Page 115 of Mafia King’s Dangerous Vow

Tamara looks up. “Would Anna recognize him?”

“No indication.”

“Would Ivan?”

Yuri pauses for half a beat. “Unlikely.”

She hears the space between unlikely and impossible. I hate that she has to.

“What else?” Igor asks.

“Second vehicle.” The image shows a car. “Gray Subaru. Less conspicuous. Registered to a woman in Poughkeepsie who doesn’t exist. Plates are real, identity is not. Passed Anna’s street twice in ten days. No stop. No contact.”

“Route check,” I say.

“Yes.”

Mikhail leans forward, elbows on his knees now. The performance has left him. “So he isn’t only watching. He’s confirming access.”

“Lightly,” Yuri says. “No pattern tight enough to alert the household.”

“Because he doesn’t think anyone else knows,” Tamara says.

Every man in the room looks at her. “If Papa knew you had found them, there would be more than two cars and a man driving past a school pretending not to look. This is maintenance. Not panic.”

She is right. The fact that she can read him this clearly makes my chest feel too tight.

Igor’s gaze moves from Tamara to me. “Then we keep it that way.”

“Yes,” I say.

The next page is Pavel Morozov. “We have the payment route, the medical transport invoice, and enough to prove he was involved. He died eighteen months ago.”

Tamara doesn’t blink. I could stop the briefing. I don’t. Stopping it would be worse. It would decide for her again.

“The pressure point we have is the adoption attorney,” Yuri continues. “Samuel Berman. Retired now. Office closed three years ago. He handled the private-placement file that made Ivan Morozov legally adoptable. The file is sealed, but the consent documents are irregular. Signatures, dates, witness names—enough problems that someone in that office knew the paperwork was dirty. Two clerks are still alive. One in Queens, one in Florida.”

“Was he bribed?” Tamara asks.

Yuri looks at her directly this time. “Almost certainly.”

“Did he know the baby was stolen?”

“We don’t know. He may have known only that the file was dirty.”

I keep my hands flat on the edge of the table.

Yuri marks the attorney’s name with a red tab. “School next. Ivan attends Hudson Valley Conservatory School. Private. Small. Arts-focused. Anna teaches there, which gives him tuition remission and keeps their daily routine tightly contained.”

Yuri places the final folder on the table. “The Colombians are still pushing at the edges,” he says. “Not openly. Offers to smaller families. Quiet approaches to port contacts. Better percentages. Cleaner terms. They’re waiting to see whether the Sokolov-Kalinin alliance fractures.”

Tamara looks from Yuri to Igor, then to me. “So if you break with my father now, they move in.”

“Yes,” Igor says.

“And if they move in, you lose routes.”

“Not all of them,” I say. “Enough.”