My fingers tighten on the edge of the table.
“Is it morning?” I ask. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m missing a few hours.”
He gives a small laugh. It has no warmth.
“It is morning enough,” he says. “Late enough that your husband has already buried one loyal woman and broken one disloyal man.”
The skin on my arms prickles. The stew in my stomach turns heavy.
“You’re the Courier,” I say. I don’t make it a question.
“You’ve always been quick,” he replies. “It’s one of the things I respect.”
“I don’t care about your respect,” I say. “Where is my daughter?”
“In her bed,” he says. “Breathing. Holding her bear. You can relax that part of your mind.”
I feel the breath punch out of me, then catch. I do not let him hear a sob. I swallow it and turn it into something else.
“You expect me to take your word for that?” I ask.
The black field on the screen shifts. A small window opens in the corner. The angle is high. The shot is of Nadia’s room. Her bed, her small body under the blanket, the nightlight on the wall. Anastasia in the chair with a blanket on her shoulders, head tipped back, eyes closed but body still upright. There is a guard at the door, only his arm and part of his rifle in the edge of the frame.
My hand reaches for the screen before I can stop it, and my fingertips touch the glass. Nadia’s chest rises and falls. I count the breaths. One. Two. Three. Four. The angle is recent. The time stamp at the bottom shows a current hour. She’s there.
“How?” I whisper.
“That’s the wrong question,” he says. “You know the answer already. A network is only as safe as the people who carry its keys. You built security around one man. I built mine around many hands. His system falls. Mine grows.”
“You don’t know his system,” I answer hotly. “You don’t know his people.”
“I know his people better than he does,” the Courier replies, his tone indulgent and insulting at the same time. “I know which ones still carry old loyalties in quiet pockets. I know which ones want to retire with full pockets and full lungs. I know which ones watch him and think his time is almost over.”
My jaw tightens.
“You’re lying,” I say, but the word feels thin. “Most of his men have stood with him for years.”
“Most,” he agrees. “That was true. It isn’t anymore.”
He taps something on his end. The small window showing Nadia shrinks. Another window opens beside it. This one shows a hallway I recognize from the outer offices near the Garden Ring. Two men I know walk past the camera. They wear my house colors, but the patch on one sleeve is wrong. Yellow and black. Baranov’s old warehouse crew. We have found that patch on dead bodies on our raids. Seeing it sewn on a living man in our colors sends a cold shot through my chest.
“That feed is from three hours ago,” the Courier says. “Your husband still thinks that wing is clean.”
The image changes. Now I see a storage room in one of the old city garages. A man stands under the bare bulb. He speaks to another man who stays just outside the camera’s range. I strain to see his face, but the frame cuts him off at the neck. The man under the bulb wears Sergei’s crew jacket. His voice is muted and urgent. His hands move. He takes an envelope and shoves it inside his coat.
“I don’t need you to believe each clip I show,” the Courier says. “I only need you to understand the shape of the picture.”
I drag my eyes away from the screen.
“You’re trying to tell me his network is gone,” I say. “That most of his men belong to you now. That’s your point.”
“It isn’t trying,” he answers. “It’s providing information. When you woke up, his strongest routes were already cracked, some by me, some by old enemies who smelled weakness. His name still means something in old bars and old streets, but his grip is loose. You know this. You have watched the numbers. You have seen the way the money moves.”
He is right about that part. The last year has been harder. More pressure at borders. More quiet misses. More small fires that never quite reached the news. Sergei’s empire is still large, but it has hairline fractures. I have seen them. I have patched some.
“You think you can do better,” I say.
“I’m already doing better,” he says. “I’m not tied to one city, or to one set of streets, or to a river or a single house. I move through grids and wires and contracts. I move in the shadows of other names.”
