"Since you left? At least twelve. Maybe more. The ones who don't speak English. The ones who pay cash. The ones who don'thave family to ask questions." Tears ran down her face, but she didn't wipe them. "He's escalating. Used to be one a month. Now it's one a week. And there's something else—"
She pulled out her phone, showed me a photo. A surgical suite I recognized, but with equipment I didn't. Portable organ preservation units. The kind used for legitimate transplants, but too many of them. Far too many.
"They're stockpiling. Building inventory. Like organs are just... products."
The crack in my chest widened. It tried not to care. Caring gets you killed. Vulnerability equals death. But what was the point of staying alive if you let nineteen-year-old girls lose organs they didn't consent to give? What was the point of having surgical skills if you only used them in basements for people who'd already been destroyed?
"Please," Irina whispered. "I can't do this alone. I can't stop him alone."
I looked at the flash drive in my hand. It was warm from her grip. It was also a bomb that would explode the moment anyone learned I had it.
"Leave." My voice sounded strange, distant. "Don't come back here. Delete any record of this address. Delete my number if you have it. Forget you found me."
"But the evidence—"
"I have it now. That's all that matters. Go, Irina. Disappear. Get out of New York if you can."
She stared at me for a long moment, then nodded. At the door, she turned back.
"The girl—the nineteen-year-old—her name is Janice. Janice Long. She lives in Sunset Park with her grandmother. Just . . . I thought someone should know her name."
Then she was gone, and I was alone with a flash drive that could destroy Dr. Brand and probably me along with him. Istood there in my basement clinic, holding proof of crimes that made my stomach turn, thinking about a nineteen-year-old girl named Janice who didn't know she was missing a kidney.
The clinical detachment I'd wrapped around myself like surgical drapes wasn't enough anymore. It was failing, system by system, organ by organ.
I put the flash drive in my go-bag. Not because I'd decided what to do with it, but because it needed to be somewhere safe while I figured out how to stop caring about Janice Long and all the others who'd come after her if I did nothing.
The problem was, I already knew: I couldn't.
Chapter 3
Konstantin
Surveillancewasboring.
My back had gone numb against the Escalade's leather seat, three hours of sitting in one position while I watched Brighton Medical Center's loading dock through the telephoto lens. The camera's timestamp read 11:03 PM, and the same van I'd documented twice before sat under the sodium lights, its refrigerated unit humming. Tuesday night, right on schedule. Forty-seven minutes, just like last week.
I adjusted the lens, snapped another photo of the orderlies loading containers. White coolers with medical transport labels, the kind used for legitimate organ transfers. Except legitimate transfers didn't happen through service entrances at eleven at night with no paperwork visible and orderlies who kept checking over their shoulders.
The driver leaned against the van's hood, smoking. Even from across the street, I could make out the tattoo crawling up his neck—a snake wrapped around a dagger. Willem Torgev's crew.One of Anton Belyaev's bottom-feeders who'd stayed loyal even after the exile. I zoomed in, captured his face in profile. Another piece of evidence for Nikolai's war room.
This was what intelligence work looked like. Sitting. Watching. Documenting. Not breaking fingers until someone talked. Not using violence to solve problems. Just . . . observation.
Boring. Boring. Boring.
My body hated every second of it. The monster in my chest kept stretching, restless, wanting action. Wanting to cross the street and make that driver tell me everything while his bones snapped like dry twigs.
But Nikolai had been clear: quietly. Subtly. Like I was capable of either.
I'd been doing this for three days now. Learning the patterns. Tuesday and Friday pickups, always between 11 PM and midnight. Always the same van with license plate VRM-4421. Always heading toward Red Hook when they left, probably to a warehouse near the docks. I had photographs, timestamps, facial recognition on three of the regular orderlies. Professional surveillance, exactly what my brother wanted.
The problem was, every instinct screamed to just grab one of these orderlies, apply the right pressure, get answers in twenty minutes instead of twenty days. But that would start another war. Sophie was pregnant. We couldn't afford a war.
I shifted in the seat, vertebrae popping. Through the lens, I watched an orderly emerge with another cooler. This one had different markings—hazmat symbols, biohazard warnings. The kind of thing that should have been going through official channels with a paper trail a mile long.
My phone buzzed. Maks: "Still playing photographer?"
I typed back: "Still watching. Same pattern."
