Page 62 of Lay It Bare

Rei stared at the map. Raska had to fall. She was a burr in their side, a constant bickering, watching presence, more so than the Yadro or the rest of the Merchari. She was the only one who continued to question Sevastyan’s loyalty, but only because she questioned his loyalty to her. If Sevastyan was to start to make connections in law enforcement and deep into government agencies, she had to be removed.

Or they found someone else to make those connections on Sevastyan’s behalf.

Rei tensed, even thinking it, sitting there alone, elbows on his thighs, hands gripped together and pressed to his chin. He glanced upward, just once, at the ceiling. Someone else who already had networks. Someone else that no one would suspect of working with Sevastyan. Someone else with motivation and resources. Someone who was the reason for why Sevastyan had pushed Anton to take action now. The answer had been there for weeks while none of them had taken action.

Someone who knew an ex-terror like Ellisandre Sollunae. Rei had done his research, far beyond what Sevastyan had asked. He knew not only what the internet would tell him on every person close to Jun now, but also what the dark web and criminal underground chat rooms could reveal. What he didn’t know yet was how much Sevastyan had gathered on Ellisandre’s past. Sevastyan putting Ellisandre’s number in his phone tonight felt like a crack in the earth. There was something below that surface.

Jun sat at the center of a powerful ring of people. Business moguls, lawyers, assassins, philanthropists, and patrons of the arts. Between them they carried citizenships from France, the UK, South Korea, and the USA. What they lacked was knowledge of what they were fighting.

But Rei knew.

And he was doing nothing with it. All he had to do was stand up while Sevastyan slept, walk upstairs, make it past their security, not get arrested as a madman, and hand them the database.

Except it wouldn’t be enough. Not to kill the organization. Jun’s people would still need someone inside, individuals willing to do what governments could not. They needed not just the paper knowledge, but the inside experience and the day-to-day monitoring.

Rei’s fingernails bit into the palms of his hands as the tension mounted in his body. The solution was simple, elegant even. It had to have occurred to Sevastyan already, so why had he not suggested it since leaving Anton’s? Why were they merely waiting in this setting, pretending to carry out surveillance?

He didn’t know. But until he found out, he could plan. He picked up his pencil.

hingness on the TV.

Sevastyan

Sevastyan woke to no warm body against his back. He looked over to the far side of the bed, seeking Rei, but found only Lisa lying there, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around his pillow and pulled in against his chest. There were no sounds in the bathroom. His slave was not in the ensuite.

He slid out of bed and padded barefoot out to the hall, closing the door as he left the bedroom. Low lights in the living room were on. Rei sat cross-legged on the couch, hunched over the coffee table, looking down at a map. He had screens open around him in a wide arc, one of the laptops half open in his lap. His shoulders drew up as Sevastyan approached. He didn’t try to hide whatever he was working on, merely slid to his knees on the floor, setting the laptop aside.

Sevastyan stepped around the table, looking down on Rei’s work.

It was a map of cause and effect. Places where officials were not corrupted and places where they were. Red circles around figures that would stop an arrest even with evidence. Blue circles where an arrest could be pushed through. Yellow for unknowns. He didn’t need a chart to tell him what the colors meant. He’d studied these names himself. But the circle didn’t center on him.

All the threads led back to Richard and Linda Reevesworth. Rei was balancing a plan around two people he didn’t even know, except he did.

In a way.

He’d mapped the Reevesworths’ influence. The rooms where either Richard or Linda could stand without question. The strings the two of them could pluck. The ears they could speak into.

Sevastyan sank down on the couch. What had been a concept in his mind when he approached Anton weeks ago, Rei had actually put on paper. Small remarks he’d made over the years to Rei were illuminated and sketched out to logical conclusions. Rei was lining up the dominos.

“You . . .” Sevastyan’s voice trailed off. Guilt hit him in the stomach. Rei was doing what he should have been doing. While he’d been distracted by keeping up pretenses, carrying out missions—Lisa, Ellisandre, and all the rest—-Rei had carried on.

“Master?”

“Yes.”

Rei hesitated. “Did I do wrong?”

Sevastyan shook his head. He put his hand on Rei’s shoulder and drew him up beside him on the couch. Rei pulled up his feet up and leaned into Sevastyan’s hold.

“Elaborate,” Sevastyan ordered.

Rei’s hands curled into nervous fists. He straightened up and leaned towards the map. “You told Anton we had an opportunity like we’ve never had before. A lever. Jun is important to Damian Sathers. Richard Reevesworth is Damian Sathers’s patron. Probably more. Reevesworth proved how far he is willing to go for Jun.”

Sevastyan nodded when Rei looked to him for encouragement.

Rei turned back to the map, sliding to his knees to get closer to his work. “The Merchari network has multiple points of failure and repair. It can lose an area, but a different region will reinforce it. Webs fall in three ways.”

Sevastyan nodded. He’d had these conversations with Rei before. Atrophy was one way systems failed. The people on the inside became self-obsessed and ignored the greater network. That was how the last dynasty of Imperial China had fallen. Russian systems had survived rounds of terrible leaders over its millennium of existence because of centralized and decentralized power. When one terrible ruler had failed, another different strong man had taken their place. Russia, in some manner, remained through it all, though the shape and the name might have changed. The Merchari were the same. The network had too many “dukes” to fall just because a king was toppled. Even the Yadro was, to some extent, replaceable.