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“I half-thought you’d come to my table to yell at me the moment he left,” I say. “I built a whole defense speech with footnotes and everything, and now it’s going to rot inside me unspoken, which is its own small heartbreak.”

“You’d have enjoyed the yelling far too much. I don’t hand you things you enjoy where people can watch.”

“And yet, here I sit, at your table, drinking your wine, having heard every syllable you banned me from over coffee this morning.” I take a sip I don’t taste. “So tell me what happens now. What’s your next move?”

He doesn’t answer fast. He brings his eyes up to mine and keeps them there, and the warm idling thing’s gone out of them completely, no charm turning over underneath, only the dark center of him with the light somewhere behind it, looking at me like he needs me to take this in instead of arguing it down.

“He’ll give us the man,” Adrianos says. “Which means he’ll hand over the one thing he has that’s worth his own life.”

“He’s a liability,” I realize. The wine turns to vinegar on my tongue. “A witness who’s seen too much. Knows too much.”

“Yes.”

“You told him you’d keep his name private.”

“I told him his name stays buried.” Adrianos slides the card into his jacket and finally lets his eyes leave mine. “I never told him the rest of him wouldn’t be down there keeping it company.”

13

Adrianos

I choose the room myself, three floors up in a Midtown building I hold through four names that don’t lead back to me, because the only thing worse than this conversation happening is it happening somewhere I haven’t swept with my own eyes first.

It’s not the full council. Lorenzo doesn’t even know I’ve called it, because a thing said to the full table belongs to all five families inside the hour, and today I trust exactly two men with the weight I’m carrying. Volkov comes in first, lowering himself into the chair with the care of a man six months off a blade that nearly closed his account, the wolf over his heart buried under a black shirt done to the collar. Declan’s four minutes behind him, a whiskey he poured downstairs already working in his fist. He takes the seat with his back to the wall, an old habit none of us bother breaking, and says nothing, because a silent Declan is a Declan with his teeth in something.

“No staff on this floor,” I tell them. “No phones in the room. What’s said here leaves in our heads, or it doesn’t leave.”

“You call the meeting, then you don’t trust the meeting.” Declan turns his phone face-down and slides it to the center before I have to ask. “Christ, I’ve missed you, Greek. You throw a lovely party.”

“I trust the three of us. I don’t trust the walls, and I paid for the walls.”

Volkov sets his phone down beside Declan’s without a word, agreeing to the rules.

“Declan. You first.”

“You’ll like this one. It’s about to be your problem as much as mine.” He turns the whiskey a quarter on the wood without lifting it. “You know what we do now. We got out of the powder after it put my cousins in a federal courtroom three times, and the third judge wasn’t laughing. So we found work nobody pins on the Irish, because everyone’s busy watching the Colombians. A man pays, a man stops breathing. Clean money, clean conscience, more or less. I sleep fine.”

“And?”

“And three of those jobs in the last fourteen months ran through the same plumbing.” His eyes come up off the glass and stay on mine. “Same routing, same shells feeding the escrow, the same prints your accountant’s been pulling out of your books. I killed for the bastard and never saw his face. I was a rifle he rented by the month, same as the men who lit up—”

He stops a half-breath short of the yacht, because he’s got the grace not to lay Nikos across the table between us, and I give him one nod for the swerve and nothing more. The cold’s already pooled around my ankles, and it doesn’t climb where these two can watch it rise.

“You understand what you’ve just put in my hands,” I tell him.

“It puts me right where you’re standing, aye. Why’d you think I poured a tall one before I opened my mouth?” He drinks to it. “I took money from the same hand that’s been bleeding you white and painting the mess onto your name, and the day it works out I’ve followed the pipes back, I’m a witness with a number on my head, same as anyone who’s got this close. I knew what I was confessing on the way up the stairs. Said it anyway. I’d rather hand it to you than sit on it and wait for that wolf-crown to turn up over another kid with my blood in him.”

It already has, over his cousin’s boy, and neither of us openly mentions that either.

“That’s worth more than you’re pretending it is,” I tell him. “You brought me the thing that puts you in my chair, when keeping quiet would’ve kept you out of it. I don’t forget that. Not in a man, not ever.”

“Sentiment. Out of the Greek, no less.” Declan lifts the glass an inch my way. “That accountant’s wearing the edges off you. Can’t say I mind. You were a miserable bastard to drink with before.”

“I’ve got less, and I’ll say it plain. Dressing it up wastes an afternoon none of us have.” His voice carries the gravel it always has, a man stating facts the way other men breathe. “Evelina took her father’s drive down to the last dead sector. There’s nothing on it we haven’t already paid for in blood. Geneva’s cold. The notary shut his doors and vanished. The trail off the files runs into a wall they built behind themselves on the way out. The drive’s done talking.”

“So we’re down to the streets.”

“Down to the streets.” A single nod. “I’ve put my people on every corner that’s ever moved a gun or run a card for us. Fighters, doormen, the men who count the gate at the bouts. Mouths shut, ears open. A man moving this much money leaves a wake. A soldier on a corner sees it before a king in a chair ever does. It’s slow. It’s the only thing I’ve got left breathing.”