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“By three years,” I say. “The shells were ready. My father was brought in afterward and handed the method.” I turn the notepad toward him. “There are eleven distinct shell entities across what I’ve traced. Four active in the chain, seven sitting unused. The reserve shells bother me more than the active ones.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t build seven shells you’re not using unless you’re planning for volume,” I say. “This infrastructure wasn’t built for four hundred thousand over two years. It was built for something larger, and either that operation hasn’t started yet, or it’s running through a channel I haven’t found.”

He looks at the notepad. Then he reaches for his phone, sends a short message, and puts it down. I go back to the transfer columns and pull the shell registration dates against the Crown meeting record. Three of the seven reserve shells were registered in the week following a Crown gathering. I write it down without commenting and push the page across when he puts his phone down.

He reads it. “Blyad,” he says, quietly.

“Yes,” I say.

We work through the rest of it over the next hour. He proposes the port routing as a possible transfer channel, and I pull it apart because the dates don’t align. He suggests the second wolf-crown victim’s financial work might connect directly to the active shell chain, I spend ten minutes on it and conclude the link is circumstantial, one shared client rather than shared ownership. He doesn’t push back when I reject his theories, he moves to the next one, which is a more efficient way to work than most people I’ve sat across a table from.

Then he proposes the reserve shells might connect to Greek network accounts, based on a registration detail his analysts flagged. I pull it apart and find the overlap in under ten minutes, a shared registration agent across three shells, and the agent’s parent company traces to a Greek-registered firm in thirty seconds.

“It’s too easy,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow.

“Evidence that presents itself this clearly usually has help,” I say. “Someone wants the trace to point toward Greek territory.”

“Da,” he says, and the speed of his agreement tells me he’d already suspected it. “Adrianos needs to know.”

“Not yet,” I say. “If you tell him before we have more, whoever planted it finds out we’ve spotted it and adjusts. Let it sit.”

“Two weeks,” he says. “Then I tell him regardless.”

“Agreed.”

The coffee has gone cold. I drink the last of mine anyway because my hands need something to do while the full weight of what we’ve built across this desk settles. My father spent three years as the logistics arm of an operation running inside the Crown. He confirmed the venue for the ambush that killed Lavro Nazarov. He was skimming on the side, afraid, building a private exit that didn’t open in time, and he died as the nearest available answer when the Bratva came looking for someone to aim at.

Volkov killed him because my father was the end of the thread he could reach. The person who put my father at the end of that thread is still alive, still sitting in rooms with four kings and a chairman, and none of them know it.

I look across the desk at the man who pulled the trigger. The revenge mission I walked into this house with is still there, unchanged, present in every breath I’ve taken in these four walls. But the target has moved, and the ground under my feet is different from what it was this morning, and I feel the shift without yet knowing where it leaves me.

“The contact number,” I say. “I’ll send you everything I have on it tonight.”

“Good,” he says.

I close my laptop, cap my pen, and stand. He’s still at the desk, eyes on me, and I hold his gaze for one beat before I turn and walk out.

The stairs are quiet, the bedroom dark except for the desk lamp. I sit down, pull out the drive, and stare at the contact number string for a long time without cracking it, because what keeps pulling at me instead is my father’s hands on a chessboard, waiting for a move that was never going to come in time.

18

Volkov

Evelina’s already at the table when I come down, notepad open, pen moving, plate untouched. I drop the folder on the table hard enough that she looks up.

“Eat,” I say.

“I have been,” she says, which is a lie, but I’ve got bigger problems than her breakfast habits, and we both know it.

I sit, pour coffee, and open the folder. The ambush file. Eleven weeks of additions, dead ends, names with lines through them. I know every page by feel, know exactly where the threads stop and the walls start. I push the first section across to her without explaining what it is, because she’ll figure it out inside ten seconds and I’m not wasting breath on a preamble.

She picks it up and reads. Her face stays closed and even, but on the second page, her hand tightens on the paper, and the knuckle goes white for a moment before she pulls it back under control. I drink my coffee.

We went through most of the information yesterday, but I never went into details that led me to kill her father. The details that led to Lavro’s death.