Page 11

“So,” he says. “You need something.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You haven’t come to see me in three years.” He sips his drink. “And you missed my fortieth.”

“I sent a gift.”

“A gift.” He says it like it’s an obscenity. “My father asked about you, at the masquerade. Where was Caleb? Why wasn’t Caleb standing with the family?”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him the truth. That you’d rather eat glass than stand in a room full of our family measuring each other’s inheritance.” He tips his glass toward me. “He didn’t like it. I did.”

It’s an old wound between us, and we both know it. When Ivor’s father started choosing between his nephews and his son, the whole family split down the middle. I refused to pick a side. I walked away, from all of it, from all of them. Ivor didn’t speak to me for two years.

Then one night he called me from a hospital in Nice because someone had put a knife in his ribs and he didn’t know who he could trust. I got on a plane. We’ve never talked about it since.

“How’s the business?” I ask.

“Mine now.” He smiles thinly. “My father’s in Sochi growing tomatoes and complaining about the weather. Your brothers and our cousins have learned to behave.” He sets the glass down. “You didn’t come here to ask about that though. What do you need?”

“Daniel Riddings.”

Ivor’s face doesn’t change much. It never does. But his eyes sharpen.

“The American,” he says. “Security systems. He’s done work for the Kirovs, the Belkins. One of my people in Marseille used him for a warehouse two years ago.”

“Was he any good?”

“Very.” Ivor tilts his head. “Too good. My man in Marseille had a shipment hit three months later. We never could connect it.”

“Yaroslav Maximov hired him in the spring. Full system on the main residence. Cameras, sensors, the works…”

“And Yaroslav didn’t trust him.”

“Yaroslav didn’t trust his own mother.” I take a mouthful of vodka. “He asked me to check Riddings’s work. In May, the system went dark for eleven minutes. No alarm, no record. Just eleven minutes of nothing. The last login before it went down belonged to one of Riddings’s installers. A man named Kyle Brenner.”

“And Brenner?”

“Quit a week later. No forwarding address. No phone. Gone.” I put the glass down. “Saturday, he followed me and Galana Maximova from a bakery on Chicago Avenue.”

Ivor lets the silence stretch.

It’s the same silence I have. I used to think I learned it from him, when we were boys in Brighton Beach. Now I’m not sure which of us learned it first.

“Galana Maximova,” he repeats slowly. “Yaroslav’s daughter.”

“Yes.”

“One of the five who have to marry or lose everything.” A slow, terrible smile spreads across his face. “Oh, Caleb. No.”

“Ivor.”

“You?” He leans back in his chair and laughs, properly, loud enough to echo off the glass. “The man who wouldn’t come to my birthday because there’d be too many people in one room? The man who lived in a hotel for six years because a house felt too much like a commitment?”

“It was four years,” I mutter.

“You’re getting married.”