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In the car I sit beside him in silence. OB6 is either in that room tonight or one degree removed from it. I’m going to spend the next two hours looking at five powerful men and trying to find which one of them has been running my father like a piece on a board.

The DeLuca estate is old stone and old money, a building that has held too many difficult conversations to be unsettled by one more. Lorenzo meets us in the hallway, hand extended.

“Volkov,” he says, then turns to me with a warm smile. “Evelina. I did not expect you, but I am glad you came.”

“Thank you for having me,” I say.

He holds my hand a beat longer than a greeting requires before leading us into the house.

The other kings are already in the room. Adrianos rises when I enter, his cologne arriving a step before he does. He takes my hand and brings it to his lips, his eyes on mine over my knuckles. “Mrs. Nazarov,” he says. “You look well.”

“As do you,” I say. “Manhattan suits you.”

“Everything suits me,” he says, and the self-awareness in it is so complete it stops being arrogant and becomes almost charming. Almost.

Santiago doesn’t stand. He’s at the far end of the table, arms crossed, jaw already set, his eyes moving between Volkov and me, working out whether my presence changes anything for him. He settles on a tight nod. I nod back and take my seat beside Volkov.

Declan is in the corner with a beer already open, his eyes moving across the room in a sweep that has nothing relaxed about it despite the drink in his hand. He raises the bottle at me by way of greeting, and I raise my chin back, and that’s the entirety of our exchange, which feels right for both of us.

The tension in the room is already doing its work before anyone speaks. Santiago has his eyes on Adrianos, jaw tight, already holding his argument behind his teeth and waiting for the opening to deliver it. Adrianos has his charm running at a frequency that reads, to anyone paying close attention, as a man working to appear unbothered. Lorenzo sits at the head of the table with his jaw set and his coffee untouched, having already decided this meeting will go well through force of will alone, and I wouldn’t bet against him.

Declan drinks his beer and watches all of it.

The door opens before Lorenzo can start. Valeria comes in with a tray, small and silver-haired, moving through the room with the ease of decades spent managing men like these and finding it unremarkable. She knows what everyone drinks. Coffee for Lorenzo, who accepts it with genuine warmth. Tequila for Santiago, which makes him blink and then, almost imperceptibly, unclench one shoulder. Another beer for Declan, taken without his eyes leaving the room. Vodka for Volkov. Wine for Adrianos, for Lorenzo, and a glass set in front of me that I didn’t request and that I accept because she placed it there without hesitation, already certain of what I’d want before I’d thought about it myself.

“Valeria,” Lorenzo says. “Thank you.”

She pats his hand, settled into his space after years of proximity, then sweeps her eyes across the table with the fond exasperation of a grandmother watching her family head straight for an argument she’s refereed a hundred times before.

“You are all very serious tonight,” she says, in accented English that softens the observation. Then she turns to me, direct. “You are the only sensible one at this table. Tell them not to argue.”

I look at the room. Santiago is staring at his tequila. Declan has something in his expression that might develop into amusement under different circumstances. Adrianos watches me with open interest.

“Gentlemen,” I say. “Don’t argue.”

Valeria nods, satisfied, rests her hand briefly on Volkov’s shoulder, and walks out. The door closes behind her.

The room shifts. Nothing resolves, but the hardest edges of the tension pull back half an inch, and everyone picks up their drinks and breathes. I’ve watched Volkov’s men do the same when he walks into a room. It turns out the effect works in reverse too, when a small silver-haired woman walks out of one.

Lorenzo sets his coffee down. “Santiago. Tell us what you found.”

Santiago tells us what he found, and he’s more controlled than I’d braced for, laying out the shell trace without the heat I’d spent the drive over preparing to manage. The terminal director, the board connection inside Adrianos’s network, the timing against the wolf-crown murder scenes, all of it delivered clean and in order. He’s presenting it like a legal brief, and I revise my read of him upward by two notches, because whatever I expected from a man who walks into rooms already looking for a fight, it wasn’t this.

Adrianos listens with his hands loose on the table and his face open. When Santiago finishes, Adrianos picks up his wine.

“The director you’ve identified resigned fourteen months ago,” he says. “The connection between his board position and the shell company was built after he left, using his name and his history.” He sets the glass down. “I have three weeks of documentation. Lorenzo will have everything before the week ends.”

“Very convenient,” Santiago says.

“Accurate,” Adrianos says. “I understand what the picture looks like. I’m asking you to look at what’s underneath it before you decide what it means.”

“I’ve been digging for two years,” Santiago says, the heat bleeding in now. “Your people crawl into my western routes and call it business. Your money shows up in places it’s got no right being, and nobody at this table says a goddamn word because you’re charming and you buy good wine and everybody wants to be the one you’re laughing with.” He puts his elbows on the table, jaw forward. “I’m not laughing, Adrianos. The Crown’s got two bodies and your name on the wall above them.”

The room goes quiet.

Adrianos doesn’t move. His wine glass stays where he set it, his hands stay loose, and his face stays open. He lets the silence run two full seconds.

“I didn’t build that wall,” he says.