"Burner they gave us. Message came through encrypted app."
Yuri lifts the burner from the table. He meets my eyes over Petrosyan's lolling head and shakes once. His gaze tells me everything. The phone's clean.
My finger rests against the trigger guard. Light pressure. Two pounds from ending this. But dead men can't lead me to whoever ordered this. They're worth more alive. Breathing, talking, unknowingly marking a trail straight to who thought he could take what's mine.
I lower my gun. They're already dead. They just don't know it yet.
Ruslan appears beside me, another syringe catching the overhead light. "Want me to wake the other one?"
I study the unconscious Armenian. His head hangs at an angle that would be uncomfortable if he were aware enough to feel it.
"No. Take this one to the sleeping world."
Ruslan's syringe finds the Armenian's neck, and the plunger descends smoothly and steadily. Within seconds, the man's breathing shifts deeper, settling into the manufactured unconsciousness that will keep him under for hours.
Yuri comes over to photograph his tattoos.
"What is it with their tattoos?"
Yuri angles his phone toward me. The screen illuminates intricate designs sprawling across the man's forearms.
"I've seen these before." Yuri's jaw moves side-to-side. It's an unconscious tic he gets when his brain starts connecting patterns. "Can't place the context yet, but the combination feels familiar."
I study the photos over his shoulder. Armenian prison work, mostly. The crude eight-pointed star marks him as a vor, standard criminal hierarchy. The dagger through a rose means he's killed for money. Nothing particularly noteworthy. Men in our world wear their résumés on their skin.
But Yuri doesn't flag things without reason. The man catalogs information like other people breathe.
Yuri zooms in on another section, studying it with the focused intensity he reserves for puzzles that matter. "That sword. From the Motherland Calls. Volgograd."
"These men are obviously not Russian."
"Volgograd ink on Armenian skin. The Russian Motherland's sword isn't something you tattoo unless you're..."
"Can you wake them?"
Ruslan glances at the two unconscious men, calculating. "Could try." His ice-blue stare shifts back to me. "Might kill them withan OD. Already loaded them up pretty heavy with the cocktail. Their systems are flooded."
I study Petrosyan's slack features, the slow rise and fall of his chest. "Odds?"
"Sixty-forty they survive the reversal agents. Maybe worse if their hearts are weak."
The shipping container number sits in my head like a lit fuse. 4-7-B-2. These two breathing pieces of shit represent the only thread connecting us to whoever ordered Fee taken.
"We keep them alive, and we follow their tracks."
Yuri's already on it. "I'm asking Dimitri about these tattoos on Armenian skin. The old man has been here in New York with the Basovs since, shit, before we were born. He can get the street intel. I'll haunt the digital world."
That's what Yuri does. Finds patterns in chaos. Connects data points separated by years and continents until the picture becomes clear. He doesn't just gather information—he interprets it, profiles it, turns fragments into actionable intelligence.
Yuri is invaluable. I trust his instincts when something "feels familiar" even before he can articulate why.
Ruslan's moving between the chairs, checking vitals with clinical detachment. He adjusts Petrosyan's position, arranging him to suggest he collapsed mid-fix. "They'll wake up with gaps in their memory and track marks they can't explain."
Then Ruslan transforms crime scenes into accidents, murders into misfortunes, interrogations into anything needed. He's good. "Tox screens will show exactly what I want them to show, if they get one."
When we're done, we exit through the back stairwell, leaving behind two men who are living on borrowed time.
The flower shop on Amsterdam Avenue glows warm against the gray morning light. 7:00 AM sharp. Early enough that foot traffic hasn't yet clogged the sidewalks, late enough that Irma Castellano will already be inside preparing the day's arrangements.
