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That one lands differently than Marka intends it. If Berezin’s daughter has half a brain and any information about what her father was involved in, she knows I’m the one who ordered his execution. She knows what I did. And she’s walking in anyway. Either she’s got no survival instinct at all, or she’s got something solid enough that she thinks it protects her.

Either way, I want to know what it is.

“She’s not.” I move to the door. “Get me everything before Thursday. Who she’s talked to, where she’s been, whether she’s made copies.”

“And if she’s been talking to the wrong people?”

“I want to know. But still bring her in. I want to meet her in person. She’s pretty, don’t you think?”

Marka rolls his eyes. “Your dick is going to get you killed one day.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Yeah,” he says. “She’s pretty.”

The rest of the day is what it always is. Phone calls, a border problem that sorts itself when Marka gets on the line because his voice does things mine doesn’t, a meeting with the lawyer who keeps our books looking clean. Normal shit. Dull shit. The kind of afternoon where there’s nothing loud enough to drown out the thing sitting underneath everything else, which is that Lavro has been dead for six weeks and I still haven’t found who gave the order. Berezin organized the venue. He was the link. But Berezin was taking instructions from someone, and I don’t have that name yet, and until I do, none of this is finished.

Underneath all of it, the same thing keeps coming up.

Berezin’s daughter.

I knew about her the way you know about a chair in a room you never go in. She existed, she wasn’t my problem. Berezin kept her clean, which I’d noticed at the time, filed away as the one decent thing the man managed in an otherwise shit performance. Kept his kid out of it. Smart. Too bad the rest of his choices were garbage.

Didn’t save him anyway.

The question I keep coming back to is what she found in that apartment. Berezin was taking instructions from someone. If he was smart enough to hide a drive from my sweep, he was smart enough to keep records. And if his daughter found those records, she might know more about who gave the order than I do. Which means she’s not just an interesting problem. She might be the next thread in the chain.

I don’t think about this too much. I know what guilt does, how it slows everything down and makes you soft in places you can’t afford to be soft, so I push it down and get back to work. I’m good at ignoring things. I’ve had enough practice for three lifetimes.

Marka comes back at four. “Thursday at two. She took the time without pushing back.”

I look up. “Nothing? Didn’t try to change it at all?”

“Not a word.”

That’s interesting. Everyone tries to move something, even a little, just to feel like they got something before the meeting even starts. She took what she was given without a peep. Either she doesn’t know to push, which I don’t believe, or she’s saving her pushback for something that matters.

“Anything else on her?” I ask.

“Top of her class. Had two good job offers before all this went sideways. Walked away from both after her father died.” Marka crosses his arms. “She’s nearly broke. Whatever savings she had are almost gone. No job, nothing lined up, nothing to go back to.”

Nothing to lose. Fantastic.

A broke girl with a dead father and balls bigger than half my men, walking in here and calling it a proposal. I look at her photograph again. That face. Cold as hell and twice as pretty, the kind of woman who looks at you like you’re already boring her and you haven’t even opened your mouth yet.

Fuck.

She’s got more education than me, more polish than me, and she’s going to walk into my house and try to take me apart with that sharp brain of hers. And she’s going to do it knowing I killed her father. That’s the part I can’t stop coming back to. She knows what I did, and she’s coming anyway. That’s either the bravest thing I’ve heard in a long time or the most reckless, and I genuinely can’t tell which yet.

And the truly stupid thing is that I want to see it. I want to sit across from her and watch her try.

My dick has been on board with Thursday since the moment I saw her photograph. The rest of me is catching up. And underneath both of those things, quieter than either of them, is the thought that she might know something about Lavro. About who gave the order. About what her father was really part of.

That’s the thought I don’t say out loud. Not even to Marka.

“Don’t tell the room what we think she’s got,” I tell Marka. “I want to watch her work.”

He doesn’t like it. His jaw goes tight, and he eats the argument whole, but he nods and leaves.