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16

Elena

“No.”

One word, and he doesn’t even look up from his phone to deliver it, which is somehow worse than if he had.

“You didn’t let me finish the sentence.”

“You didn’t need to. You were going to ask to come to the address Petros gave us, and the answer’s no regardless of how the rest of it goes.” Adrianos pockets the phone and reaches for his jacket off the back of the chair. “It’s a private wealth office downtown. I’ll have Stavros bring back whatever’s there.”

“Stavros.” I say the name like it’s a diagnosis. “Stavros looks at a balance sheet the way most people look at a parking ticket, mild resentment, no curiosity, possibly holding it upside down and not noticing. I need the room, Adrianos. The actual desk, the actual drawers, whatever’s been left behind, because that’s where the tells live, and they don’t survive a phone camera and a man who thinks a ledger is something you balance on a shelf.”

“You’ll get photographs. Good ones.”

“You don’t have anyone more competent than me for this, and you’ve said so, more than once, so I’m going to assume you remember saying it.” I’m up from the desk now, because I’ve learned that arguing with this man works better standing. “Here’s my counteroffer. If you leave me in this apartment, I’ll spend the entire day thinking about what might be in that office, and at some point, my curiosity is going to win, and I’ll find a way out of here that involves considerably less supervision than walking out the front door next to you. I read building schematics for fun. It’s a hobby. Service stairwells, fire escapes, I’ve got options you haven’t even thought about.”

That gets him to stop, jacket half on, and for a second, I brace for the no to land again.

“You’re telling me that if I leave you here, you’ll find a way out anyway. Alone. With no idea who’s watching that building or what’s waiting for you on the street.”

“I’m telling you the version where I sneak out alone is strictly worse for both of us, which makes bringing me the responsible choice. Really, I’ve done the risk assessment for you. You’re welcome.”

He finishes with the jacket, and the quiet stretches long enough that I start drafting my next argument out of habit.

“Fine,” he says so softly that I almost miss it.

“Fine?”

“Fine. You come. You don’t touch anything until I say so, you don’t wander, and if I tell you to move, you move, no commentary attached.” He’s already at the door, and I have to lengthen my stride to keep level with him. “I’d rather have you where I can see you than spend the day wondering which window you’ve gone out of.”

“I told you, windows are beneath me. Fire escapes have a certain dignity. Windows are for people without options.”

“Get your coat, koukla.”

“You say that like it’s a verdict and not an outfit suggestion.”

“With you it’s usually both.”

The building is glass stacked on steel, forty floors of money too old to need a sign out front, tucked into a Financial District block where every lobby looks like the last one, marble, ferns, a security guard who’s paid specifically to look like he isn’t paying attention. Evander stays with the car. Adrianos doesn’t sign anything, doesn’t speak to anyone, just walks through the lobby like the floor we’re heading to already belongs to him, and at this point I wouldn’t bet against it.

The elevator climbs in a quiet that has nothing to do with two people running out of things to say. I watch the floor numbers and try to read his mood in the brushed steel of the doors, but come up empty. The man could fold a winning hand on purpose, and his face wouldn’t tell you a thing about it.

“You think we won’t find anything,” I say.

“I think whoever’s behind this has had years of practice staying a step ahead of everyone chasing them. I’d be surprised if this were the exception.”

“Then why are we here? I feel like this is a lot of elevators for a foregone conclusion.”

“Because staying a step ahead isn’t free. It takes time, people, a reason to move fast enough that a seam shows.” The doors open on the fortieth floor, and he steps out first, his eyes moving across the hallway in a pass that takes half a second but somehow accounts for everything in it. “Petros handed us this name yesterday. If it’s already gone, that tells us how close to the center it sits. Nobody burns a location that wasn’t worth burning.”

The office door is unlocked, and inside, it isn’t torn apart the way Berezin’s place was, no open drawers, no drift of paper across the carpet. It’s worse than that. It’s empty the way a room gets empty when someone plans it, the desk wiped, the shelves bare except for the outlines in the dust where things used to live, a fresh liner in the wastebasket that’s never held a single thing. Even the carpet carries vacuum lines, fresh ones, the kind a machine leaves behind when someone runs it over a space they want to look untouched, but ends up proving the opposite instead.

“They knew we were coming,” I say, already crouched by the desk out of habit, because some part of me refuses to believe there’s nothing here even while looking right at the nothing. “Not someday. Soon. This place got cleared this week, maybe yesterday, those vacuum lines are still sharp, nobody’s walked through here since whoever did this left.”

“I see them.”

“And the liner in that bin is from a box of fifty, the fold’s still got a crease in it. Somebody brought their own supplies. A regular crew uses whatever’s already under the sink, they don’t bother bringing anything new.” I drag a finger along the edge of the desk, and even the dust feels wrong, too even, like someone wiped it down and then went back over it with something dry to lay a thin layer back so it wouldn’t look freshly cleaned. “This is someone covering for someone, fast, recently, and well. Sloppy-fast and clean-fast are two different skill sets entirely. This is the second one, and it’s a good one.”