Page 27

Then, he reached for a knife.

I caught his throat, drove him backward into the rail, and slammed his injured arm against the metal until the knife clattered down the stairs. He tried to knee me in the balls. I turned my hip, absorbed the blow, and struck him once beneath the jaw, hard enough to remove him from the conversation entirely.

He collapsed across the landing.

Behind me, Alessia picked up the fallen knife. I looked at her. She held it correctly, blade angled away from her body, one heel planted behind the other for balance.

Interesting.

“What?” she whispered.

“Stay there.”

“I was planning to.”

I crouched beside the unconscious man and retrieved the pistol. The serial number had been milled away, but not cleanly enough. It was amateur work. The weapon itself was ordinary enough, a compact Czech nine-millimeter, but the magazine was not ordinary.

Three shallow diagonal cuts marked the base plate.

My pulse slowed.

I dropped the magazine into my palm and stripped one round free. The bullet had a nickel case with green lacquer around the primer. The headstamp showed seventeen over four.

I had seen the same marks before.

Two years earlier, after Dmitry Volkov’s fight with Nikolai, one of Dmitry’s men had abandoned a weapon in the warehouse locker room. The pistol had been wiped. The ammunition hadn’t. Three diagonal cuts on the magazine. Green-sealed primers. Lot seventeen-four, one of the Balkan shipments cleared through a Volkov-controlled procurement line.

Petrosyan men didn’t use Volkov ammunition lots by accident.

“What is it?” Alessia asked.

I pocketed the magazine and the loose round.

“Something that shouldn’t be here.”

“That’s comforting.”

A shout rose from the floor above us. Then Theo’s voice came through my earpiece.

“Main floor secure. Two in custody. One dead. Police response estimated at four minutes.”

“Clear the loading route.”

“Already done, sir.”

I took the knife from Alessia and offered her my hand. She looked at it, then at me.

“Take my hand.”

“I told you already, I can walk.”

“I know.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

After one long second, she put her hand in mine. Her fingers were colder than they should have been.