There is no way she should know.
Most of the room knows me as Roman Sokolov. Some know more, but only in pieces. A bastard son from the wrong branch of the wrong story. A man who came back rich enough to force people to remember him. Very few know the whole shape of it. Fewer still would speak it aloud.
So how does she?
I move through the room on instinct, nodding where I have to, letting the right people think I’m listening while my mind turns over the same possibility from different angles.
She heard something in Moscow. At the club.
That’s the only explanation that makes sense. She must have gone upstairs. She must have heard enough of Oleg’s conversation to understand that Roman Sokolov was not only Roman Sokolov.
Enough to make her run.
It fits too well.
And if it’s true, then for four years I have hated her for vanishing while never once understanding what she thought she was escaping.
Someone says my name. I turn automatically, answer something bland to an old customs man from Brighton, and keep moving. I do not trust myself to stop near Sergei Markov’s table again yet. If I look at Katerina now, I may drag answers out of her in the middle of the ballroom, and as satisfying as that might be for a few seconds, it would be catastrophic by the end of the night.
Mikhail reaches me before I reach a decision. “We need to go,” he says quietly.
I look at him. “Now?”
“Yes.”
That one word is enough to clear the rest of the room out of my head.
“What happened?”
“Pier Nine.”
My body stills.
Pier Nine is not one of the obvious places. That’s why it matters. It’s one of our smaller river properties on the Jersey side, dressed as a refrigerated import terminal. Mostly legitimate on paper. Useful because of what can pass through it when customs decides to be cooperative.
“Talk.”
Mikhail steps half a pace closer. “One of the night supervisors called in a gas leak ten minutes ago. Fire crews got there and found no leak, but half the cameras were looped and one cold-storage unit had been opened from the inside. Three men are down.”
“Dead?”
“One dead on site. Two breathing when the call came.”
“And?”
He keeps his voice flat. “There was a container in Bay Fourteen that wasn’t supposed to exist.”
Only six people knew about Bay Fourteen.
One is standing in front of me.
Two are dead.
Which leaves three men I may soon be burying.
“What was in it?” I ask.
Mikhail’s mouth tightens. “Documents. Drives. The old Moscow accounts.”
