Page 14 of The Enforcer’s Pawn

I take the scarf. She stays asleep. That saves me from the weakness of goodbye.

Downstairs, the night clerk recognizes my face and immediately regrets it. Ten minutes later, the hallway drive is in my coat pocket, removed by a maintenance man who’ll never admit I was here. The clerk forgets the false name he saw. Money helps. Fear helps more.

The car waits by the curb. Maksim calls again before I reach it. His voice has changed. Colder now. Cleaner.

“We found one man alive near the outer wall,” he says. “He carried no papers. Our men are keeping him breathing.”

“I want him.”

“You’ll have him after I know who paid him.”

“I want him now.”

“You want blood. I need the path.”

I close my eyes. My parents lie under shrouds in Moscow. Someone has lit the ground beneath my feet.

Maksim knows it. His next words come like a blade laid flat against my throat.

“Don’t become the weapon he aimed.”

The driver opens the door. I get in.

Only then do I look at Cara’s number in my phone. I should erase her before any man with enough hunger finds out where I was tonight. My thumb hovers. I delete the number. Caring has become dangerous.

At the private terminal, one of Maksim’s investigators meets me with a tablet. “Dmitri.”

I look at him.

“The feeds were cut clean,” he says. “Professional work. No street crew.”

“Who?”

“No name yet.” That should make me angry. It does. But underneath it, something colder starts working.

The investigator turns the tablet. A fragment of a payment route sits on the screen, broken in three places, scrubbed badly in one.

“Money moved through Boston before it hit Moscow,” he says. “That’s all we have.”

Boston.

Patrick had been eager to get Volkov men into that penthouse. Eager to talk freight, introductions, medical shipments, and “Boston friends” with money that didn’t behave like Boston money. Maksim had already heard Morozov’s name near one of our freight lanes, faint as smoke under a door. That was why I went when Patrick invited me. To see whether the smiling Irish boy had found a Russian monster and mistaken it for a ladder.

Patrick O’Connell is still smiling somewhere after his party, pretending he doesn’t know how dirty money travels. I close my hand around Cara’s scarf. The pain becomes a name. Patrick O’Connell.

4

CARA

Boston, present time

Five years later, I know three things for sure. Patrick is still trouble, I’m better at pretending I’m fine, and my little boy has Dmitri Antonov’s eyes.

When Patrick shows up, I have marinara sauce on my sleeve, a bath towel hanging from one shoulder, and a security alert blinking on the laptop beside a pile of crayons.

I’ve just walked in from my cybersecurity desk at a financial compliance firm, and my eyes burn from fraud flags, locked accounts, and men with more money than sense trying to blame software for their bad decisions.

The stove smells of garlic, tomatoes, and Mikhail’s favorite turkey meatballs. Mikhail is my four-year-old son, the tiny dictator of pasta shape, bath towels, and whether dinosaurs should face outward on pajamas. I picked him up from Kathryn’s place on the way home.