Page 114 of Mafia King’s Dangerous Vow

Her brow lifts. “Who?”

“My wife.”

She looks down at the ruined crêpes, the cold coffee, the flour on her bare feet. Then back at me.

“We’re going to need better breakfast before we destroy my father.”

I pick up the least terrible crêpe and take a bite. Tamara watches, suspicious as I swallow.

“I guess I’ll take care of breakfast from now on.”

The smile she gives me is small.

But it stays.

28

THE TRUTH. EDITED. (ALEKSANDER)

The study no longer looks like a room where anyone has ever read a book for pleasure. Yuri has turned the long table into a map of other people’s sins.

Photographs. Vehicle plates. Corporate filings. School schedules. Property records. Old customs documents. Phone numbers linked through shell companies and dead men. A map of Woodstock and the roads around it occupies the center, weighted at the corners by my coffee, Mikhail’s phone, and the envelope Kalinin gave Tamara yesterday.

She sits beside me, hair still damp from the shower, one leg tucked beneath her, a pencil in her hand. She has said very little since Yuri arrived, but she has missed nothing. Every time a name lands on the table, her attention moves toward it, probably organizing the world in her head the same way she does a room: sightlines, pressure points, exits.

Last night, she fell asleep with her hand open beside mine. This morning, she came into the study before I could decide whether to ask her to. That should not undo me. It does anyway.

Igor is near the windows, jacket buttoned, untouched glass in hand. Mikhail has taken the chair closest to the door and tipped it back on two legs, which means he is either relaxed or ready to move. Yuri stands at the head of the table. He has not sat down once.

“Start with the household,” Igor says.

Yuri places three photographs beside the map. “Anna Morozov. Thirty-three. Lower-school teacher at Hudson Valley Conservatory School. Widow of Pavel Morozov. No criminal record. No known connection to Kalinin beyond the adoption arrangement through her husband. Financials are clean. Salary, pension benefit from Pavel, mortgage current. One disclosed estate account from Pavel with low six figures, no deposits after his death. Likely accumulated before he died. Nothing that shows Anna knew where it came from.”

“She didn’t know,” Tamara says.

Yuri looks at her, then at me. I answer before he can make it too careful. “There’s no sign she knew.”

She doesn’t look relieved. Relief would be too simple. She writes something in the margin of the paper in front of her, her face controlled, her eyes fixed on Anna’s photograph. A woman in a navy coat, hair pulled back, holding a boy’s hand.

“What about her parents?” Tamara asks.

Yuri shifts a file toward her. “Leonid and Marina Zorin. Retired. Live fifteen minutes away. Listed as emergency contacts at the school. They pick Ivan up occasionally. No obvious connection to Pavel’s work.”

Her mouth tightens at Ivan’s name, but she doesn’t correct him.

“Does my father know about them?”

“He would if he reviewed the school forms.”

“Then he knows.” She says it without heat, as if she is confirming the load-bearing wall in a structure nobody else has finished examining. “Papa doesn’t create leverage and forget to inventory his assets.”

Mikhail lets the front legs of his chair hit the floor with a quiet thud. “I hate how reasonable that sounds.”

Yuri places a traffic camera still near the map. “Kalinin’s surveillance is light but consistent. Vehicle one passed the school twice this week. Black Lexus. On paper, it belongs to a harmless transit advisory firm. Under that, three layers down, it traces back to one of Kalinin’s freight documentation vendors.”

Igor picks up the photograph.

“The driver is Anton Kravtsov,” Yuri continues. “Former private military. Now contract work through three small firms. He has worked security for Kalinin before. Not high-level, but reliable enough to watch a school without attracting attention.”