No one is supposed to have it.
I pull it out. The screen glows.UNKNOWN.
I answer it without speaking. I press it to my ear and I listen, because that's how you learn the most, by giving the other man nothing and letting him fill the silence.
At first, there's only static, the hiss of distance, of mountains and snow and miles.
Then a voice.
"Afon Satyrin," it purrs, familiar and horrible. "Playing the quiet game, eh? You always were good at that. The patient one."
Twenty years drop away. In the blink of an eye, I'm in a back room in Kingston, and there's a hungry, scrawny kid scarfing cold dumplings out of a takeout box, watching everything and saying nothing. Gervasii's hand on the kid's shoulder.
He's sharp, Afon. Sharper than both of us. We could use sharp.
"Reznik," I say.
"Bingo." He laughs. "Took you long enough to say it. You and Gervasii, you two never could justsaythe damn thing. Always dancing around it. Always the slow approach."
"How did you get this number?"
"Does it matter?" The static crackles. "There's no number that can't be bought if you know whose pocket it's sitting in." He pauses, then adds, "Though I'll admit, this one cost me. You had it tucked away somewhere expensive."
I growl, "What do you want?"
"I have something of yours," Reznik says.
"I don't have anything you could've stolen. You burned the only thing I owned. Congratulations."
"I'm not talking about the cabin,friend." He sounds entirely too pleased with himself, and that's how I know that whatever's coming next is very, very bad. "I have your nephew."
I keep the phone steady against my ear and my breathing level. Outwardly, I do not make a sound, but inside, something old and terrible cracks open, the same thing that cracked when I knelt in the snow at Saratoga Springs and looked at the place where her car went off the road.
"Matvei," I whisper.
"Bingo again," Reznik agrees. "You're good at this! Gervasii's boy is all grown up now. A lawyer, can you believe it? Soft hands. Fancy suit. He fought, though, when my men took him. I'll give him that. The blood runs true."
"He's not involved," I snarl. "He got out. He's got nothing to do with any of this."
"And yet…" Reznik lets that hang. "Funny how that works. You think you can pull a thread out of the cloth and it'll just be free. But the cloth remembers where the thread used to be." Another soft laugh. "You and Gervasii pulled me out of the gutter and stitched me into something. You think I forgot? You think I don't remember every single one of you?"
My hand is white-knuckled around the phone. "You leave Matvei out of this. This is between you and me."
"Yes," Reznik says. "It is. Which is exactly why I called."
I close my eyes.
"Here's how it goes," he says, and now his voice is brisk, businesslike, the voice of a man who's run a thousand deals and knows that the moment after you have someone by the throat is the best time to set the terms. "You come to me. Alone. No Lazarevs. No Bratva. No dog, though I hear the rabid little pup is out of commission anyway—shame, that. I liked the look of him. You come alone, on foot, unarmed."
"When?"
"Tomorrow. At noon." I can hear the smile on his end of the line. "I understand you have somewhere to be at noon. A wedding, I'm told? How nice. The Oglethorpe girl, eh? Bill's daughter, all grown up and getting married to the man who put her father in the ground. There's a poem in that somewhere. Pity that I never had the head for poems. Gervasii did. Though look where it got him."
The cold spreads from my chest down into my arms, my hands, my legs. Heknows. He knows about the wedding, knows the hour, knows everything, which means he has eyes inside or near or close enough.
Which means none of us were ever as hidden as we thought.
"You come at noon," Reznik says, "and you walk into my camp with your hands open, and the boy walks out. He goes home to his pretty wife and his soft life and he never hears my name again. You have my word."
