"The Pavlov matter is closed."
"That's what I thought, sir. Until this morning." A pause. Papers shuffling. "We've identified the accelerant used in the Pavlov scene. It's a match for three other crime scenes across Europe in the last eighteen months. Lyon. Prague. Istanbul."
Alexei set his coffee down. "Three other scenes."
"Three other murders. Same method. Same accelerant. Same staging. And sir—" Kotov's voice dropped. "Same letter."
The room contracted.
"Explain."
"Each scene had a body in a chair. Each body was burned with the same military-grade accelerant in the same star-shaped pour pattern. And each body had a letter in the lap, written in the victim's blood, with the same words."
Alexei's hand was a fist on the desk. "Cursed are you who reads this."
"Yes, sir."
"A chain."
"That's what my people are calling it. He kills the target, leaves the letter. Multiple people see the letter at each scene, but he chooses one. One target per scene. The rest walk away. Lyon to Prague to Istanbul to Saint Petersburg. In each city, one reader was selected, and that reader is dead."
Alexei's mind was doing what it always did: sorting, connecting, building the architecture of a threat. Lyon. A mid-level fence named Roux, found eighteen months ago. Prague. A retired SVR officer, found twelve months ago. Istanbul. A shipping magnate with Bratva ties, found six months ago. Each one dead in a chair. Each one with a letter they shouldn't have read.
And then Pavlov. In Saint Petersburg. In a townhouse. In a chair.
And Alexei had walked in and taken the letter from Kotov's evidence bag and unfolded it and read it.
"He knows who reads the letters," Alexei said. His voice was level. His pulse wasn't. "How?"
"We don't know yet. My theory is that each scene is monitored. A camera. A contact. Someone who reports back. But sir, there's more."
"Go on."
"The intervals are shrinking. Lyon to Prague was six months. Prague to Istanbul was six months. Istanbul to Saint Petersburg was four months. He's accelerating."
Alexei stood. The casino floor spread below him, bright and buzzing, a thousand people feeding coins into machines and not knowing the world had just rearranged itself.
"You're telling me I'm a target."
"I'm telling you that in every city, the person he selected is dead within four months." Kotov's voice was stripped. "And you read the Pavlov letter three days ago. If he's chosen you, sir, the clock is already running."
Three days. He'd read it three days ago, standing in a charred room in Saint Petersburg, and he'd felt nothing. No fear. No dread. Just the blankness where purpose used to be.
The blankness was gone now. Filled in. Shaped like a girl at a desk in a clinic three floors below him, answering intake forms and spilling coffee and not knowing that the man she'd given everything to had a death sentence in his pocket.
"What do we know about the killer?"
"Almost nothing. Male. European, probably Russian based on the letter's Cyrillic phrasing in the earlier scenes. Well-funded. The accelerant alone would cost more than a car. And sir, he's not doing this for money or territory. There's no financial motive in any of the kills. My profiler thinks it's—"
"A game."
Silence. "Yes, sir."
A game. A man was playing a game with corpses and letters and the people who read them, and Alexei had walked into the latest round without knowing the rules, and now the clock was running.
Four months. Maybe less, if the intervals kept shrinking.
He thought of Mia in the chair that morning, asleep, her foot hanging off the bed. He thought of her at the clinic, behind the intake desk, open and warm and visible to anyone who walked through the door.
