I make two more calls.
Yuri first. He picks up fast.
“I need eyes,” I say. “Live feeds. Anything council-tier that blinks when it shouldn’t.”
“I’m already looking,” he replies. No questions. “Call stays open.”
Good.
The second call goes to Maksim Volyn. I still need a vehicle waiting after extraction.
“Exit and burn,” I say. “One car for leaving the scene. No plates. No return. Then another with a driver two miles out.”
“Where?”
“I’ll send locations when I have them.”
A pause. Then a breath. “You’re crossing lines,” Maksim says.
“I already crossed them,” I answer.
“Send the drop,” he says. The line goes dead.
Pavel gets a message, text only, telling him to be ready for a perimeter watch as soon as I drop coordinates. Confirmations come back one after another, stripped of tone or reassurance. Oleg doesn’t need prompting. The transfer hits my account while I’m still standing at the wall.
They’ll expect me to rush in hard and loud. I won’t.
I’ll start at the edges, the men posted to watch doors and pass messages. The ones who think this is routine. I’ll make it harder for them to treat her like leverage.
When this is done, my name will be attached to it. No one will mistake who moved. I stand there a moment and look out at the city.
I sit in the car and pull up the maps again. I trace the routes and mark the time gaps between checkpoints. I circle three locations and stare at them until one doesn’t fit the pattern.
That’s the one.
I pull up a number I haven’t used in years and let it ring.
8
DOMINIK
The man who owes me his life doesn’t make me wait, which tells me he knows exactly what it means that I’m calling. He knows I don’t call for nothing. He also knows picking up could pull him right back into a mess he wants to stay out of.
His name is Lev Antonov. Former Bratva logistics. He used to move women, money, and documents through the cracks between jurisdictions, never asking what they were worth, only how fast they had to disappear. Lev was never a killer and never a planner. He was a carrier. He moved what others couldn’t risk touching.
Years ago, during a purge Markov ordered half drunk and fully angry, Lev froze at the wrong moment. A man came up behind him with a gun already raised. I saw it, stepped in, and put a bullet through the man aiming at his back and told Lev to run. He did. We never spoke again.
Until now.
He answers on the first ring.
“You shouldn’t be calling me,” he says.
“I shouldn’t be doing a lot of things,” I reply. “Where is she?”
Silence. I hear his breathing, paper shifting.
“She came in,” Lev says finally. “Six hours ago. Maybe less.” Then he lowers his voice. “I moved her. Where she stays isn’t my business.”
