“No,” I state. “He killed him like he’d been waiting to.”
The trains continue grinding somewhere outside the building, the sound traveling through the walls in a low metallic rhythm that never quite stops. Somewhere in this warehouse, men are already reorganizing loyalty, scrubbing blood from the floor, replacing one name with another as if power can be transferred the same way furniture gets moved from one office to the next.
Within the hour, we’ll probably be relocated again. New walls. New door. New isolation.
Lila looks at me, the fear in her expression slowly hardening into something more focused.
“We can’t let him move us again,” she says.
She’s right. We can’t. Once we disappear into another location, whatever chance we have of finding a weakness, catching the right moment, or Kiren reaching us before Ivan decides we’re no longer useful becomes smaller.
“We get one shot,” I tell her.
And if we miss it, Ivan will make sure we never get another.
8
KIREN
I don’t go to Marian’s house alone. Mikel drives while I sit beside him in the passenger seat, the low hum of the engine filling the quiet space between us as the car moves through the darker parts of the city. Two vehicles follow at a careful distance behind us, their headlights appearing in the side mirror whenever the road curves enough to reflect them. The arrangement is routine. Nights like this aren’t.
Cold air slips through the narrow crack in the window beside me, along with the faint scent of wet pavement and distant salt from the bay. It moves through the car in thin currents that brush against my face and clear the last of the warmth left from the estate.
The streets feel quieter than usual tonight. Traffic lights change for empty intersections. Storefront windows glow dimly beneath buzzing fluorescent bulbs. The city hasn’t shut down entirely, but it has slowed enough that every sound feels a little more distinct.
Mikel keeps one hand on the steering wheel while the other rests near the console, his posture relaxed but attentive. He doesn’tfill the silence unless there’s something worth saying, and I rarely encourage conversation when my thoughts are already moving through problems that refuse to resolve themselves.
Rowan sits at the center of everything tonight.
Arkady.
Ivan.
The industrial freight district near the train yards.
Every piece of information circles the same pattern, but something about the structure still doesn’t fit Arkady. Arkady prefers distance. Slow pressure. Quiet leverage that leaves very little visible movement. What happened to Rowan involved too many moving pieces and too many men coordinating at once. Even with Ivan involved, the scale of it feels wrong, like someone else is arranging pieces from farther up the board.
“You think Marian already knows more than we told her?” Mikel inquires after a while, his voice low enough that it blends easily with the steady rhythm of the tires against the pavement.
I watch the streetlights slide across the windshield in slow intervals before answering. “She knows enough to understand that Rowan didn’t simply decide to vanish.”
“That won’t bring her much comfort.”
“Comfort isn’t what she’s waiting for.”
Mikel nods at that, the faintest movement of acknowledgement before his attention returns to the road ahead. We turn onto Marian’s street a minute later, the quiet residential block unfolding beneath the headlights as the car slows.
The neighborhood sits in a quiet calm, the sort that belongs to people who believe the worst thing that might happen tonight is a barking dog or a car alarm somewhere down the block. Small houses sit close together behind short fences and narrow driveways, each porch lit with warm yellow bulbs that soften the darkness rather than erase it. Nothing about the place suggests violence. Nothing about it belongs to my world. That fact doesn’t stop my world from touching it anyway.
One of my men waits across the street in an unmarked sedan. He straightens when our car pulls up to the curb. Marian has had protection since Rowan entered my life. She never requested it, and I never gave her the opportunity to refuse.
Mikel eases the car to a stop in front of the house and leaves the engine idling for a moment while I study the porch light glowing above the door. Marian knows I’m coming. More importantly, she’s been waiting for me.
“You believe she’ll listen to what you have to say?” Mikel questions.
I open the door and step out into the cold air before answering. “I believe she’ll decide whether I deserve to finish a sentence.”
The snow crunches softly beneath my boots as I walk toward the porch. Behind me, the second vehicle edges closer to the curb, the silhouettes inside unmoving.
