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A week later, he was dead.

I didn’t think about it again. Papa had a lot of strange visitors. Men he shouted at. Men he didn’t. I learned a long time ago not to ask.

But Geoff walked that man in. Past the gatehouse, without a call. Without a log.

And Geoff is the only person Papa ever trusted with a copy of the guard rotation.

I look down at the business card in my hand. My fingers are cold.

“Caleb,” I say.

My voice comes out strange. Thin. In the study, the low Russian stops at once.

He’s in the doorway before I can say his name again.

He looks at me on the floor. At my face, and the diary in my lap. At the card in my hand, shaking very slightly.

“I think I saw him,” I say. “I think I saw the man who paid for this information.”

CALEB

My first instinct is to take the card off her and send her upstairs.

I don’t do it. But I want to, so badly that my hand actually moves toward her before I stop it.

She’s sitting on the floor of my living room with her father’s diary in her lap, pale and wide-eyed, and every part of me that’s spent twenty years keeping clients out of the line of fire is shouting the same thing. Get her out of this. Lock the door. Handle it yourself.

That’s what her father would have done. It’s what Arina did, and Garick, and me, four days ago in Yaroslav’s study, deciding things about her house while she cooked lunch for forty widows.

She looks up at me.

I crouch down in front of her. I take the card out of her cold fingers, very carefully, and look at it. Then I look at her.

“Tell me everything,” I say. “From the beginning.”

We work through Saturday night and into Sunday.

I bring my laptop into the living room and sit on the floor beside her, my back against the sofa. She makes tea, more tea than two people can drink, in a saucepan, since I apparently don’t own a kettle. She tells me about the afternoon of August twenty-eighth three times. Each time, she remembers a little more.

The first time, it’s the car, the gray suit and the shouting.

The second time, it’s that the man turned left at the bottom of the stairs without Geoff showing him the way.

“Papa’s study is on the left,” she says. “But you’d never know that from the front door. Everyone who comes to our house for the first time turns right, toward the living room. Every single person. Garick did it the first time. Theo did. You did.”

I did. I remember.

“He knew where he was going,” she says. “He’d seen the house before. Or he’d seen a picture of it.”

A floor plan. Brenner pulled the floor plans in May.

The third time she tells it, she stops in the middle and frowns at the wall.

“His ring,” she says.

“What ring?”

“When I put the tea down. He was wearing a ring on his little finger. Gold, with a stag on it.” She closes her eyes. “I remember thinking it was ugly.”