Plus… I usually do find his quiet, snarky attitude amusing.
“So,” I drawl. “You’re telling me you’ve gone through every second of footage from the cafe and still have nothing?”
“Notnothing. Just nothing you’ll like.” His eyes glint behind the glass when he turns to look at me.
I arch a brow. “Meaning?”
He swivels in his chair, typing in a few commands until the still frames start to play in slow motion. A grainy, timestamped video of the street outside the cafe fills the screen. He freezes it at a particular moment when two men pull up in a blacked out vehicle, the window rolled down on the door facing the cafe.
“Watch,” Matvey says.
The playback begins at normal speed, the midday traffic crawling by, people bundled in coats against the bite of Moscow’s winter. Then he slows it to half speed, then a quarter.
That’s when I see it. From the dark interior, a pair of binoculars emerges. They glint in the light for a fraction of a second before angling toward the cafe’s front windows, narrowing in on something, or someone, inside.
The footage keeps moving forward, frame by frame. A second figure inside the car leans forward. His arm extends through the gap in the window. In his hand, a short-barreled weapon.
The cafe’s window explodes inward in stuttering bursts of violence, glass spraying across tables. Patrons scatter. Chairs topple. A woman in a pale coat goes down hard. The air inside must’ve been full of screaming, though here it’s silent, just the faint hum of Matvey’s computer equipment.
Thirteen seconds. That’s how long it lasts. Thirteen seconds of chaos before Roman, out of frame until now, returns firefrom inside the shop. The muzzle of his gun flashes, strobing as he takes cover when shots are returned. Three and a half seconds later, the black vehicle jerks forward and peels away, disappearing around a blind corner up the block and out of view of the feed.
Matvey freezes the frame on the last visible glimpse of the car—the back bumper, a partial plate blurred by motion.
He sits back, his chair creaking. “I don’t think Roman’s contact was the intended target.”
That earns him my full attention. “Interesting theory. Why do you say that?”
He exhales through his nose, swiveling the monitor so it’s angled toward him again. “Because I pulled the metadata from a private forum on the dark web. One of my better honeypots caught it before it vanished. Someone bought a profile dump on the tutor. Thorough. Deep scan. We’re talking employment history, travel logs, medical files, even school records from high school and college. It was a full digital scrape. That’s not a background check for a job. That’s a dossier for a mark.”
My gaze hardens. “You’re suggesting someone was watching her during this incident.”
He shrugs. “Why else would they check to see who was in the cafe, fire off rounds, and then not stick around to take out Roman? None of it adds up if you consider Roman’s contact was the intended target. If that were the case, they did a sloppy job. They could’ve gone around the alleyway, taken the back entrance, and dealt with him quietly. Everyone who visits that cafe knows the owner stays tucked in there during business hours.”
I glance at the frozen frame again, my mind turning over every piece of information as he speaks. It’s certainly an interesting theory, though one that doesn’t quite stick.
What value would killing Ivy have?
Sergei would replace her by the week’s end. Going by her family history that I’d seen, she’s not in contact with her immediate family and only has three friends from college that she regularly speaks to.
None of whom come from politically driven backgrounds, or families, that would have enough pull to make her disappearance—or death—a national sensation. Killing her would be a complete waste of time.
Matvey leans back in his chair, tilting his head toward me. “All I’m saying is that if shewasthe target, someone went to an awful lot of trouble to confirm she was in that building. They made a whole big show of trying to take her out without actually following through. That tells me it wasn’t about taking her out. It was about flushing her into the open for some reason.”
“Why, though?” I ask.
He merely shrugs.
I exhale slowly. I leave him with a clipped nod and a command to keep digging. Then I push off the desk and head upstairs. I need to know what she knows, what she’s hiding. Clearly, there’s more to her than what we’ve been able to find from our data pulls.
Some explanation as to why she’s been locked on as a target.
But I’m not going to get those answers by locking her in a silk-trimmed suite and sending in bruisers to question her. She’s nota woman who folds under pressure, that’s clear. If anything, shethriveson it.
If I want the truth, I need something else.
Neutral ground.
A battlefield disguised as a lunch invitation.
