I pressed my hand against my temple. Looked at it. Blood, not much, not serious.
I looked at the car door, now sprung slightly open from the impact.
I looked at Dimitri, dazed and blinking beside me.
I am not getting on that plane.
Not alive.
I got my shoulder against the door.
Chapter 18
Jared
The gate camera was the old model.
I had noted that on my first visit, the specific brand, the firmware version, the forty-second loop in the motion detection that created a window during transition cycles. Ivan Morozov had spent considerable money on the internal security of his house and considerably less on the external approach, which was the kind of oversight that came from believing that your reputation was its own deterrent.
I was standing at his front gate at eight seventeen in the morning. My heart doing something it had no business doing during an operational approach, which was beating significantlyfaster than the situation technically required. I had run hotter entries than this in worse conditions. The accelerated pulse was not fear of the operation.
It was her.
She was in that house. Behind that gate and those walls and her father’s careful management, and she had called me last night to say goodbye with a voice so steady it had nearly destroyed me, and I had been in that car for thirty minutes before I’d arrived here telling myself that what I was about to do was operationally sound and not examining too closely the fact that I would have done it whether it was operationally sound or not.
“Kane.” Vlad’s voice through the intercom. Flat. Unsurprised.
“I’d like to speak with Mr. Morozov,” I said. “He’s expecting me.”
The gate opened.
He was. I had run this calculation through every iteration since last night, since I’d left Declan’s apartment and called Nikos from the car with the specific urgency of a man who had run out of time and patience simultaneously. Ivan knew I was connected to Polina. That much had been made painfully clear by the phone call she’d made the night before. Something had happened inside this house after she’d left me. Whether Ivan had discovered us, confronted her, or simply reminded her who controlled the board, I didn’t know. But a man like Ivan didn’t leave loose ends unattended. He would want me inside. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere manageable.
What he didn’t know was that three streets over, Nikos’s team was watching the gate camera on a live feed.
I walked through.
Behind me, moving fast and quiet, the operation began.
The house had a different quality this morning.
I had moved through it in the dark often enough to know its rhythms, the particular silence of two in the morning, the specific sounds of a building at rest. This was not that. This was the silence of a place that had been through something and hadn’t finished processing it. A maid in the kitchen doorway with her hands clasped and her eyes down. The absence of Dimitri from his usual post. The faint smell of cold coffee left sitting.
Something had happened here this morning before I arrived.
The thought of what that something might have been tightened everything in my chest that had been tight since last night and I moved faster down the corridor.
Ivan was in the study. Standing—a deviation I noted and catalogued in the half-second before I looked at his face and found there what I had expected: the social warmth layered over the cold assessment, a man performing composure while he calculated the fastest route to the outcome he wanted.
I had spent eighteen months building a file on Ivan Morozov. I had read every intercept, every financial record, every intelligence assessment of his character and his methods. I had understood him, intellectually, as a man of systematic cruelty. Not the theatrical kind, not the kind that needed an audience, but the quiet administrative kind that locked doors and closed exits and handed daughters to men like Roman Davidof with the same deliberate care he used to file shipping manifests.
Looking at him now, in this room, suspecting what he had done to Polina last night, knowing what he had done to her mother fourteen years ago, I found that the intellectual understanding and the visceral reality were two very different things, and that standing six feet from this man without showing him a single degree of what I was feeling required more discipline than almost anything I had done in eleven years of this work.
“Mr. Kane.” His voice was warm. Practiced. “I wondered when you would come.”
“I imagine you did,” I said.
We looked at each other across the study. Behind me, through the walls of the house, I heard the front door being smashed in.
