Page 61 of My Wedding Night Massacre

He looks at the map for another few seconds, then up at me.

“About time,” he says.

Three years. Three years of building this from a hospital bed in Palermo, from Leoni’s villa outside the city, from every call, contact, favor called in, debt leveraged, and name added to a list that kept growing. All of it pointed at this. All of it waiting for the moment the board shifted enough to move without losing everything before it started.

The board has shifted.

I make two calls. The first to Romeo, who’s been running perimeter surveillance on the east side holdings since before the extraction and has the updated position of Bogdan’s remaining visible security. The second to Leoni’s number in Palermo, which patches through to the three men in New York waiting on my signal. Both conversations are short. The signal goes.

By noon, the first account structure starts to move.

Misha tracks it from the laptop across the table, his good hand working the keyboard, his shoulder held still. He gives me updates in one or two words. Moving. Clean. Done. The Baladin connection severs cleanly at one-fifteen in the afternoon, without any visible event to announce it as an action rather than an administrative processing error. It’ll take Bogdan’s people time to find it. It’ll take more time to understand what it means. By the time they do, the second layer will already be moving.

The afternoon goes on this way. The city outside does its indifferent thing. The intelligence channels stay quiet, Bogdan’s silence pressing against the windows like weather building on the other side of the glass. He’ll feel the account move eventually. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow morning. When he does, the silence will end.

I’m ready for it to end.

Around three, I hear Denis.

Not distress, not crying, just his voice carrying from the back of the villa, the full conversational volume of a two-year-old. A question, then Pavlina’s voice answering, lower and clear, taking it seriously. Then Denis again, the follow-up to an answer that apparently opened three more things he needs to know.

I set the pen down and go to the corridor. The door at the far end is half open, the room beyond it full of thin afternoon light coming through the window. I stop in the doorway.

Pavlina is on the floor with her back against the bed, Denis in her lap, a board book open between them, one of Leoni’s grandchildren’s things found in a drawer somewhere. Denis has the book, and he’s pointing at something on the page, his small finger moving with authority.

“Why does the bear have a hat?” he asks, but not like he’s questioning it. It’s more like he’s throwing out an accusation directed at the page.

“Because he’s going somewhere,” Pavlina says.

Denis considers this. “Where?”

“Somewhere important.”

He looks at the picture again, weighing it. “Does he need the hat?”

“He thinks so,” she says. “That’s what matters.”

A long pause while he processes the implications of a bear who thinks he needs a hat. Then he turns the page, apparently satisfied, moving on to whatever the bear does next.

Pavlina hasn’t seen me. Her hair is loose, she’s still in yesterday’s clothes, her face at rest in a way it almost never is in rooms with other people in them. She looks like herself. Not the fake or the hollowed-out version from surveillance photographs, or the woman moving through her father’s house with composure, doing all the work. Just herself, on the floor with her son, explaining hats.

Denis asks another question. She answers. He points again.

I stand in the doorway long enough that I have to make myself stop. Then I turn back to the corridor.

There’s still Bogdan. That piece hasn’t fallen yet. The justice my father is owed by the man who orchestrated his organization’s destruction. None of it is finished. None of it will be until it is, and it isn’t yet.

But that room. That light. Those two people on the floor with a bear in a hat.

That’s what the three years were for.

I go back to the table. Misha looks up when I come in, reads my face, then looks back down at his screen without a word.

I sit and pick up the pen.

The financial dismantling is running. The crew is positioned. The plan is clean. Outside, Bogdan’s silence presses against the glass, and somewhere in the city, he’s sitting very still, drawing a new board, preparing a response I’m not going to give him enough time to fully form.

He built everything he has on the assumption that I was gone.