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Dino’s is bang in the middle. A single bulb over the door. A buzzer. Heavy curtains behind the ground-floor windows. If you did not know, you would think someone ordinary lived there and did their washing next door and bought overpriced coffee on Sundays and never asked what happened in the rooms at the back after midnight.

But I do know.

I pull in a street away and kill the lights. The engine ticks as it cools.

Snow gathers on the bonnet slowly but surely. I’ve got a decent enough view, but I’m not so close that I’ll arouse any suspicion.

“Get to work” I command, deliberately holding any sense of doubt or emotion back.

“Yes, Pakhan,” Elias replies, his words sending a chill through me. “I won’t let you down…”

Two hours later the door of Dino’s Studio opens and he comes out.

I am already moving. I reach across and push the passenger door wide before he is fully off the pavement.

Elias drops into the seat.

The door slams.

My heart is a fist against my ribs as I put the Mercedes into gear and pull away from the curb hard enough that the rear end squats on the salted stone.

He is here. He is whole. No one followed the boy out. No shout. No second man in the doorway.

This tells me that he was not rumbled. That should be enough.

But somehow… the tension in the car is a living thing. It sits between us with the smell of his cold coat and the faint trace of whiskey that is not mine.

I drive. I watch the mirrors. I watch his hands fidget in his lap. I cannot bear the pictures my mind is building of what he may have done in those back rooms with Tito Lucci.

His hands. His mouth. The smile Elias uses when he wants a man to look twice.

Whatever it takes, I told him. No matter what.

The words taste like blood now.

I take three corners I do not need and then I pull over. A side street. Dark. A skip and a bricked-up doorway and snow already filling the tracks I just made.

I kill the engine.

“Did you complete it?” My voice is low. It does not shake. “Did you make contact with Tito?”

Elias turns in the seat. His face slightly pink from the cold and from whatever happened behind that door.

“He wasn’t there,” he says. “Tito didn’t show. But I got close to the men who were waiting for him. I established highly valuable intel on him. The rotation of places he uses to sleep when he doesn’t use his secret base. Which nights he prefers Dino’s. Who drives him when he wants to look like nobody. And it isn’t only you…” He swallows. “There is a building plot. Not only against you. Against two other Pakhans. Maxim Kovalev. Nikolai Checkov. They want the structure down. All three of you. One after the other if they can time it.”

I nod.

The information lands clean. Maxim and Nikolai asked me for time in a diner while their ports and partnerships burned. Now I know why the Lucci have been circling. They are not only coming for my throat. They are coming for the accords themselves.

“Good,” I say. “Thank you. That is more than I sent you for.”

The gratitude is real. The rest of me is still an animal that spent two hours imagining another man’s hands on him.

It breaks.

I cannot control my urge.

I reach for Elias. There is nothing measured in it. I drag him across the console and his mouth is already open when it hits mine.