I’m not going anywhere.

My father told me the best position in any negotiation is the one your opponent doesn’t see coming. They’ll expect grief. Desperation. A woman with nothing who’s trying to beg for whatever scraps she can get. What I’m going to offer is something else entirely, and I’ve spent three weeks making sure it’s something a man like Volkov Nazarov won’t be able to refuse, because a man like Volkov Nazarov, from everything I’ve read, responds to one thing and one thing only.

Leverage.

I press call. It rings twice.

“I’m requesting an audience with Volkov Nazarov,” I say. “Tell him Konstantin Berezin’s daughter has a proposal. Tell him it concerns the stability of his seat on the Crown, and tell him it’s worth his time.”

I hang up before they can respond. Let them come to me with the logistics. Starting as I mean to go on.

I stand on the steps for a moment and breathe cold air and let myself feel the full weight of it, just here, just for this second, where no one is watching.

My father is dead. The man who killed him is going to let me walk into his house, because I’m going to give him a reason to. He took everything from me, and he doesn’t even know my name yet.

I flag a cab. There’s work to do.

2

Volkov

The man’s been crying for ten minutes, and it’s starting to piss me off.

Not the crying itself. I’ve seen grown men weep, beg, piss themselves in this room, and none of it does anything to me. What pisses me off is the noise. The grating noise of a man who thought he was smarter than me finding out he wasn’t, and falling apart about it instead of just taking what’s coming.

“Tri million,” he says, three million, like saying it in Russian makes it smaller. His wrists are zip-tied behind his back, and his nose is still leaking from where Marka put it into the table twenty minutes ago. “I was going to put it back. I just needed more time.”

I crouch down in front of him. Not because I need to get closer, I can hear him fine, but because I want him to look at my face from down there. I want him to feel what it is to kneel in front of the man he thought he was stealing from.

“Eight months,” I say. “You’ve had eight months, Pavel. That’s not a time problem. That’s a you problem.”

His mouth opens. I stand up before he can use it.

“Break both hands,” I tell Marka. “He keeps the fingers. He’s got a kid in school, and I’m not here to blow up the whole family over three million dollars that’s already back in reserves.” I pick my jacket up off the chair. “But if the accounts aren’t clean by Friday, we come back, and we finish it.”

Pavel starts crying harder. I walk out.

The waterfront hits me the second I push through the door, cold and salty off the water, diesel underneath it. Brooklyn at ten in the morning is the same grey it always is, ugly in a way that stopped bothering me a long time ago because I’m already used to it. I light a cigarette and stand with my back to the building and smoke half of it while the sounds on the other side of the wall do what they need to do.

Lavro used to hate this part. Not the decisions, not even the mess of it, just the noise. He’d come out here with me after, and we’d stand exactly like this, both smoking, water in front of us, and he’d say something that cut right through whatever shit the morning had been. One sentence. That was all he ever needed. He’s been dead for six weeks, and I have to start the day over from that point, which is not a great way to start a day. I haven’t worked out how to get through the mornings without that one sentence and I’ve stopped pretending I’m going to.

I grind the cigarette out when Marka comes through the door.

“He’ll have it by Thursday,” Marka says. “His wife runs the books. He’s more scared of her than of us.”

“Should’ve thought about that before he put his hand in my pocket.” I turn back toward the building. “What else?”

Marka pulls out his phone and holds it out. “This message came through the Yegorov channel an hour ago.”