I had known since approximately the forty-second mark. The left side, below the ribs—not deep, the angle had been shallow, but the blood was consistent and the pain was the specific quality that distinguished surface damage from something that required immediate intervention.
“It’s manageable,” I said.
Viktor’s expression indicated that his definition of manageable and mine had historically differed.
“Car,” he said into his earpiece. “Now.”
***************
The wound was a through-and-through graze, which was the good news. The bad news was that it was deep enough and located in a position that made me see how close death really was, again.
I submitted to the treatment with the patience I could manage, which Viktor would have characterized as insufficient but which was the best currently available.
Afterward, the doctor left. Viktor positioned four additional men on the inner perimeter of the warehouse we stopped at and came to the office doorway to tell me so.
“Internal,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“I want everyone’s movements for the last three weeks. Everyone with route knowledge. Everyone with access to thelogistics schedule.” I paused. “Quietly. I want them to keep functioning as normal while we do this.”
He nodded.
An hour later, I was back in my office at the casino.
The timeline was still on the desk. Volkov’s architecture, the months of patient construction, Elena positioned as leverage in my casino. The Harmon breach. The compromised routes. And now an ambush executed with the precision of people who had known, within five minutes, where I would be.
The four people on the access list.
Someone in my structure had been feeding information. Not one of the brothers: I could account for their movements and motivations with the specificity of thirty-plus years of shared history, and I would look at the evidence when it arrived because I was not sentimental about truth.
The leak was ongoing. And it was close. My thoughts went somewhere I had been avoiding.
Elena.
She had been in the manor for days now. She had no knowledge of operational routes or logistics schedules—I was certain of that, or as certain as I was permitting myself to be. She had come to me with casual questions of schedules and had stood in the garden this morning in the early light looking like someone trying to find the shape of a new life in unfamiliar territory.
She is not involved.
She couldn’t be. She couldn’t be the reason for this.
But my conclusion drove me into another infuriating truth. Marrying Elena may not have neutralized her usefulness to the enemies, even though it successfully gave her protection.
It made me angry at myself than anyone else.
Exhaustion added to my annoyance, I decided to go to the manor even though it was still early.
I would get to the root of this.
But the instinct that had never failed me in thirty years of this life was not pointing at Elena.
Chapter Nine – Elena
I noticed the added heaviness and tension around the manor. Footsteps that moved faster than usual. The specific cadence of men who were relocating rather than patrolling, covering new ground, filling gaps. Two conversations that stopped when I came to the top of the staircase, the voices dropping to nothing in the way that indicated the conversations were resuming in my absence.
I descended the stairs and ate breakfast in the kitchen with the cook, Mariya, a quiet and kind woman who was too old to be called middle-aged and had worked for the Golovin family for twenty-two years. She put a plate of warm bread and soft cheesein front of me with the particular deliberateness of a woman offering what comfort was available in the vocabulary she had.
I ate it slowly, forcing the anxiety that had refused to leave me to slow down.
