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“A number string I haven’t cracked yet. The log is one-directional, my father’s side only. Either the contact’s replies were deleted, or they were never stored on the drive.” I pause. “Which means someone was controlling what got kept.”

He sits back. “Or Berezin was.”

“My father was careful,” I say. “The skimming proves that. But careful and controlled aren’t mutually exclusive, and whoever built that shell structure had access to methods my father didn’t develop on his own.” I hold his gaze. “So yes. Possibly both.”

Volkov pulls a second folder across the desk, opens it to a page of dates and transaction amounts, and sets it beside my laptop. I take the invitation without comment and start cross-referencing.

Ten minutes of quiet. The matches stack up faster than I want them to. Eleven pulls that align within forty-eight hours of confirmed Bratva operational activity in the same period. My father was timing the skimming to larger fund movements, using the noise to cover the drain. Patient work, and it tells me something about him I’ve been circling since I first found it.

“He understood the operation well enough to hide inside it,” I say.

“Da,” Volkov says. Just that.

It doesn’t come out as an accusation. It comes out flat, which is somehow harder to absorb than anger would be. I go back to the dates.

The communication thread is the part that’s been keeping me up.

I’ve spent the better part of the last three days cross-referencing the contact’s instruction dates against Crown meeting records I pulled from a legal database during my first week in this house. I’ve checked it four times because I didn’t want to be right.

I set my pen down and push my notepad across the desk. “The instructions to my father. I tracked them against Crown meeting dates.” I tap the columns, date against date, margin notes in my own shorthand. “Twelve out of fourteen instructions follow a Crown gathering by seventy-two hours or less.”

Volkov stares at the notepad. His eyes move down the columns and what crosses his face isn’t confusion, it’s recognition, and that’s worse.

“Inside the room,” he says.

“Someone who leaves those meetings and within three days issues instructions that need a logistics man, a shell network, and a confirmed venue,” I say. “I can’t give you a name. The files don’t produce one, and I won’t speculate past what’s there. But the pattern doesn’t point outward.”

He stands and walks to the window.

The silence runs long enough that I hear the security rotation change outside, boots on gravel, muffled voices. I look at the documents spread across the desk and think about my father sitting with his hands flat on a chessboard, thinking ahead, and how none of it was enough.

“It could be coincidence,” Volkov says, at the window. “Crown meetings happen often.”

“Twelve out of fourteen isn’t coincidence,” I say. “That’s a pattern with two anomalies, and the anomalies are worth examining separately to understand why the timing broke in those two cases.”

He turns. “Which two?”

I check my notes. “One instruction came six days after a Crown meeting rather than three. The other came four days before one.” I tap the relevant line. “The early instruction interests me more. Someone issued an order before a Crown gathering, which means either they had advance knowledge of what would be decided in that meeting, or the meeting was called in response to something they’d already set in motion.”

He comes back to the desk, stands over the spread with his hands flat on the surface. “The first wolf-crown victim. Twenty-two, Declan’s cousin’s kid. When was he found relative to the last Crown meeting before it?”

I pull up my notes on the murders. “Five days after.”

“The financial operator. Second victim.”

“Three days after the following meeting.” I tap the page. “Which fits.”

“So whoever’s doing the killings is connected to whoever was running Berezin,” he says.

“Or they’re both downstream of the same person,” I say. “The killings and the financial operation don’t have to be the same hand. Two separate executors, one instruction source.”

He pulls out the chair and sits down properly for the first time since I walked in.

“Walk me through the skimmed money,” he says. “Where does it go after the terminal accounts?”

“That’s what I haven’t fully traced yet,” I say. “The terminal accounts are clean shells, nothing registered to any name in any database I can access. The money goes in, and the trail ends.” I open a new page in my notepad. “But the shells were registered in a three-month window six years ago, all at once. Someone built the infrastructure before they needed it.”

“Six years ago,” he says. “Before the skimming started.”