Lev:Wow. Never heard Dima talk so much in a day. Year, maybe.
Dima talked a lot? That was “a lot”?
Another buzz. This time it’s from a number I don’t recognize.
Unknown: There’s a man named Evan at your apartment. Should I kill him?
I stop walking.
29
Anton
It’s afternoon. Mary’s still sleeping. I’d know if she weren’t. The penthouse stays too quiet without her moving around.
I’ve still got the earpiece in, low enough to catch the faint sound of her breathing when she shifts in bed. No footsteps, no drawers opening. She hasn’t tried to leave.
Now I’m here, in a place I know too well and somehow don’t belong in anymore.
The meeting room at the Mirage doesn’t look like a meeting room. It looks like a card shark’s wet dream—velvet walls the color of old blood, chandelier light soft enough to hide the tells, and a table big enough to seat twelve men who don’t trust each other.
Igor Vetrov sits at the head, black suit pressed to perfection, not a strand of his silver hair out of place. His eyes—dark, heavy-lidded, unreadable—move slowly over the room, cataloguing everyone. The habit of a man who’s been in power too long and still sleeps with one eye open.
On his right, Yuri is quietly cracking pistachios, the shells piling on a silver saucer. Next to him, Mikhail, built like a safe, hands clasped over a stomach that says he’s survived too many assassination attempts to care about cholesterol.
Lev leans back two chairs down from me, restless. His foot taps under the table. No smile today.
Igor takes his time lighting a cigarette.
“Viktor Kozlov,” he says, smoke curling upward. “Two million dollars missing from my casino floor. I told you to bring me both—the man and the money.”
He tilts his head slightly, eyes still on me. “I have neither.”
“He’s gone underground,” I say.
I could tell him to ask his nephew where the money went. Could mention the Brightside accounts, the clean transfers, the way Timofey’s been building his own empire under Igor’s nose. But not yet. Not without proof that won’t get me killed for suggesting it.
“That’s convenient.”
Lev shifts again, the muscle in his jaw ticking like he’s chewing broken glass. His fingers drum once against the table before he forces them flat, the kind of control that never lasts long with him.
“Convenient for who?” he says.
Igor ignores him, gaze still on me. “I expected you to have him by now.”
“He was here three days ago.”
What I don’t say: three days ago, I was standing over a dead man on Mary Sullivan’s grandmother’s porch, an assassin who wasn’t Kozlov. Since then, I’ve put three more in the ground: two Russians who slit Dave Thornton’s throat, and a cop who tried to put a bullet in Mary. None of them part of the original plan. And none of them leading me closer to Kozlov.
“Three days is a long time,” Igor says. “Long enough for him to leave the country. Long enough for a man to… disappear.”
“I’m still working it.”
“Working it,” Igor repeats, like he’s rolling the words in his mouth to see if they taste like a lie.
Yuri cracks a pistachio. Mikhail doesn’t move at all.
Igor leans back in his chair, eyes on me for a long moment before sliding to Lev. He takes a slow drink, sets the glass down with precision. “It’s not like you to drag your feet, Anton. You’vealways been my cleanest blade. Lately… people are saying the edge is dulling.”
