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“The timing,” she says, without looking up. “Someone knew the exact window.”

“Forty-five minutes in,” I say. “We were booked for two hours. They came through the door when we were settled, weapons down, heads on the table. Not at the start when we’d still be sharp, not at the end when we’d be wrapping up. Exactly when we’d stopped watching the door.”

She sets the page down. “My father knew the venue, but who knew the agenda?”

“Sadalsky’s and our side. The Sadalsky men who died in that room rule their people out as the source. You don’t send your own men into a room you’ve already burned.”

“So the leak wasn’t Sadalsky,” she says.

“No.”

She moves to the next section without being told to. Security footage, time-stamped, two cameras that survived. I watch her cross-reference against the witness accounts, making small marks in her notepad, and she does it fast without asking me to explain the filing system.

“The men who came through the door,” she says. “You identified them?”

“Four of them. Took three weeks.” I turn to the photographs, all four with lines through their names. “Freelancers. No permanent faction, hired single-job, paid through an intermediary account that dissolved the week after the ambush. Clean in, clean out, no trail back.”

“The intermediary account routing,” she says. “Do you have it?”

I pull the page and hand it across. She looks at it for thirty seconds, then pulls her notepad closer and starts writing. Then she taps the page. “Same terminal logic as the shells in my father’s files. Not identical, but built from the same method.”

“Da,” I say. “I know.”

“Two different operators working from the same source,” she says. “The ambush account was built fast, single use. My father’s shells were built to last. Same instructor, different students.”

I look at the routing page and think about the men I put in the ground in the weeks after the ambush. Every one of them freelancers, every one hired through the same dissolving intermediary, none of them knowing who sat above the layer they could see. I was thorough. I went through every thread until it ended and I put a bullet in everything at the end of it.

Wrong man. The thought sits there flat and ugly, and I leave it there.

“Walk me through the night,” she says.

I look at her.

“The events,” she says. “Not what you felt. Who called the meeting, who confirmed the location, who set the time, in order.”

“Sadalsky’s people reached out through a neutral channel,” I say. “Said they wanted to talk about the eastern border, said it needed to be face to face. We pushed back on their proposed venue, said we’d source our own. They pushed back, said neutral ground, proposed your father as the independent broker. Both sides had used him before. Three years without a problem.” I stop. “We agreed.”

“Sadalsky’s side proposed my father specifically?” she asks.

“Da.”

She writes it down. Her pen doesn’t shake. “Which means whoever directed my father also had reach inside Sadalsky’s operation, or had someone there who could make the suggestion without it seeming forced.” She doesn’t look up. “My father didn’t volunteer for this. He was placed.”

“The men I went through afterward,” I say. “The ones who moved the money and sourced the freelancers. Every one of them had a ceiling they couldn’t see past. I pushed hard. None of them broke, because none of them knew anything worth breaking for.” I look at the folder. “The ceiling dissolved the same week the intermediary account did.”

“Compartmentalized,” she says. “Not the way muscle compartmentalizes. The way an institution does. Someone built this for the long run, not for one job.” She’s already moving to the next thread before I’ve finished the thought. “They wanted the ambush done and the structure gone before anyone came looking. Same person who handed my father a fifteen-year-old method and three years of instructions.”

“They’ve been running this a long time,” I say.

“Then the ambush wasn’t the main event,” she says. “It was a move. Something in the Crown needed Lavro dead, or needed you dead or destabilized, or needed the Bratva seat distracted enough to miss what came next. Which was it?”

Nobody has ever put that question to me directly. My men don’t ask questions like that. She’s sitting across a breakfast table asking me why my brother had to die like she’s deposing a witness, and the fury comes up fast and hot, but I swallow it because she’s right to ask and I don’t have the answer.

“I don’t know yet,” I say.

She nods and moves on. “The Crown inner circle. Meeting schedules, security arrangements, the movement of the kings. Whoever hit that forty-five-minute window had that information from inside the room.”

“Which means they were in those rooms,” I say. “Or close enough to someone who was.”