“It always is.” He looked at me steadily. “Don’t let complicated become your reason, Jared. Complicated is a circumstance. It’s not a verdict.”
I was forming a careful deflecting response, the one I kept ready for exactly this type of conversation, when the staff door at the far end of the corridor opened and Raia’s voice carried through, sharp with irritation.
“Sir, this is a closed facility. The club doesn’t open until—“
“Yes, I know, thank you so much.” The voice was smooth, unhurried, and carrying the particular warmth of a man who considered locked doors a charming suggestion rather than an instruction. “I’m just here to see a friend. Terribly briefly. You won’t even know I’m here.”
Declan raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll handle it,” I said.
I found Nikos in the corridor outside the private rooms, straightening his jacket with the composed expression of a man who had just talked his way past security in a closed building and found this entirely unremarkable. Raia stood two steps behind him, somewhere between irritated and impressed.
“It’s alright,” I told Raia. “I’ve got him.”
Raia retreated with the look of a woman making a note. I turned to Nikos.
“You can’t be here.”
“And yet.” He gestured pleasantly at the corridor around him. “Private room?”
We took the nearest one. I closed the door.
The warmth he’d brought from the corridor evaporated the moment it was just us. He dropped onto the small leather sofa and his face settled into the expression I’d come to associate with genuinely bad news. Not dramatic, not urgent, just the specific flatness of a man delivering facts he’d already made peace with.
“Talk,” I said.
“The transaction Ivan’s been building toward, we thought it was months out. Something shifted this week. Movement in three of his financial channels simultaneously, communication uptick with the buyer network, and a supply confirmation out of Odessa that we weren’t expecting for another six weeks.” He looked at me evenly. “The window has moved. We’re looking at weeks, Jared. Four to six if we’re fortunate.”
The room was very quiet.
“The soft approach,” I said.
“Is no longer viable on its own. The security contact needs eight weeks minimum. The technical approach”—he shook his head—“our team has been at the encryption for ten days. It’s not breaking in time.”
I looked at the wall.
“If we move without the financial intelligence,” Nikos continued, “we can arrest Ivan on what we have. Existing evidence, existing charges. He goes down.” A pause that carried weight. “But the network doesn’t. The buyers, the suppliers, the infrastructure; it all goes dark and reassembles somewhere else in six months. We’d have cut off the head and left the body intact.”
“And Polina.”
“An uncontrolled arrest gives her no warning. She’s in that house when the agents come through the door.” His voice was professionally neutral. “Best case, frightening but manageable. Worst case, Ivan decides in the final moments that she’s leverage.”
The thing that moved through my chest at that was not something I was going to examine in front of Nikos.
“There’s an art gala tomorrow night,” I said. “Barnes Foundation. Ivan’s on the attendee list.”
Nikos looked at me carefully. “Yes.”
“If I can get face time with him directly, establish a relationship, find a legitimate reason to be invited to the house, that’s another access point. Clean, no exposure for her.”
“One day’s groundwork before a four to six week window.”
“It’s a thread. I’ll pull it.” I met his eyes. “Keep the other options moving. All of them. I want every viable path still open.”
“And if none of them move fast enough?”
The question sat in the room and didn’t go away.
