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“Good.” I pick up my jacket. “Nobody touches anything until I say so. No hits. No approaches. No contact with anything Crown-adjacent that could tell them we’re looking. We watch, we learn, and when I’ve got enough to aim at something I’ll aim.” I look around the table one last time. “And if anyone in this room runs their own threads on this without coming to me first, I won’t send Marka. I’ll come myself. Are we clear?”

Every man says yes. I can see it in every set of shoulders in the room, the drop that happens when men stop calculating and start complying. The newer ones don’t know what personally looks like. The older ones do. Both sets of eyes are the same right now.

I walk out.

Marka catches up in the hallway, but I keep moving.

“Crown meeting in two weeks,” he says.

“I know.”

“Lorenzo’s going to want something real.”

“Then I’ll have something real.” I don’t slow down. “Or I won’t, and I’ll handle Lorenzo. Not your problem either way.”

He stops following, letting me go.

The rest of the morning is phones. Port. Territory. Lorenzo’s office calls and I take it in ninety seconds and cut it because there’s nothing to report and I don’t do theater. Normal operational shit, the kind that fills up the hours and doesn’t fill up anything else. Ten weeks of this. Ten weeks of keeping the machine running while the thing underneath it just sits there and doesn’t move, doesn’t get smaller, doesn’t do anything except remind me every few hours that I made a promise on a warehouse floor with blood on my hands and I haven’t kept it.

By early afternoon I’m done with the phones, done with the noise, done with all of it. I tell Marka I’m unavailable and I go upstairs to Lavro’s door, second on the right, and push it open.

The room is the same as I left it. I don’t come in here often enough to change anything, and I don’t want to. The photographs on the wall, the bottle on the desk, all of it exactly where it should be. I’ve been in this house thirty-eight years of my life, and the only room that feels like it belongs to someone worth a damn is this one, and the person it belonged to has been dead for ten weeks, and I still can’t figure out what to do with that, so I just keep the door closed and the bottle full and leave it alone.

I sit in the chair by the window, but don’t touch the bottle yet.

Ten weeks. The name I promised him is still out there breathing. I’ve got a symbol, a dead financial operator, and a wife who found something in Berezin’s apartment and is working it on a drive she thinks I don’t know about. I could take it. I’ve thought about it. But it’s encrypted, and she’s Berezin’s daughter, which means she might know things about how he structured it that none of my guys would. She grew up with the man. Whatever he hid and however he hid it, she’s got a better shot at understanding it than anyone I could put on it. Smarter to let her work and take everything she’s found at once. I promised Lavro I’d find who gave the order and every morning that fact is the first thing sitting on my chest.

I hear the door.

She stops in the doorway. Her eyes move across the room, the desk, the photograph, the bottle, me in the chair. I watch her figure it out.

My jaw locks.

She’s got no business here. Nobody has business here. I’ve had men in this house for ten weeks who’ve kept away from this door without being told to, because they know me well enough to know what happens if they don’t. She’s been here three weeks and has already figured out which rooms matter and apparently decided that doesn’t apply to her because she steps inside anyway.

Pulls the door most of the way shut. Doesn’t apologize. Doesn’t ask. I don’t tell her to leave, and I’ll deal with why later. I’ll tell myself it’s because she’s useful and she’s in this house for a reason and keeping her close is part of the plan, and that’ll be enough for now.

She goes to the photographs on the wall. I stay in the chair with my hands on my knees, watch her, and keep very still because if I stand up right now I don’t know what I do next, and that’s not a feeling I have often. I don’t like it.

She stops at the waterfront photograph. Lavro mid-laugh at something only he could see. He was always laughing at things only he could see.

“He looks like you,” she says.

My hands push into my knees hard enough to hurt. I keep my mouth shut.

She moves to the next one. Young Lavro and I, outside our father’s house, a neighborhood that’s been torn down and built over twice since then. She looks at it properly.

“Who took this?”

“Our mother,” I say, my voice barely audible.

She nods, then moves to the desk and stands in front of the grinning photograph. She doesn’t touch it, which is good instinct, but I’m not going to tell her that.

“My father had one like this,” she says. She’s talking to the photograph, not to me. “The two of us at a chess tournament in Chicago. I was fourteen. I’d just beaten a sixteen-year-old in the final round, and he looked like I’d handed him the world.” She stops. “He kept it on his desk. I used to tease him about it because I’m making an awful face, very serious, like I’m calculating the opponent’s death, and he thought that was funny.”

I look at the bottle instead of her.

“He called every Sunday at ten,” she says. “I answered on the second ring because answering on the first felt too eager and I was twenty-six years old with a law degree and some standards.” The dry control in her voice drops out for a second. Just a second, but it’s enough for me to catch. “He flew to Chicago for every moot court competition I had. Even the losses. Especially the losses.”