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I store that away. Financial records. He’s already thinking in the same direction I am.

Two more calls. One about the symbol, someone on the other end with nothing useful. Volkov listens for twenty seconds and cuts it off. “Call me when you have something real.” The second is entirely in Russian. I catch enough to understand they’re trying to confirm whether the second victim had any direct contact with the first. From Volkov’s face, the answer is not yet.

Marka comes in at the ninety-minute mark, speaks quietly near the door, and leaves. Whatever he said made Volkov’s jaw tighten.

I turn another page I haven’t read.

The men who report to him are efficient about it, no wasted movement, no performance. They just do what he says because not doing it would be stupid, and they all know it.

It’s the most unsettling thing I’ve seen him do in two weeks. More unsettling than the breakfast comments, more unsettling than what happened under the meeting table. This is what he actually is, stripped of everything else, and it is objectively impressive, and I find that deeply inconvenient.

Two hours pass. The security sweep runs longer than expected. Marka reports in the second time with something that tightens Volkov’s jaw. I don’t ask. I have absorbed nothing from my book because I’m thinking about the symbol.

I caught enough snippets of conversation that I connected information into something coherent. Wolf-crown. First scene, Declan’s cousin’s kid. Now a second scene, different family, same mark. Two murders, same signature, no faction claiming it. It doesn’t fit into anything I know about this world, which isn’t much, but I know enough to know that when violence goes unclaimed it’s not random. Someone chose to leave that mark and chose not to explain it, and those two choices together mean something.

“The symbol,” I say, when Volkov gets off a call, and there’s a gap of silence. I say it casually, like it’s just occurred to me. “The wolf-crown. Is it a known mark?”

He sets his phone down and turns to face me. He doesn’t answer immediately. He looks at me for a long moment, deciding how much to give. I hold his gaze and wait.

“We have nothing,” he says. “No faction, no family, nothing in any database we’ve got. First showed up six weeks ago.”

“At the Declan scene.”

“Da.” He pulls a chair and sits across from me, elbows on his knees, which isn’t a posture I’ve seen on him before. Almost conversational. “Two bodies. Different families, different parts of the city, same mark. Whoever’s doing it wants it seen.”

“A message,” I say.

“A message.” He looks at me. “Question is who it’s to.”

“Or it’s not a message to anyone specific,” I say. “It’s a declaration. This is what we are, and we’re not hiding.”

“You think like a cop,” he says. “Or a criminal.”

“I think like a lawyer,” I say. “Same logic, different tools.”

He almost smiles. He doesn’t, but it’s close. “Crown’s scared,” he says. “Two bodies, no leads, nobody to hit back at. That’s worse than knowing who did it.”

“Because you can’t respond,” I say. “You can’t make an example if you don’t have a target.”

“Da.”

“What do you know about the victims?” I ask. “Beyond family connection.”

“First one was young. Twenty-two, nobody really, just hung around the edges.” He scrolls his phone. “This one’s fifty. Mid-level. Did some financial work for one of DeLuca’s operations.”

I go very still.

Financial work. I keep my face right and my voice level. “Any connection between them? The two victims?”

“Not that we’ve found yet,” he says.

I nod like that’s satisfying and go back to my book.

Financial work for a DeLuca subsidiary. The files run through my head, the shell company structures I’ve been tracing, the routing that goes through layers I haven’t fully unpacked. I’ve been treating the files as a window into my father’s situation. I haven’t been treating them as a window into something larger.

“The symbol itself,” I say, a few minutes later. “Is it old? Does it reference anything historical?”

Volkov puts his phone down and looks at me differently this time, his head tilted to the side. “Why?”