Page 30

“A lawyer,” I say. “A good one.”

“Da,” he says. “I’m starting to get that.”

I look at the coffee he put on the table without being asked. The right temperature, the right amount, no question asked. I’ve been sitting here for four hours working a problem with the man who killed my father, and it has felt, in moments, like something I don’t have a word for.

Marka comes in at the four-hour mark with the all-clear. Volkov stands, exchanges another dozen words with him, and the estate begins to unclench. I stay in the chair until the energy in the house settles.

Then I go upstairs, close the door, and open the drive.

I pull up the financial transfers and look at them with the new frame sitting over everything. Shell company routing. Dates. Amounts. I’ve been reading this as my father’s story, my father’s involvement, why he died. I haven’t been reading it as part of something with its own history, its own prior claim, its own logic that predates him by decades.

Old Bratva. Pre-Crown. Forty, fifty years ago.

My father was in his mid-twenties then. New to whatever world he’d been drawn into. Young enough to be recruited. Young enough to be useful to someone who needed clean hands and no record and a man who could move money without leaving tracks.

I look at the oldest communications in the files. The dates on the earliest transfers.

My hands go still on the keyboard.

The wolf-crown symbol at the murder scene. The financial structures in my father’s files. The routing patterns I’ve been tracing for weeks without understanding where they lead.

They could lead to the same place. I don’t know that yet. I don’t have enough to know that yet. But the signs are there, sitting just at the edge of what I can see. I’m close. I can feel it.

I close the laptop and sit in the dark.

I came in here to destroy Volkov Nazarov. That hasn’t changed. But my father wasn’t just a casualty of one man’s decision. He was a piece in something that was already moving before I was born, and Volkov may be as much inside it as he is on top of it. I don’t know what to do with that yet. I put it with everything else I’m not ready to look at directly.

12

Volkov

“Shut up,” I say, and the room does.

Six men around the table. Dmitri with his hands flat on the wood, already knowing better than to move them. Alexei to his left, jaw tight, eyes forward. The others the same. Marka at the end, arms crossed, eyes on me, already doing the math on whether I’m going to break something.

I’m not going to break anything. Not yet.

“Two bodies,” I say. “Same mark. No one claiming it. You’ve all had a week to find me something and what I’m hearing is nothing.” I look at each of them in turn, slowly. “You know what nothing gets you in my organization? Nothing gets you a very bad fucking week. So let’s try again. What do we have?”

Silence. The silence of men who’ve been around long enough to know what comes after questions like that.

I let it run for five seconds. Then I answer my own question because that’s apparently what I’m doing now.

“Pre-Crown mark. Old faction, forty fifty years back, most of them got swallowed or put down when the Crown formed. Someone’s using it now, which means either they’ve been sitting on it for fifty years or they dug it up on purpose.” I put my hands flat on the table. “Either way, they want us to see it. They want us sitting exactly where we’re sitting right now, which is confused and unable to shoot at anything.” I look at Marka. “Second victim. DeLuca connection confirmed?”

“Financial work for one of Lorenzo’s subsidiaries,” Marka says. “Three years. Clean on paper.”

“It’s never clean,” I say. “Find out what he actually touched. Names, accounts, who knew his schedule, who he ate lunch with. All of it.” I straighten. “And cross-reference everything in Berezin’s network against the shell companies linked to the victim. I want to know if there’s an overlap. Any overlap. One name, one date, one dollar amount that shows up in both places, I want it on my desk.”

Dmitri shifts in his chair, just barely, one inch to the left like he’s got something to say and thought better of it halfway through. I look at him, and he goes still, face flat, hands back on the table.

“Something you want to add, Dmitri?”

“No,” he says.

“You sure? Because your ass just moved like you had an opinion.”

“I’m sure,” he says.