"Pakhan." His voice cracks. "I had nothing to do with this. Whatever's happened. The money was just money. Viktor never said anything about the girl. I swear on my mother's grave. He talked about the business, succession, restructuring. He never mentioned her. I didn't know he'd go that far."
"But you knew he'd go somewhere."
His mouth opens and nothing comes out.
"You knew." I step toward him. "You took a hundred and fifteen thousand from a man building a shadow operation behind my back, and you didn't ask yourself where the shadow ended. You sat in my library and said Pakhan to my face while the man paying you was planning something you chose not tolook at. You watched him challenge the right of succession, my place as Pakhan. You heard him say it. And you took the money anyway."
I'm standing over him now. Close enough that he has to tilt his head back to meet my eyes. Close enough that I can see sweat pooling in the hollow of his throat.
"And now the woman I love is missing."
I pull the Makarov from the desk drawer.
My father's gun. It's been in the top right drawer for as long as I've been alive, and I cleaned and loaded it the night he died because that's what you do when you inherit a chair. You make sure the tools are ready.
Alexei's body tries to stand before his mind catches up. Dmitri's hands land on his shoulders and push him down. The chair scrapes. His breath comes in short, wet bursts.
"Pakhan. Please. I'll help you find her. I'll tell you everything. Every conversation. I'll give you Viktor's entire operation. Please. I have children."
"You have children," I say. "And Sadie has diabetes. A condition that will kill her in twenty-four hours without medication, and her medication is in a bag on the floor of an alley because the men your benefactor sent didn't let her keep it."
My hand is steady. It was steady the first time I killed a man at fourteen and it has been steady every time since. The steadiness isn't courage. It's the absence of doubt.
"I can help," Alexei says. He's crying. The tears cut tracks through the sweat on his face. "I can call Viktor. I can find out where he's keeping her. Give me the chance, Pakhan. Give me the chance and I'll bring her back to you."
Dmitri is watching me. I feel his eyes on the side of my face. He's not going to stop me. He's not going to advise me. He's measuring whether the man in front of him is still the Pakhan he signed on with, or something else.
I look at Alexei. The tears. The shaking hands. I think about my father's voice.Hide her or bury her. Those are the only options he will leave you.
I think about Sadie in danger because I fell in love with her when she helped me in a car wreck.
“Your wife and children will be provided for,” I say, and shoot him in the head.
The sound fills the study. It bounces off the walnut paneling, the leather chairs and the old bookshelves and settles into the walls the way gunshots do. Permanent. Part of the building now.
His body slumps sideways. The chair tips. Dmitri steps back to avoid the blood. He doesn't look away.
I set the Makarov on the desk.
"Kol." Dmitri says it softly. The name he uses when he is worried, which is almost never.
I don't look at him. I'm looking at Alexei. At the cost of patience. The cost of giving a man time to come back on his own, of believing that forty thousand was an investment and not a down payment.
I was wrong. I was careful and strategic and measured, and I was wrong, and Sadie is gone.
"Get this cleaned up." I pick up my phone and dial. "Lev. You're coming in. Now. Thirty minutes. You're going to tell me every car parked on that street this morning, every face in that alley, every second between the moment she stepped out of your car and the moment you drove away without watching her walk through the door."
I hang up.
Dmitri's face is a mask. Discipline and loyalty and the bond between two men who have stood in enough rooms like this one. But I can see it behind his eyes. The question. The calibration.
"Don't," I say.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"Good. Call Gregor. Call Yevgeny. Wake every man we have. Viktor's properties, his warehouses, his daughter's apartment, his lawyer's office, every address on file. I want men at all of them within the hour."
"And Viktor himself?"
