I help her into the car, go around to the driver’s side, and get behind the wheel.
When I start the engine, my hands are steady. That means nothing. Inside I’m already breaking. I just found my children, and I’m already close to losing them again.
For the next thirty-six hours, I turn the city inside out.
There is no other way to describe it.
Every warehouse, every dock office, every old route my father ever used and every newer one his men might have borrowedgets hit. I send men into clubs, garages, marina slips, private rooms over restaurants, empty apartments held under false names, storage units that smell like oil and old paper. I shake loose drivers, cash couriers, two brokers who thought changing phones would save them, and one customs man who starts crying before Mikhail even sits down.
Nothing.
Not nothing, exactly. Pieces. Enough pieces to keep the pressure moving. A sighting in Red Hook that turns into a dead end. A stolen car found abandoned near the river with wiped handles and children’s biscuit crumbs on the back seat. A woman in Brighton who swears she heard one of Andrei’s old names spoken in the wrong bar at the wrong hour. A church caretaker who remembers a black SUV idling too long outside a side gate.
Pieces.
Never the children.
That’s the part that starts eating through me.
I stop sleeping after the first night. Mikhail stops suggesting it after the second time I look at him like he’s lost his mind. Coffee stops helping. Food becomes something people push in front of me and take away untouched. My whole world narrows into maps, names, phones, routes, and the image of two children in the back of a moving car somewhere in the city while my father sits hidden and decides how much of me he wants to carve off before he’s done.
Katerina stays close.
Not in the way I would want under any other circumstances.
Twice I find her in the safe apartment kitchen in the middle of the night, one hand pressed to the counter, eyes closed, breathing carefully as if grief can be managed if you divide it into smaller portions.
I never tell her it won’t work.
She already knows.
By the third morning, the whole city feels like a net I’m pulling through water with nothing in it but mud and broken glass.
Mikhail meets me in the warehouse office with another stack of reports and the expression of a man who would prefer better news but has long since stopped expecting it.
“Savchenko’s place was empty,” he says. “I’m afraid we’re running out of leads.”
Mikhail says, “We may need to think smaller.”
I laugh once under my breath. There is nothing funny in it. “They took my children, and you want smaller.”
“Not what I meant,” Mikhail says. “He might have taken the children out of the city for all we know.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “My father wants to taunt me.”
My father was never sentimental in the ordinary sense, but he was vain. Men like him mistake old claims for permanence. If he thinks those children matter to me enough to make me irrational, then he also thinks he can predict what I’ll do.
Unknown number.
I almost ignore it.
Then another message comes in immediately after the first.
A waterfront property in Staten Island I know by sight before I even look it up properly. One of my father’s old holding places. Not important enough for family. Too expensive for ordinary storage. Built for meetings no one wanted remembered.
I go cold all over.
Mikhail sees it happen. “What?”
