“Hopefully, this will all be over by tomorrow night.” I tell her.
“What are you going to do?” Alex asks.
“What needs to be done,” I say coldly.
“That’s not much of an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have right now,” I say. “The less you know right now, the safer you both will be. What I need from you is to stay inside that building with my people.” I hold her gaze again. “Give me twenty-four hours. If I don’t sort it out by then, I’ll help you run.”
She looks at me for a long moment, searching my eyes for something to quell her own self-preservation. Finally, she says, “Okay. Twenty-four hours.”
With that, I get out of the car and open the back door for Evie, who climbs out with her backpack and looks up at me with those dark eyes.
“Are you coming up?”
“For a minute,” I say.
I walk them up. The hallway on the fourth floor is empty and quiet, and I wait for Alex to unlock the door and open it. I goin first, doing a quick sweep of the small space, before signaling them inside.
“Vera will be here within the hour,” I say, low enough that it’s just for her. “Don’t open the door for anyone until she gets here, she’ll knock three times and say her name. Anyone else comes to the door, you call me.”
She nods.
I look at her for a moment longer, the urge to kiss her nearly winning over rational thought. Then I look past her at Evie, who stands in the kitchen doorway watching us.
Not now,I tell myself.Not with Evie here.
“Stay inside,” I say instead. To both of them.
“You’ll come back, right?” Evie asks.
“Yes.” I tell her with absolute certainty. Then I slip out the door and wait to hear it lock behind me before heading down the stairway.
Pavel’s house is on the north side of the city, a brownstone and boring. He’s lived here for the last eleven years, and in all that time, I’ve only been inside of it a total of four.
I know the layout, though. I’d logged it in my memory the first time I’d visited the way I did with any new space. But David knows it even better; he knows the security rotations, the spaces the cameras can’t see, the men Pavel keeps on post overnight — and from some mysterious source, he even knows that the window on the east side of the ground floor has a latch that doesn’t fully lock.
Using that information, we slip through the window while Pavel is at the board dinner I’d conveniently arranged to miss. The politics of it should give us at least two hours of his absence, but the rotation schedule only gives us eighteen minutes to get in and out without being discovered by security.
“Search the office first,” I said. “Then the study.”
With a slight nod, David moves off into the dark house ahead of me, quiet and efficient. If there was something to be found, we’d find it. Pavel’s house smells like him — expensive cologne, old wood, and the dry musky scent of a house that prioritizes money over warmth. No photographs hang on the walls in the hallway, no personal effects on the flat surfaces of the furniture; the entire space is dry, sterile, just like Pavel himself. I've been here four times, and it’s never felt lived in. I feel that now more than ever.
We moved through the space without touching anything but the floor until we reached the office at the end of the hallway on the second story. The desk, the filing cabinet, and the safe behind the obscene painting of some naked Roman goddess are locked— for all of about forty seconds once David gets his hands on them.
Inside the desk and filing cabinet were various documents, some to do with the household, others with Pavel’s various businesses. But in the safe, there is a stash of cash in multiple currencies, and a passport under a false name. Beneath those is a folder. Just one.
Plain. Manila. Unmarked.
I take it to the window, using the light from the streetlamp outside to look at its contents. Four pages, dated eight months ago. A contract between Pavel and Nikita Koshkin.
I read it once. Then read it again. The paper feels cold in my hands — eight months.
Pavel was offering the Koshkins full organizational partnership — territorial access to three eastern shipping routes through Rozovsky-controlled ports, and a board seat that had never been offered to any party outside the family in the history of the organization. In exchange, the Koshkins offer political and financial support for Pavel’s transition to Pakhan, the votes of two allied families, and one additional security: Yarina Koshkin’s hand in marriage.
Instructions to secure the contract terms were listed on the third page: Locate Yarina Koshkin and return her unlawful ward, Evangeline Koshkin, to Nikita Koshkin’s custody.
I turn to the fourth page. This page, I noted, is slightly different from the rest — added later, signed by Pavel alone. A single paragraph. Pavel agrees to facilitate the marriage of Yarina Koshkin to himself upon her return to Koshkin custody, thereby securing the alliance.
