The Quinns want me at tonight's meeting. Not for muscle, but because they trust me to put a bullet in someone's head if something goes wrong.
The Chicago shipment's worth more than money; it's new tech, prototype weapons no one's supposed to touch except the Basovs and the Quinns. We've been working on this run for months. Morrison was clearing the way, making sure every manifest, every crate, passed through customs untouched.
I didn't like him. Never did. But I watched him, and he was solid. A gambler, sure, but the kind of debt they said he had? Yuri would've seen it long before it hit bottom.
So, this story about gambling, it's theater. Someone's using it to hide what really happened.
Morrison's death left more than a body; it left a position wide open. A strategic channel that could be exploited by anyone ambitious or reckless enough to reach for it.
For now, the Quinns are working with another of our contacts, someone from Morrison's circle. Hartley. A government type. Polished, polite, careful about the company he keeps. He sat in on a few of Morrison's meetings, handled those art transfers that required the right paperwork and the wrong favors. I've seen his name before, attached to art shipments that passed through customs untouched when they shouldn't have.
Yuri's been digging, but if he couldn't trace what buried Morrison, then we're dealing with something that changes data but doesn't live in it. The kind of truth that hides in people, not servers. That means old methods, eyes, hands, and pressure.
That's where Ruslan comes in.
Brutal. Precise. The kind of man who believes pain is a language, and he's fluent. He doesn't ask questions twice. Doesn't need to.
With Ruslan, men would rather die than lie again.
I'm no stranger to that work myself. Killing is cleaner, but truth extraction...that's an art of a different kind. Between Ruslan's needles, Yuri's reach, and my patience, there's not a secret in this city we can't drag into the light.
When I exit the elevator, the doors part like a curtain on a stage I've played a thousand times. My jacket settles against myshoulders, the familiar weight of the gun beneath my arm, and another at my ankle.
Fifteen rounds and more ghosts than I care to count.
Dominic and Alexei wait in the lobby's marble expanse, their postures shifting from casual to alert the moment they see me.
"There's going to be a special delivery today." I check my watch, which reads 3:15 AM. The florist opens at seven. "Flowers. Nothing else goes up to the penthouse without my direct approval."
Alexei's eyebrows lift slightly.
"Call me first," I tell him. "I don't care if it's the Pope delivering communion wafers. You call."
"Copy that." Alexei nods, but I catch the glance he exchanges with Dominic. They're wondering why their notoriously controlled boss is micromanaging flower deliveries.
Yuri leans against the wall next to my car, cigarette smoke curling around his face. He straightens when he sees me, drops the cigarette, and grinds it out with his shoe.
My phone vibrates against my ribs. Connor's message cuts through the night like a blade: North warehouse. Twenty minutes.
I glance at the text, then delete it. Connor and Patrick want me to observe from afar.
I slide behind the wheel with Yuri at my side, and the engine purrs to life like a predator stretching awake. The city blurs past in streaks of neon and shadow as I navigate toward the docks, where honest work ends and our kind of business begins.
Manhattan at this hour belongs to garbage trucks and insomniacs, the city's pulse slower but never stopping. Steam rises from manholes like ghosts of the day's heat.
"What have you found so far?" I ask, settling into the familiar rhythm of operational planning.
Yuri scrolls through his phone, eyes half on the road. "What we know already, he's the Cultural Commission Director, David Hartley. Law degree, thirty-eight, divorced twice, no kids. Still relatively new in this scene. Good government connections, Morrison being one. A few hookers, minor vices. Nothing that screams problem."
"Nothing screams until it does."
I keep my eyes on the road, the leather wheel warm beneath my hands. The city slides by in slow blurs of yellow light and shadow. "I need everything there is to know about him."
"I'm still digging. His secrets will surface."
"Maybe." I don't look at him. "Or someone's already changed them."
"You're thinking someone's altering the data?"
