Raina lifts the camera and turns it to face the wall. Then she cuts the power cord with her knife and drops the dead unit on the floor.
“Enough,” she says.
She opens the box.
Inside sits a tablet. The screen glows with a live feed. The angle is high and narrow. It shows a door and a strip of wall. I know that hallway. It is the one outside the safe room in my city apartment. The timestamp in the corner is current.
Raina’s breath catches.
He is watching my house from here.
Text rolls across the bottom of the feed in clean white letters.
YOU LEFT HER WITH FRIENDS.
A second line appears.
WILL THEY BE ENOUGH WITHOUT YOU?
My jaw clenches. I taste metal under my tongue.
The tablet chimes. The feed splits in two. On the right appears another camera view. It shows the lobby of my building. The concierge desk is empty. The doors are shut. On the desk sits a white box tied with black ribbon. The tag on it is blank from this distance, but I know what is written there.
“Delivery three,” Raina says.
The text on the screen changes.
MATH PROBLEM, SERGEI.
ONE BATHHOUSE FULL OF GAS.
ONE LITTLE STAR IN A BOX.
ONLY SO MUCH TIME. PICK YOUR FIRE.
As the words scroll, a timer appears in the corner. It starts at twenty minutes and begins to count down.
Kirill looks up. “Gas mains,” he says. “We should shut them.”
I inhale slowly and force my voice to stay even.
“First we confirm the building is not full of people,” I say.
“Thermal shows minimal bodies on both floors,” Kirill says, already reading the handheld. “More heat in the pipes than in the rooms. That fits a closed house. They are on night status. Two staff at most, maybe.”
“So he used them for the threat,” I say. “He cleared everyone else. He wants us to spend twenty minutes on his toy while he plays at my door.”
Raina stares at the tablet. Her fingers tremble once, then steady. “He can’t open the safe room from outside,” she says. “That system is physical. Only the study panel opens it. He can make noise at the lobby. He can shake the guards. He can’t walk through steel with a camera.”
“He can send someone,” I say. “We left a traitor in a chair, but he has other hands. Some of my men moved with him before. We have seen the patch on bodies who should be loyal.”
She looks at me. “So what is your call?”
I think fast.
If I stay at the bathhouse, I spend my time in his script. I shut the gas, I calm the staff, I clean the scene. I prove I care about lives in a building that is not my own. He gets footage of me working to fix a problem he made. He gets that for his collection.
If I leave now, I hand the gas work to my men and to the city crews I own through other names. I cut his network node here and race back to the source that matters. He may get his leak, but he will not get my house.
