"There was a van at the end of the block," Lev says. "White. Panel. I thought it was the laundromat's."
My pulse doesn't change. My breathing doesn't change. The room doesn't move. But something behind my ribs locks into place with the precision of a round sliding into a chamber.
"Which direction was it facing?"
"East. Toward the alley."
"Engine running?"
Lev closes his eyes. Opens them. "I don't know. I didn't check. Pakhan, I swear to you, if I had known—"
"You would have what, Lev?" I step closer to him. He's sitting and I'm standing and the geometry of it is the same geometry I stood in over Alexei ten minutes ago, and Lev can feel it, because his breathing has gone shallow and his hands are gripping his knees. "You would have watched her walk inside? You would have done the one thing Dmitri does every single time without being asked?"
He doesn't answer. There is no answer.
I turn away from him. If I keep looking at his face, I'm going to do something that costs me the information I still need.
"Dmitri," I say. "White panel van, east end of the block, facing the alley. Run it against the traffic cameras. If it moved east after eight o'clock, it would have hit the light at Ashland and the interchange camera at the on-ramp."
Dmitri nods and steps into the next room with his phone.
I look at Lev. He hasn't moved from the bench. His hands are still on his knees and there's a sheen on his forehead that reminds me of Alexei, and the reminder makes something dangerous flex in my jaw.
"You're going to the clinic," I say. "You're going to walk the alley. Every inch of it. You're going to look at the ground, the walls, the dumpster, the fire exit. You're going to find anything they left behind, a cigarette butt, a footprint, a scuff mark, anything. And you're going to call Dmitri the second you have it."
"Yes, Pakhan."
"And Lev."
He stands. His legs aren't entirely steady.
"If I find her and she's hurt, you and I are going to have a different conversation."
He leaves without another word. The front door closes behind him and I'm alone in the hall with the sound of Dmitri's voice coming through the wall, low and rapid, giving instructions to someone on the other end.
I pull out my phone and look at the call log. The unknown number sits there, a single line of digits, eight seconds of silence and a disconnect.
He's going to call back. I know this the way I know the sound of my own breathing. Viktor took Sadie because Viktor wants the chair, and the chair is the thing he'll ask for. He'll frame it as a trade. He'll use the language of family and reason and compromise. He'll tell me that this doesn't have to be difficult, that he's doing what's best for everyone, that Sadie can come home unharmed if I simply step aside and let the succession be reconsidered.
He'll say all of this in the voice of a man who has rehearsed compassion the way other men rehearse lies, and he'll expect me to negotiate, because negotiation is what rational men do when the stakes are this high.
He's wrong.
I don't negotiate for things that are mine. I never have. My father didn't teach me negotiation. He taught me patience, and then he taught me violence, and the only difference between the two is timing.
Dmitri comes back into the hall.
"Traffic camera at Ashland caught a white panel van heading east at eight-oh-eight," he says. "Plates are muddied but we got a partial. I'm running it now. The interchange camera has it entering the highway heading north."
North. Away from the city. Toward the industrial corridors along the lakeshore, where the warehouses sit in rows like teeth and half of them haven't been used since the shipping routes changed in the nineties.
"Viktor's construction company held a lease on a storage facility up near the Calumet yards," I say. "Two years ago. Check if it's still active."
Dmitri is already on his phone. I watch him work. His face is composed, his movements efficient, but there's a tightness around his mouth that has been there since Dr. Mehta called. Dmitri doesn't love many people. He loves his mother in St. Petersburg. He loves his sister. And he loves Sadie, in the careful, boundaried way of a man who has watched the woman his Pakhan chose become the quiet center of a house that needed one.
He catches me watching him and holds my gaze for a beat.
"We'll find her, Kol."
