Page 22 of The Enforcer’s Pawn

I marked it in green. Cara sees it. The sarcasm leaves her face, and something older takes its place. Fear. The kind Patrick has been feeding for years, one favor at a time.

I tap the highlighted line. “Your name appears in one Blacklist entry. Three attachments. One transfer authorization.”

“My name appears on plenty of things I didn’t sign,” she says, but her voice has less bite now.

“This one was enough to put you on a plane.”

She looks from the screen to me. “Patrick did that?”

I let the silence answer first, then give her the rest. “Patrick used you to buy time. From Morozov.”

I study her face when I say the name. Her eyes stay on mine, tired and angry, and nothing in her expression reaches for memory. Viktor Morozov means nothing to her yet, beyond another monster dragged into Patrick’s mess.

She may really know nothing. Patrick built disasters by making people do small favors without telling them why.

“Viktor Morozov,” I say, keeping my hands flat on the table. “He runs a rival circle. Your brother has been moving money through his fronts.”

“My brother borrows money from idiots and calls it strategy.”

“Patrick stole from Maksim Volkov and gave pieces of our routes to a man who burns families to make business points.”

Her eyes lift to mine.

She heard the word burns. Some part of her understands I’m no longer talking only about freight, money, or her brother’s talent for surviving other people’s consequences. She studies my face, and for the first time since she stepped off that plane, she seems to lose the next word.

It lasts a few seconds. Then Cara throws her head back, laughs once, and points at the laptop.

“This is digital,” she says. “Patrick can fake digital. Show me paper. Bank copies, contracts, signatures, courier logs. Something he couldn’t rewrite from a hotel bar.”

I flick two fingers toward Nikolai. He opens the wall safe behind the file cabinet and brings over the folder Abramov prepared. The cover is plain black, without any mark or family crest. No wolf, no crown, no warning, only paper, and paper ruins better men than knives.

Nikolai sets it in front of Cara and steps back.

She doesn’t touch it at first. Her eyes move from the folder to my face. Color climbs along her throat. One hand curls against her knee, then opens when she catches herself doing it.

“What did he do?” she asks. It’s almost a whisper.

I open the folder.

The first page is a bank statement from Cyprus, printed and stamped. The second is a freight clearance form with an altered vessel code. The third is a courier receipt from a medical supply charity with a Boston billing contact, a Moscow storage reference, and Patrick’s assistant listed as the approving handler.

Cara leans in despite herself. Her eyes run over the highlighted lines. Dates, amounts, vendor names, shipment numbers. A hospital charity that never sent medicine. A disaster relief group that bought no supplies. A renovation contractor paid multiple times for work no inspector signed off on.

“This isn’t one theft,” I say, turning another page. “Patrick didn’t walk in and grab money from one account. He opened little doors. A clearance change here. A vendor substitution there. A payment route that looks harmless until the same names repeat across six countries.”

Cara pulls one sheet closer. Her finger stops on a note near the bottom. I see the second she recognizes it. The color in her face deepens, and sweat beads near her temple despite the cold office. She reads the line again, then looks at the next page fast.

“That’s my format,” she says.

“Yes.”

Her hand lifts from the paper. “No.”

“Patrick used a security memo you wrote for him.”

“He said it was for a client portal audit,” she says, and now her voice has lost the bite. “He said his vendor kept messing up access logs, and he needed me to clean up the report so he wouldn’t look stupid.”

“He used the way you organized the report to hide what he stole,” I say. “Your format made it look like normal paperwork.”