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“Kallistratos.” The voice carries the same gravel it always has, a man six months past a blade that should’ve finished him and wearing the survival like it cost him nothing. “The Geneva line’s dead. Evelina took it apart account by account, all the way to a notary’s office that locked its doors in the spring. They cleaned the way out behind them. There’s no thread left to pull.”

“Another dead end.”

“Yes.” Air moving on his end of it. “Anything on your side?”

The page is on the desk down the hall, eight years cold, the one door I’ve sealed for the night. “Nothing I can move on.”

It’s not a lie, but not the clean truth either. Volkov has put enough men in the ground to hear the gap where the rest of it should be, but he also knows when to leave it alone. Though we share an alliance, we’re not friends enough to go digging in each other’s silences. What we have came through blood, and it holds like a working tool holds, not like a friendship does.

He stays on the line past the point the business closes. Then his voice drops under itself.

“I heard. The yacht. Your boy, your mother and father.” A pause he doesn’t rush. “I’m sorry.”

The cold rises through the soles of my feet without being sent for, the way it does now, an uninvited tenant that’s stopped knocking. I keep my eyes on the lit grid below me and say nothing to the front of it, because there’s nothing to be said and we’re both old enough in this to know that filling the silence is the cruelty, not the silence itself.

“I buried a brother,” he says. “I won’t stand here and tell you it’s the same shape, because a brother and a son aren’t the same loss and I won’t insult either of us by pretending. But I know the house after. How it stays quiet. How you keep half-listening for a sound that isn’t coming back into it. I know that piece.”

Lavro, unspoken, the same as I leave Nikos unspoken. Two men holding a phone between them and refusing to say their dead out loud.

“We’re not friends, you and I.” He says it without apology, because it’s true. “But if there’s a thing you need. Men, money, a door I can take off its hinges for you. The number’s the same.”

“I need the one who lit the match.” It leaves me lower than I planned, the single true thing the cold has left me room to carry. “Find me that. I’ll do the rest myself. I’ll do to him exactly what he did to a sixteen-year-old who wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

The line holds steady. Volkov doesn’t reach for comfort, which is the most use he’s been all night, and after a breath he says, “Then we find him.”

The grief is in the room with me now, but I have no hours to give it, so I do the only thing that has ever reliably worked, which is turn and walk at the next problem before the cold sets hard around my ankles. The next problem is down the hall, feuding with a dead man through a monitor.

Elena hasn’t moved much. She’s deep into the next account of numbers now. Her hair’s escaped her ponytail and gone its own way. She’s got a bare foot up on the seat of the chair with her knee tucked to her chest, the least professional posture this office has held in its existence, and she doesn’t bother turning around when I come in.

“If you’re here to radiate at me, I moved the live-tracking to the left screen, so your usual weather won’t reach it. You’ll have to develop a new front.”

“Have you ever fired a gun?”

Her head comes around. She turns the chair, her foot dropping to the floor, and for half a second the dry delivery slips while she works out whether the words she heard are the words I said.

“No,” she says. “I’m an accountant. I shoot routing numbers. They don’t shoot back, which is the entire reason I chose the career.”

“You’re about to learn.”

8

Elena

Adrianos goes to arrange the gun, and I sit in the room he left, trying to think about anything except the gun.

It doesn’t work, because my brain is a completist and it wants to inventory exactly why the idea turns my stomach. Here’s the inventory. I have spent twenty-eight years building a life out of things that hold still while you read them. Paper holds still. Ink holds still. A number sits in its cell and waits for you to understand it and never once decides it’s done waiting and reaches for a weapon. A gun is the opposite proposition. A gun is the sentence the conversation ends on, and I have never wanted to be in a conversation that ends that way, on either side of it. Kalliopi used to tease me that I’d survive an apocalypse purely because I’d be down in a basement archive and forget to come up. She wasn’t wrong. The archive is where I’m brave. Out here, where things point at you, I’m a woman who flinches at a stapler.

So I do the brave thing I actually have, which is the work, and the work runs me straight into a wall I can’t climb.

The live accounts give me three more hours and a fat handful of nothing. They’re clean. All of them, scrubbed by a hand that’s had years to learn its trade, and there’s no torn edge anywhere to get a nail beneath. Every road in the present is paved. Which leaves the one road he doesn’t want me on: the cold page squared on the corner of his desk, which I keep glancing at as if it might glance back. Berezin. The first leak, from back when the thief was still an amateur and left a thumbprint in the wet concrete. Adrianos wants me forward, on the live trail, because the dead man is a door he’s welded shut. I understand the impulse. I also know it’s the wrong call, and a wrong call sitting unchallenged near me is a physical discomfort, like a picture hung crooked. You don’t break a fraud by studying the part the criminal perfected. You study the part he hadn’t learned to hide yet. You go to the beginning, and you go in person.

Because I don’t read beginnings on a screen. A screen gives you the transaction, scrubbed, flattened, and translated into somebody else’s idea of what mattered. The room gives you the rest, the cabinet that actually held it, the page a living hand actually creased, the stale air of an office where good money first turned. I trust my own eyes over anybody’s summary, every time, and it’s the trait that’s made my career and the trait Kalliopi swore would put me in a ditch one day. But she’s the one in the ground now, so the universe and I clearly disagree about whose recklessness was the problem.

Adrianos’ office is dark when I pass it. The hall is empty. The whole floor is empty, no Stavros, no Evander, no low Greek murmuring behind any door, the penthouse hollowed out around whatever he left to set up so I could learn to hold a weapon I never want to hold. There’s no one here to tell me to stay put, so I see no reason why I can’t leave.

The elevator opens onto a lobby, and the doorman opens the street door for me. I put my hand up for a cab, then give the driver the last address in Berezin’s filings, a tired building in the Garment District. The entire ride south, my head is so crowded with what I might find that I don’t even realize we arrived.

His name is still on the glass.