Viktor slid me a coffee. “You are okay?”
No. “What’s this?”
The blueprints.
Alexei answered for him. “The port building on the west side of the northern bay.”
He didn’t say which port. Didn’t have to. I recognised the layout—it was the same port Viktor and I had fought for more than a year ago.
“This building is behind the harbour police base,” Alexei explained. “Tonight, the area is still monitored by uniformed units from the local constabulary, but those patrols will cease in three days.”
“How do you know?”
Alexei slithered me a flat glance. “Maybe I do not. Maybe it was a wild guess, no?”
“All right. No need to be a sarky cunt.”
Viktor rolled his lips, concealing a smirk.
Alexei drank from a vodka glass I hadn’t noticed. “Nomad, you do not change.”
Couldn’t tell if that was a compliment. But since I owed him for persuading Vik to not leave me behind, I let it slide. “Why are you here?”
It was the simplest question without getting into how the fuck he’d got this close to us without triggering Jake’s billion-and-one sensors.
Jake let him.
Alexei set his glass down and dead-eyed me. “Jakov believed you when you told him Viktor was fit to fight. I wanted to see for myself.”
This time, Viktor set his smirk free. “I did not know you cared.”
“I care about the people who love him.” Alexei pointed at me. “And if you die, he dies, no?”
Viktor’s humour faded. He spoke Russian again.
Alexei shrugged and replied in English. “It is the same for all of us now. Get used to it or die alone.”
It was the only small talk he offered before he and Vik got into it about the logistics of a murder op so close to a police station. Port police, but still. Feds were feds.
“No explosives.” Alexei sounded regretful. “The collateral damage risk is too high.”
Viktor nodded, agreeing. He leaned closer to me before he caught himself and dropped his elbows on the counter instead. “This building is complex. We have a few good men, but not enough to cover the space and exit undetected if the alarm is raised.”
“Then you will have to make sure that does not happen, and you will need to do it with six men.” Alexei tapped the blueprints. “No more. And no less. Allowing for injuries, you will need the manpower for disposal.”
Of evidence. Bodies. Whatever. I’d worked that shift before, and I’d do it again, a hundred times if I had to.
The conversation moved on and climbed way above my pay grade. Alexei figured out I was no longer paying attention and switched back to Russian.
I got bored and took Lida outside. Turned my entire personality inside out and ate an orangealone. Go me.
It was the dead of fucking night by the time Alexei came out.
He didn’t want an orange, but he accepted a smoke. “You have done well here.”
“With what?”
“With Viktor. Jakov believes he would be dead without you.”
