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He’s watching me when I turn around, pants back up, shirt still open, elbows on the table. He picks up his coffee, finds it cold, puts it down.

“You should take some time off from all this,” he says.

“I have work to do,” I say.

“It’ll keep,” he says.

I pick up my notepad and my laptop. I walk to the door and stop with my hand on the frame.

“My father would have hated you,” I say, without turning around. “He’d have read you in thirty seconds and hated every single thing about you.” I pause. “He also would have respected the fact that you said it. He was fair like that, even about people he hated.”

I walk out before he can answer, up the stairs, and I sit at the desk, open the drive, and stare at the contact number string. My body is still warm from him, but my father is still cold because of him.

20

Volkov

Evelina’s already asleep when I come upstairs.

On her side, facing the window, one hand flat under her cheek, hair loose, face doing nothing. I stand in the doorway longer than I should and then change quietly, get into bed, and stare at the ceiling.

I lie there for twenty minutes running the ambush file through my head, which is what I do when I can’t sleep, except tonight it keeps getting interrupted by the sound of her voice saying he was fair like that, even about people he hated, and I don’t know what the fuck to do with that so I go back to the ambush file and the ambush file keeps not sticking.

Evelina shifts in her sleep. Her shoulder drops, and her face turns slightly toward me. I’m watching her before I’ve decided to do it, which is becoming a habit I haven’t figured out how to break. Berezin’s daughter. My wife. The woman who walked into my compound weeks ago with a legal proposal, a hidden drive, and a plan she still hasn’t finished running, and I let her in because I needed what she had. And now she’s in my bed, and I said what I said at the breakfast table, and she told me her father would have respected me for it. I’ve been turning that over for three hours without getting anywhere useful with it.

Lavro would’ve had another one-sentence of his. He’d have waited until I thought he was done and then said the thing that cut straight through, and I’d have told him to shut up, but he’d have been right anyway. The room is quiet, and there’s no sentence coming. I get up, get dressed in the dark, and go downstairs.

Marka picks up on the second ring.

“Talk,” I say.

“You should probably come in for this conversation.”

“Tell me now.”

“The wolf-crown symbol,” he says. “Both murder scenes. We traced the printing source. Supplier in Queens, cash transaction, six weeks ago.” A pause. “The supplier’s account received a wire two days before the job. We pulled it back through three shells.”

“Where does it land?”

“Athens,” he says. “Holding company, two directors. One of them sits on the board of a subsidiary inside Adrianos’s financial network.”

I stand in the kitchen and say nothing.

“Greek money,” Marka says. “On paper.”

“On paper,” I say. “Evelina and I were thinking something similar, but it’s too obvious. Too easy.”

“It’s clean enough to hold up to two looks,” he says. “Santiago’s already pulling threads on the symbol. Declan’s gone quiet since his cousin’s kid, and quiet Declan is working Declan. They’ll both end up at the same shell trace inside a week if they didn’t already. Probably less if they talk.”

“Does Adrianos know?”

“Not from us. His own people will find it, but they’ll find it after Santiago does at this rate.” He stops. “Someone built this to break the alliance along the Greek line. Santiago already thinks Adrianos is moving into his territory. Declan doesn’t trust anyone who smiles that much, you said so yourself. Whoever put this together knows exactly how both of them think.”

“They’re inside,” I say. “Not adjacent. Inside. You don’t read Santiago and Declan that well from the outside.”

“Da,” Marka says. “That’s the problem.”

I go to the window and look at the skyline. “Can we kill the shell trace before it surfaces?”