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I gave the signal, and the four guards closed around us. Kirill moved ahead with two of them while Roman launched a drone small enough to fit through a broken window. Anika kept her place on my left as we crossed an overgrown lot and reached the shipyard’s outer fence. Someone had cut the chain on the pedestrian gate and looped it back through the links to make it appear locked.

Kirill eased it free and caught the gate before the hinges squealed. The smile he usually wore before violence never appeared. Nora’s voice had stripped the pleasure out of the hunt and turned us all into machines. Death waited at the end of this trail, death to all who had dared touch what was ours.

We entered through the gap and followed a row of rusted containers toward the water. Rain tapped against the steel on both sides, turning every narrow lane into a passage filled with soft, shifting noise. Roman’s drone crossed one warehouse, then another, finding empty offices and cold machinery but no movement.

Anika’s breaths rang through my earpiece. I kept both hands on my weapon and adjusted our pace so she never had to run to remain beside me.

The lane opened into the main loading yard, and every exterior light came on at once.

White flooded the concrete and turned the rain into a thousand bright needles. Anika flinched against my side as every gun in our formation swept the roofs, windows, and cranes. I tensed, waiting. Three shadows separated from the rest, and we crept forward, guns ready and anticipation for the fight boiling me alive.

“What is it?” Anika whispered the question, her hands spasming around her waist.

Black masquerade masks hung from separate crane hooks, their empty eyes aimed toward the yard.

Behind them, white letters covered the corrugated doors of the largest warehouse.

THE DAY YOU CLIMBED IN BED TOGETHER WAS THE DAY YOU SIGNED YOUR DEATH WARRANTS.

30

ROMAN

The wind caught the center mask and turned it toward me. All three were approximations meant to take us back, probably meant to spin some kind of regret or other emotion, one that Iosif Sokolov thought he could make us feel. Black paint made them uniform, but the shapes differed enough to tell us what they represented. Sokolov had recreated the masks we’d worn while we slept beside Anika. Now he’d hung them at the height of a man’s face with their empty eyes aimed into the yard and the message stretched across the warehouse doors behind them. Rain blurred the edges of the white letters but I doubted the sight would have the effect he intended. We were not children to be fucked with, whose emotions could be manipulated.

“Don’t touch them.” I caught Kirill’s arm before he could reach the nearest hook.

His hand remained suspended beneath the mask. “I wasn’t planning to put it on.”

“A device that obvious is hiding something.” I pulled the compact scanner from my vest and held it toward the loading yard. “Or distracting us. Sokolov believes himself a master manipulator, something he’s brought up more than once.”

The shipyard funneled cargo through several exits. Containers formed a steel corridor toward the northern dock. Rusted tracks disappeared between two warehouses, and an open stretch of concrete led toward the fuel depot on the western edge of the harbor.

Maksim signaled the guards into a tighter formation around Anika. “Movement?”

Kirill studied the roofs while I checked the drone feed. Kirill had been far more silent than usual, probably because guarding Anika took more concentration than he’d give to himself alone. He angled his head to the side without looking away from the roofline. “Nothing with enough blood in it to entertain me.”

The floodlights destroyed our night vision, exposed every approach, and reflected off the rain-slick concrete until shadows stretched in the wrong directions. A shooter had plenty of places to hide, but the roofs remained empty and no heat moved behind the warehouse windows. Fuck.

I lifted the tablet and switched modes, scanning the area and grunting at the result when my tablet vibrated. Three locator signals appeared on the harbor map, each one moving away from the shipyard. The first traveled north between the shipping piers. Another crossed the rail yard. The third headed west toward the fuel tanks. “Three signals. Three of us. One for each of us to follow.”

Anika pressed hard against my arm. “Are those the children?”

“I doubt it.” I enlarged the tracking data as another update came through. All three devices reported from different sections of the harbor, but their transmissions reached us at the same strength and through the same narrow frequency. “They aren’t where the map claims they are.”

Maksim moved closer. “You’re sure?”

“Have I ever been wrong?” I didn’t give him time to respond as I barreled ahead. “They updated at the exact same moment, and every packet has the same delay. Three moving devices wouldn’t stay that perfectly synchronized.” I turned in a slow circle with the scanner. The reading rose when I faced the crane hooks and dropped when I aimed it toward any of the supposed locations. “The transmitters are in the masks.”

Kirill stared at the three masks, his face twisted so tight I almost worried he’d crack. “He wants one of us chasing each signal.”

That was why he’d arranged the yard this way, with a mask waiting at every route and the accusation a temptation to let anger control us. Sokolov had reduced us to three men who’d shared a woman, lost thirty million dollars, and spent five years hunting someone to blame. He believed the right pressure would finally drive us apart. Poor fucker didn’t have a clue about us.

He was working from what he would do, how he thought three men would react, not from the knowledge of our friendship and brotherhood, something he could never understand. We’d spent five years furious over the same woman without turning on one another, and now that Anika stood between us, no one was going anywhere alone.

Anika moved beneath Maksim’s arm and stared up at the masks. Rain darkened her curls and ran over the hard line of her mouth. “The only thing I regret about that night is leaving before I knew your names.”

Fuck, my attention left the yard longer than it should’ve. Kirill’s head snapped toward her, and Maksim’s hand closed around the back of her vest. My hand almost left the scanner to pull her against me, but the open yard remained a threat even if Sokolov hadn’t fired yet.