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“I haven’t decided.”

“You have.” He’s still laughing. “You’ve got that face.”

“I don’t have a face.”

“You’ve had the same face since you were nine years old. You had it when you wanted that bicycle in Uncle Mikhail’s garage. You stared at it for a month, and then you just took it.” He wipes his eyes. “What’s she like?”

I think about the flour in the crease of her thumb. About twelve sandwiches with twelve names written on them. About the small, shocked sound she made when I kissed her, and the way her hands curled into my sweater and held on.

“Kind,” I say.

Ivor stops laughing.

He looks at me for a long moment, and whatever he sees there makes his expression change completely.

“Well,” he says quietly. “There it is.”

“What?” I demand.

“Independence was never the same thing as isolation, Caleb. I’ve been trying to tell you that for fifteen years.” He picks up his phone. “Natasha told me the same thing, once. Right before she stopped letting me be an idiot.”

“Wise woman.”

“Terrifying woman.” He scrolls, then dials. “Give me a minute.”

He speaks in quick, low Russian to someone called Arkady. I catch fragments. Riddings. Chicago. Maximov. It goes on for longer than a minute. Then Ivor goes quiet and listens, and his face settles into something cold.

He hangs up.

“Someone’s selling,” he says.

“Selling what?”

“Maximov information. It’s been offered through three brokers in the last two months. Arkady saw the listing himself in August. Property layouts. Warehouse schedules. Transport routes, out of the Port District.” He sets the phone face down on the arm of his chair. “Quietly. Discreetly. To anyone who could afford it.”

“Who bought?”

“Arkady doesn’t know. Yet.” He meets my eyes. “But he thinks someone did. Somebody local. Somebody who’d been waiting a long time for Yaroslav to die.”

Rusakov. It has to be. Half of Chicago watched him laugh at the old man’s funeral.

“I want everything Arkady has,” I say.

“You’ll have it by tonight.” Ivor pauses. “There’s something else.”

The way he says it makes the back of my neck go cold.

“The package that sold in August,” he says. “Arkady said it was the most expensive one. The only one they ever listed for more than a hundred thousand.” He watches my face. “It wasn’t a warehouse, Caleb. It wasn’t a route.”

I already know. I knew the second Brenner’s face turned away from me beside that nail salon window. I just didn’t want to hear it out loud.

“It was the house,” Ivor says. “Floor plans, camera positions, the guard rotation. Every blind spot on the property.”

The house where five sisters are sleeping tonight, with only a gate between them and anyone who bought that package.

The house where Galana gets up at three in the morning and walks out alone across the dark lawn with a tray of sandwiches.

GALANA