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Dinner at the Iron Wolf began that night with the understanding that no one was allowed to say the words Veles, port authorization, or perimeter while holding a fork. Riley enforced the rule by threatening to remove the plate of anyone who violated it.
Maxim lasted four minutes.
“The east approach—”
Riley took his bread, and he stopped speaking immediately.
The round table had been cleared of maps and weapons. Platters replaced the screens. Roasted chicken, potatoes, black bread, vegetables, salad: enough food to suggest Riley believed final operations required aggressive carbohydrate loading.
Sergei sat beside me.
Amy and I discussed three new costume sketches for Nocturne. Sloane told an increasingly implausible story about Nikolai attempting yoga. Ivan complained that Kit had renamed one of his secure devices Tiny Paranoid Box. Aleksei insisted the name damaged the equipment’s dignity.
Kit’s phone vibrated in the middle of dessert. No one spoke while she read the message. Then she placed the device in front of me.
Dmitry’s reply contained no threat and no dramatic flourish.
Tomorrow. 10:00 PM. Janus waterfront warehouse. Do not bring the Shield.
Sergei read the words over my shoulder.
He asked, “Do you accept?”
“I accept.”
Kit sent the confirmation.
Then Riley slid Sergei’s bread back onto his plate.
“That’s a problem for tomorrow, though,” she said. “Tonight, we just focus on dinner.”
So that’s what we did.
CHAPTER 30
Alessia
The next day…
I stepped out of the Bellandi sedan at nine fifty-two. The driver didn’t open my door or offer an arm, which was intentional. Tonight, I was supposed to be a furious daughter acting without her father’s blessing and a newly married woman who had learned too late that Sergei Morozov considered vows another kind of cage.
My wedding ring hung from a fine platinum chain beneath my blouse, lying directly over my heart. My left hand was deliberately bare. The high neckline of my sweater covered the collar beneath it.
Kit’s voice entered my ear as I approached the loading dock.
“I got you.”
I walked forward and opened the steel door. Once I was inside, I looked around. The interior of the warehouse looked less like the secret heart of an international criminal network and more like an old customs warehouse no one had bothered updating since the seventies. The concrete floor had been painted gray, though tire marks and years of freight had worn the center nearly white. Steel shelving rose along the walls, stacked with sealed art crates, numbered shipping cases, and climate-controlled containers belonging to people wealthy enough to store paintings where governments couldn’t easily find them.
Near the center of the warehouse, a glass-walled office had been scrubbed clean and lit for the meeting. A steel desk occupied one side. A black computer tower sat beneath it, connected to an old monitor. A maintenance cable disappeared from the rear of the tower into the wall—the Janus service uplink Kit had compromised before dawn.
I entered the office without looking too long at it.
Levon Petrosyan stood beside the desk. He was broader than the photographs suggested, with silver threaded through dark hair and the composed elegance of a man who paid other people to commit his crimes for him. His dark charcoal suit was expensive. So was the heavy black ring on his right hand. Unlike Arsen’s, the eternity mark had a narrow section filled with red enamel.
Beside him waited a thin man in a gray suit carrying a legal folder. I knew that he was Levon’s chosen nominee. Levon intended to place him inside the Bellandi companies I controlled, give him voting access, and to use him as the respectable face of his power.
Levon studied me with the quiet entitlement of someone who had spent eleven years imagining the moment Raffaele Bellandi’s daughter finally entered his reach.
