Maks did not enjoy the answer. "Andrei Lebedev. The freight office was leased through one of his shells. The shooters were his. The meeting that was dressed up as peace was his idea from the first phone call."
I looked at the face on the screen and felt the old weight settle into the place it keeps. Andrei Lebedev. Younger brother of Grigori Lebedev, whom I had killed in a parking garage in another life, for reasons that were sound at the time and have not aged well. Grigori had been a problem the family needed gone, and I had made him gone, the way you do when you are young and certain and have not yet learned that every man you take out of the world leaves a door standing open behind him. Andrei was that open door. He had spent six years and a fortune learning patience. I had checked on him once a year, the way you test a lock you do not trust, and every year Andrei Lebedev had been somewhere far off, building something, and I had let myself believe the something was a life. That was no life. It was only a long fuse. He had buried his brother and then planned this with more discipline than most men bring to anything they love, and the conclusion he reached was the one I would have reached in his place. That is the part I do not say aloud. I would have come for me too. Now he had arrived to settle the account, he had very nearly closed it, and he was still out there breathing.
"What is he after?" I asked, though I already knew. I wanted to measure how much Maks had found.
"To take from you what you took from him. A brother." Maks did not cushion it, and I respected him for that. "He has been buying this city in small pieces for months. A doorman here. A clerk there. He isn't searching for you, boss. He found you weeks ago. He is searching for the one thing that would cost you the most to lose."
The room went very quiet, because every man in it understood, in the same breath, exactly what that meant with a nurse asleep in an apartment across the river.
So this was where it stood. Two wolves were circling her. One wanted to keep her. One wanted to use her to reach me. I intended to bury both.
The first did not know I existed, or did not care, because his hunger had one object, and it was not me. The second did not yet know she existed at all. That was the only mercy in the whole equation, and it was a thin one, because mercies like that expire. The day Andrei Lebedev learned that Kolya Petrov had taken to sleeping in a car outside a Brooklyn walk-up, that he had hung steel in a nurse's doorway and put four men on her shifts, that he had sat across a diner table from her and forgotten, for one hour, to be afraid, that was the day she stopped being a woman with a stalker and became the cheapest way in the world to make me bleed.
If they learn what she is to me, they will not come for me. They will come for her.
I had spent twenty years making myself difficult to hurt. I had filed off every soft place, refused every hostage to fortune, made certain there was nothing a man could take from me that cost more than money. It was the great achievement of my life, and I had undone it in three weeks over a woman who steals her roommate's yogurt, argues with paperwork, and runs at the dying when every trained instinct says run the other way. Love, I was discovering, is just a list of brand-new ways to be afraid. I had not asked to be added to the list. I was on it regardless.
On the small screen in the corner, a feed I had called security to myself showed the hallway outside her door, and at the edge of the frame a sliver of her kitchen window, lit. She was awake. Of course she was. She had a photograph of herself sleeping somewhere in those rooms and a man in the hall she had neverasked for, and I sat in a bunker watching her light burn the way the other one must have watched it from the fire escape. The comparison did not spare me. I am not the same as him, I told myself, and the telling had the hollow ring of a thing said too often. The line between a guard and a stalker is permission. She had given me hers the night her hands shook around a set of keys, and I meant to be worthy of the difference. The man on the fire escape, I had no doubt, had told himself something just as fine.
The Pakhan found me an hour later. He arrives in rooms without the courtesy of a door, and he stood at my shoulder and read both boards, the named wolf and the faceless one, and understood the whole of it before I said a word.
"Bring her here," he said.
"For a few days. Until we have the coworker."
"Do it, then. But be honest with yourself about what you are doing." He had stopped looking at the boards. He was looking at me. "You have kept yourself unreachable for twenty years, because reachable men in this work do not get to grow old. I allowed it. It kept you breathing and it kept my brothers breathing. Now you want to walk something soft through my front gate, and you are calling it a few days, and one of us is being lied to. I find I do not much care which one."
"It is a few days."
"It is for as long as she permits it," he said, and was gone.
He was right. He generally is. And the thing I did next is the thing I will have to answer for when the reckoning comes, the way it always comes.
I decided not to tell her about Andrei Lebedev.
I told myself it was protection, and there was truth in it. She had a man eating the edges of her sleep already; she did not need to learn that a second one, colder and better funded, with soldiers and a grudge, might one day aim both at her becauseof me. I told myself she carried enough. I told myself the fewer people who knew the shape of my enemies, the safer all of them were. Every word of it was true. None of it was the reason.
The reason was simpler, and worse. If I told her what knowing me might cost her, she would follow the same cold logic I had just followed to its end, and she would reach the sensible conclusion, which was to put as much of this city as possible between herself and Kolya Petrov. And I was not willing to lose her to her own good sense. So I kept it. The first real lie I ever told her was a silence, and a silence is the only kind of lie a man never has to keep straight, which is precisely what makes it the dangerous kind.
I climbed up out of the lower floor into the part of the compound that pretends to be a home. There are rugs up there, and a kitchen that is never cold, and Galina, who has run this house longer than I have stood inside it and is frightened of precisely nothing. It is a strange place to bring a hunted woman, a fortress that has taught itself to look like a family. I tried to set Ruby down inside the picture and could not decide whether the image steadied me or unnerved me more.
Petya was waiting for me by the kitchen door. He reads my face better than he reads anything built out of letters.
"We're moving her to the compound," he said. "Aren't we?"
"For a few days."
"For a few days." He said it back to me in the voice of a man who believed it exactly as much as I did. "I'll have the east rooms opened. She'll hate them. She'll rearrange the furniture as a form of political protest. Galina will have adopted her inside the hour."
"Petya."
"Boss."
Here was the order I had climbed the stairs to give, the one that mattered more than the rooms or the furniture.
"Scrub it. All of it. Every place where my name and hers touch the same page. The hospital admission, the discharge, the camera feeds, the diner if it kept any, every man who has seen us in a room together. I want no record, no rumor, no photograph that puts the two of us in a single frame." I held his eyes until the easy humor drained out of them. "She cannot become my weakness. If they learn what she is to me, they will use her. No one connects her to me. No one."
9
