Time passes. My father drifts in and out of consciousness. My mother talks to him in a low, steady voice whenever he surfaces, telling him things about the garden and Mila’s flowers and the birthday party we still haven’t had, ordinary things, the kind of things you say to someone you need to keep tethered.
Somewhere outside this building, Luca is either coming or he isn’t.
I keep my back straight and my chin up, and I count my father’s breaths, and I wait.
Then I hear it.
Not voices. Not footsteps. Something else, outside the walls, a sound that doesn’t belong to the ordinary noises of the building settling and the river moving and Renat’s men shifting in the corridor.
A sound like a door coming off its frame.
Mila’s head comes up.
Alexei goes completely still.
And then there are sounds that I recognize from a warehouse four months ago, brief and sharp and final, moving through the building toward us, and I pull both twins against me and put my body between them and the door, and I wait for it to open.
It opens.
And Luca is there.
37
LUCA
The fence goes downat 9:47.
I know the time because I checked it when we pulled off the road and killed the headlights, and Pavel gave the signal. Forty minutes from the estate to this river complex, every one of them longer than the last, and now we’re moving and time stops mattering.
Fourteen men across two entry points. Pavel takes the east side. I take the west.
The side door is reinforced, but not well. Two of my men hit it together, and it gives on the first attempt. Inside, a corridor, low light, the smell of river damp and old machinery. Two of Renat’s men at the far end turning toward the sound.
They don’t get further than turning.
We move through the ground floor fast and tight. Room by room, door by door. My men know what they’re doing. They’ve done this before, most of them, in buildings worse than this one, and they move with the economy of people who understandthat speed and precision together are the only combination that matters.
I’m not watching them work. I’m moving toward the center of the building where the light is strongest.
A man comes out of a side room directly into my path. He’s reaching for something at his belt. I don’t give him the chance to find it. He goes down, and I step over him and keep moving.
Pavel’s voice in my earpiece. “East side clear. Two men down. Moving to the central corridor.”
“Copy. I’m at the main junction.”
Two doors ahead. Light under both. I take the one on the right, and Pavel takes the left, and inside is a storage room with crates and two more of Renat’s men who make the mistake of going for their weapons.
Pavel’s voice again. “Left side clear.”
“Right side clear. Moving to the rear.”
The rear of the building is where the holding rooms are. I know this from the layout Pavel pulled from his contact, three rooms along the back wall, reinforced doors, the kind of setup that tells you exactly what a building gets used for.
Two men are in the corridor outside the doors. They see me coming, and they make a calculation, and the calculation is wrong, and then there’s just the corridor and the three doors, and I’m trying all of them.
First door. Storage.
Second door. Empty.
