Konstantin stepped out in a gray robe and slippers, his pipe already in his hand. He settled into the wrought-iron chair the same way he'd settled into the chair at The Silver Table. Slowly, deliberately, a man who owned every room he entered. He packed the pipe, lit it, and pulled the first file from a leather portfolio.
I waited.
The pipe smoke drifted toward the cypresses. Sweet, dark, the same tobacco I'd smelled on his suit the night he'd leaned across the space between us and told me there was a leak in the organization and I'd felt my blood turn to ice.
He read for nine minutes. Turned a page. Made a note in the margin with a silver pen.
I came out of the trees at 5:51.
The suppressor reduced the Glock's report to something close to a textbook closing hard. Two rounds, center mass, from eight feet. He slumped sideways in the chair, the pipe falling from hishand, the portfolio sliding off his lap and scattering pages across the stone patio.
His eyes were still open, wide with surprise. Not afraid. Surprised. Like this scenario had never factored into his calculations. Like the man who cleaned up other people's messes was the one variable he'd never accounted for.
Everybody makes the same mistake.
I collected the brass. Checked for pulse. Found none. Picked up the portfolio and the scattered pages and tucked them under my arm.
Inside the house, the guard's phone glowed on the kitchen counter. He hadn't heard anything.
I went back over the wall and through the greenbelt and emerged on a residential street where the Chevy waited under a broken streetlight.
Two down.
One to go.
Viktor was a survivor in a world that killed most men before they hit forty. He'd stayed alive by trusting his gut, and his gut was usually right.
But Viktor didn't know about Dmitri yet. The body wouldn't be found for at least a day. Konstantin's guards would find the patio situation sooner, but it might take them a minute. The portfolio was gone and the shell casings were in my pocket and the suppressed shots hadn't carried past the cypress trees.
I had a window. Small, but enough.
Viktor lived in a house off East Cesar Chavez. Nothing flashy. A three-bedroom craftsman with a wide porch and a detached garage. The kind of place that blended into the neighborhood so well you'd never guess the man inside had ordered more deaths than he could count while wearing Italian loafers that cost more than his neighbor's rent.
He kept the house lightly secured. No system, no cameras. Viktor trusted his own alertness over technology, and until now, he'd been right to. He slept with a gun under his pillow and a knife on the nightstand and the confidence of a man who believed his reputation was enough to keep the wolves away.
It wasn't.
I let myself in through the back door at 7:15 AM. The lock was nothing, a standard pin tumbler that gave up in under ten seconds. The house was quiet. A coffee maker on a timer had just started gurgling in the kitchen, and the air smelled like coffee and Versace Eros—that dense, sweet vanilla-and-mint cologne that always preceded Viktor like a warning—and the lingering bite of cigarette smoke embedded in everything he owned.
Quick and careful, I made my way across the kitchen to the narrow hallway. The floor here was hardwood. I kept to the edges where the boards were nailed tighter and less likely to flex.
His bedroom door was open three inches. I could hear him breathing. Deep, steady, the rhythm of a man sleeping soundly. A man who believed the job was done, the loose end was burned, and the cleaner was somewhere licking his wounds and learning to live without the girl he'd been told to kill.
I pushed the door open.
He was on his back. One arm thrown over his head, the other resting on his stomach. Even asleep, there was something wolfish about him.
The Beretta was under the left side of his pillow. Within reach if his hand moved six inches.
I didn't give him those six inches.
The suppressor touched his forehead and his eyes opened.
There it was. The transition from sleep to recognition to understanding, all in the space of a single heartbeat. His pupils expanded. His hand twitched toward the pillow.
"Don't," I said.
He stopped. Not because I told him to. Because he was smart enough to calculate the odds and realize they were zero.
