Page 78

“Eventually.”

“What did Salvatore want from Gideon?”

“Proof. Gideon had spent years collecting the same kind of secrets Poseidon preserved. He used them badly, but he knew how Sylvia connected the Society to the Biker Federation, government contracts, and criminal organizations. Salvatore believed Gideon might possess the part of the structure we couldn’t reach from Poseidon.” Reagan paused. “Gideon died before Salvatore could get it.”

Salvatore had moved among mercenaries, bikers, scientists, and ghosts while I believed the greatest danger wore my father’s face. Nolan had never been the whole darkness. He had merely known how to open its door.

I reached into my bag and removed the photograph.

The young woman stood on a crowded street beneath Cyrillic lettering, both hands wrapped around a paper cup. Her dark hair framed a face turned slightly away from the camera. I had studied her until suspicion transformed every ordinary detail into evidence, but Reagan had stripped certainty from everything I thought I understood.

I slid the photograph across the table. “Then explain her.”

Reagan looked down.

Nothing dramatic changed in her face. There was no shock, fear, or recognition of a secret powerful enough to kill. She simply frowned with the concentration of someone placing a familiar face outside its expected setting.

“That’s Nikita Belova.”

Rurik came closer. “You know her?”

“I know who she is. Anyone who follows classical music does.” Reagan picked up the photograph by its edges. “She’s a cellist with the New York Philharmonic and one of the most celebrated musicians of her generation. She avoids interviews whenever her contracts allow it, performs, bows, and disappears before the patrons finish congratulating themselves for attending.”

“What else?” I asked.

“She’s painfully shy, according to people who’ve worked with her. Gentle. Private. She seems to live for the music and very little else.” Reagan turned the photograph over and read the name Salvatore had written. “Why did he have this?”

“That’s what we’re asking you.”

Her eyes lifted to mine. “She has no connection to Poseidon that I know of.”

“Sylvia?” Rurik asked.

“None.”

“The Society?”

“None that I’ve ever seen.”

The answers should have relieved me. Instead, uncertainty tightened around us. Every other name in Salvatore’s possession belonged to a bloodline, an alliance, or a lie capable of changing who held power. Nikita Belova made music and fled applause. She wasn’t a soldier, an heir, or a threat. She was a woman holding coffee on a cold street, unaware that a dead man had carried her face among secrets that had gotten him killed.

I had spent days trying to decide what she represented. Looking at the photograph now, I felt ashamed of the question. Nikita didn’t represent anything. She was a person. An innocent woman who had built a quiet life around the one thing she loved, and people like us were already gathering around her image, asking how she could be used to explain the dead.

Reagan brought the photograph closer to the lantern light. “This wasn’t taken in New York.”

“We know,” Rurik said. “The sign is Russian.”

“Moscow.” Her fingertip hovered above the blurred stone façade behind Nikita. “That’s the side entrance to the conservatory. I saw her perform there during the Philharmonic’s tour. What date was written in Salvatore’s notes?”

Rurik opened the file and gave it to her.

Reagan read the date, then went very still. “That was the night of her concert.”

Rurik took the page back and turned to the travel records he had dismissed as unrelated. His finger moved down a list of flights and hotel charges before stopping.

“Salvatore arrived in Moscow that morning,” he said. “He left the following afternoon.”

The restaurant receded around me. I saw only the photograph, Salvatore’s handwriting, and one day of his life he had crossed an ocean to conceal.