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“For Philip too,” she says. “His has no butter. He told me yesterday he doesn’t eat dairy.”

Leo looks down at the bag. Then at me over her shoulder. He’s been working for me for six years. I’ve never seen that expression on his face.

“Thank you, Miss Maximova,” he says.

“Galana is fine,” she says gently before closing the door.

At eight thirty, Zhenya and Milana start an argument in the hallway about the car. It’s loud and getting louder, the kind that’s only partly about a car. I don’t know these women. I don’t know what’s under it, or how long it’s been building.

Galana does.

She walks out into the hallway, says something I can’t hear, quietly, to each of them in turn. Thirty seconds later, Milana’s laughing, Zhenya’s rolling her eyes, and both of them are out the front door together.

She comes back into the kitchen and checks the thing in the oven like nothing has happened.

Nobody thanks her. Not once. Not for the coffee or the pills, or the lunchbox, or the keys, or the peace in the hallway. She doesn’t seem to notice they haven’t. She takes the apple cake out, sets it on the rack to cool, and starts on the dishes.

I sit at her kitchen table and finally understand something I should have understood before all this.

Yaroslav didn’t pick me because I’m good with a gun.

He had men who were good with guns. Dozens of them. He had Garick for Arina, because Arina needs someone who’d stand beside her in the fire and never flinch. He had Theo for Evaria, because Evaria needs someone big enough to make her feel safe while she learned to be brave.

And for Galana, he chose a man he knew would notice.

She’s spent her whole life taking care of people who don’t see it. He knew that. He watched it happen, in his own house, for twenty-some years. And he couldn’t fix it, because he was one of the people who didn’t see it either.

So he found a man who sees everything.

Somebody who’d look at the flour on her hands and clothes and understand what it cost.

The old bastard.

I watch her at the sink, washing up, with her sleeves pushed up, humming something under her breath. Then I pick up the teatowel resting on the island, and begin drying the dishes as she washes them.

I think of the house in Winnetka.

A client signed it over to me three years ago, instead of paying the bill. Five bedrooms, a garden that runs down toward the lake, a kitchen nobody’s ever cooked in. I’ve slept there maybe a dozen times. It still has the last owner’s furniture in it, and the last owner’s art on the walls. I’ve never even bought a towel.

I picture her in that kitchen. Flour on her hands. The windows steamed up. Children’s shoes kicked off in a heap by the back door, and the house full of noise. And me standing in the doorway, listening to her sing.

I’ve never wanted anything like that in my life.

I want it so badly now that my chest aches.

At eleven, Arkady’s files finally come through.

Galana’s gone upstairs to strip the beds. I’ve got the house to myself, and the screens in the study, and an hour of uninterrupted quiet to tear through everything Ivor’s man sent me.

It’s mostly what I expected. Broker records, encrypted listings. The package itself, in fragments, as it was offered. I go through it page by page.

The floor plans are from Riddings’s installation. I recognize the file format and the little watermark in the corner. The camera positions are from Riddings’s system too. Brenner could have pulled both of those in his eleven minutes in May.

Then I get to the guard rotation.

And I stop.

It’s the current rotation. The new one. The rotation Yaroslav changed at the start of July, after the old system went dark, because he was paranoid and didn’t trust anyone. He changed it himself, by hand. He wrote it on a sheet of paper in his study. He gave a copy to his head of security and to nobody else.