"Aleksi! Hey!"
The voice came through water. I blinked. The workroom came back in layers, sound before sight: the hum of the overhead tubes and the tick of a radiator, and Dmitri somewhere down the row saying something in Russian about a count. Gregori was standing next to me with his hand half-raised, like he'd been about to touch my shoulder and thought better of it.
"Aleksi. What do you want us to do with the bodies?"
I dragged a hand down my face. The leather of the glove was cold against my skin.
"Count first."
"Eleven. We're still checking the back."
"Any men?"
"Three. Lieutenants. They went down by the door. The rest are women. Workroom staff."
"Mr. K?"
"Gone. Hours ago, looks like. Left this for the crew to handle."
I turned away from the bench and made my feet move. The workroom was long and narrow, a converted warehouse space, with fluorescent tubes running the length of it. Eight machines in two rows. A cutting table at the far end. Bolts of lining on a rack along the wall. Pattern pieces pinned to a corkboard in the shapes of bags, wallets, and belts. Everything tidy. Everything in its place. The kind of order a person makes when work is the only thing keeping them breathing.
The women were at their stations. Most of them were slumped forward the way Dragana was. Two had turned toward the door and gone down sideways. One was on the floor in the aisle. She'd run. She hadn't made it.
I walked. Gregori walked a half step behind me and didn't say anything. I could hear the men in the back room, boots on concrete, voices low. Somebody had the sense to keep it quiet.
"Time of death?"
"Collins says three hours at the outside. Maybe two."
Two hours. We'd been sitting on the Keystone intel for less than a day, and Mr. K had moved inside of that window. Someone had told him the vory were coming. Someone in my organization or someone in his, and either way it was a problem I'd deal with later, because right now I was walking through a room of women who'd been sewing fake handbags for a wage they never saw and Mr. K had put bullets in their heads to move faster.
"Boss."
Dmitri this time. He was standing at the cutting table at the far end. There was a ledger open on it and a stack of shipping manifests and a phone that had been wiped.
"Anything useful?"
"Numbers. Codes. I'll take it back to Pavel. Names on the first page, though."
He turned the ledger toward me. A column of names ran down the left side, production numbers next to each. Dragana. Petra. Marta. Stanislava. Eleven names on the page, matching the count on the floor.
"Pull the ledger. Pull the manifests. Pull the phone. Burn everything else."
"The bodies?"
"Call Collins. Tell him to bring the van and do it right. Names get logged. If any of them has family, we'll find them."
Gregori made a sound behind me. I turned.
"We're going to find their families," I said. "Any objections, Gregori?"
"No, boss."
"Get it done."
I walked back through the workroom toward the door. I made myself walk. I didn't stop at Dragana's bench. I didn't stop at any of them. I kept my eyes on the exit sign over the back door, and I put one foot in front of the other.
Gregori caught up to me outside.
