Page 46

“No. You’re coming with me.”

* * *

The Iron Wolf’s back room was full by the time we arrived. Maxim sat at the round table with the black file already in front of him, one hand resting over the cover without opening it. Nikolai stood near the bar instead of taking his usual chair, his shoulders tight beneath a dark shirt. Aleksei occupied the place opposite Maxim, immaculate as always, though the cold set of his face had stripped away every trace of his usual polish. Ivan and Kit took the screens. Alessia sat beside me without waiting for permission.

Maxim looked at me. “Show me what you found.”

Kit put Dmitry’s image on the main screen, while Ivan set the evidence pouch beside it.

“The rounds used by the Armenians during the attempted kidnapping of Alessia were purchased through the same dead Orlov shell that appears in the Moscow transfer,” he said. “That shell is now feeding weapons into Petrosyan crews.”

Nikolai moved first, crossing the room until Dmitry’s face filled the space in front of him. “He’s here, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And the fight against me?”

“It was reconnaissance.”

Nikolai turned his head toward me. The playfulness usually hiding beneath his violence had vanished completely.

“He let me break his face so he could count our guards?”

“He came to see how we moved when challenged in public. The fight gave him a reason to case us and our place here in Boston.”

Nikolai stared at the image for another moment. “Then next time I’ll break more than his face.”

Maxim cleared his throat as he glanced back at me.

“What did you see that night our parents died?”

The room narrowed to sensory snippets of memory.

I remembered the smoke first. Thick and hot enough to scrape the throat. Gasoline. Burned rubber. The chemical noxiousness of ruined upholstery. My mother’s perfume had lingered beneath it all.

“I was six steps behind the car,” I said. “You were near the curb with the driver. The bomb went off before Mama reached the passenger door. I remember that you were thrown into the street. I woke up against the wall.”

I could still feel the grit between my teeth. Glass had filled my mouth, bright and sharp beneath my tongue. I had spit blood and crawled toward a car that no longer looked like a car.

“There were men across the street,” I continued. “Three. They began moving before anyone else understood what had happened.”

“Were they Volkov?” Aleksei asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?” Nikolai said.

“One wore their crest. Another was the man who collected payments for Yuri Volkov in Presnensky. I didn’t see the last man’s face.” I looked down at the photograph of the transfer instead of at my brothers.

I didn’t say anything else, and my brothers gave me that. No one asked whether our mother had still been alive when I reached her. No one asked what remained of our father or why my coat had been covered in so much blood when Maxim woke to me standing beside him in the hospital.

My brothers knew there were answers a man could give only once, and some he couldn’t survive giving at all.

“Enough,” Maxim said, pressing both palms against the table. “We need to stop treating this as three separate problems,” he said. “The Bellandi war is not one problem, the Petrosyan attack another, and the Volkov investigation something buried in our past. Until we prove otherwise, we treat the three as a single enemy.”

“Someone is protecting the person at the top,” Aleksei said. “Every order must pass through another family.”

“Then we work upward,” Maxim replied. He looked to Ivan and Kit first. “Follow the trail. I want to know everything that you find.”