Chapter 12
Ksenia
Ipulled on the clothes from the night before.
The grey t-shirt, the black trousers. My hands were steady.
My body still hummed with the residue of everything that had happened in this bed—the spanking, the orgasms, the conversation about seating arrangements—and the hum continued while I dressed, coexisting with the cold clarity that had arrived the moment I heard the word Maspeth.
Daniil was already in his trousers, reaching for his sweater. I pulled my hair back and tied it.
“I’m coming with you.”
He looked at me. The sentence had been a statement, not a question, and he recognized the difference.
“Ksyusha—”
“Orlov cargo moves through that yard. The false schedules were my idea as much as Nikita’s. I’m not staying here.”
He held my gaze for two seconds. Then he nodded.
We went downstairs. Ilya was already outside, the engine running. The November air hit my bare arms and I grabbed a coat from the hall closet—Daniil’s, too large, smelling of cedar and cold. I did not button it.
The drive to Queens took twenty-three minutes.
I knew because I watched the clock on the dashboard.
Ilya drove fast and without commentary, the headlights cutting through empty streets.
Brighton Beach gave way to Gravesend. Gravesend to Bensonhurst. The BQE slid beneath us and the industrial corridors began—chain-link, loading docks, the skeletal frames of warehouses against a sky that had not yet decided to be morning.
I smelled the smoke before we saw the yard. It came through the car’s vents—acrid, chemical, carrying the particular sweetness of burned diesel. Daniil’s jaw tightened.
Maspeth Yard appeared behind a firefighters’ cordon.
Yellow tape. Two trucks, their lights still cycling.
Floodlights on poles threw white glare across the asphalt, and in that glare everything looked wrong—too bright, too exposed, the colors stripped to black and grey and the sick yellow of emergency lighting.
Shed C was a carcass. The loading bay doors had buckled inward.
The roof had partially collapsed on the east side, the steel beams bent under heat that had long since died.
Blackened walls. The ground was wet—fire hose runoff pooling in the uneven asphalt, carrying ash in slow, dark streams toward the storm drains.
Steam rose where the water met surfaces still warm.
The night crew stood together near the south exit. Fourteen men. Some sat on the curb with blankets around their shoulders. Others stood in small clusters, talking low, their faces grey with smoke residue. Two had oxygen masks, the clear plastic fogging with each breath.
Daniil spoke to the fire captain first. Brief. Professional. The captain pointed toward the south exit, and Daniil walked toward the group of men.
I followed, then stopped. This was his. These were his workers, his yard, his responsibility. I stood six feet back and watched.
He reached the men. He did not raise his voice. He spoke to the nearest one—a broad man in a high-visibility vest, soot on his neck—and the man pointed toward a figure sitting alone on a concrete bollard.
It was Yuri.
The dispatcher was thin. The kind of thin that came from skipping meals during long shifts.
He wore a Sokolov Freight jacket with the collar turned up, and he held a paper cup of coffee that didn’t look warm.
His hands were shaking. Not dramatically—a fine, persistent tremor visible in the way the cup rattled against the bollard.
I watched Daniil crouch beside him, bringing himself to Yuri’s level. He spoke. Yuri answered. Daniil listened. Then he stood and turned to the rest of the crew.
I moved closer. Close enough to hear.
“Your wages continue while the yard is closed,” Daniil said. “Full pay. No deductions. The yard shuts down for investigation, not for layoffs.”
Nobody spoke. The words settled over the group. One of the men with the oxygen mask pulled it down to his chin and nodded.
“Yuri pulled the alarm,” Daniil said. “Fourteen of you are standing here because of him.”
Yuri looked at his coffee cup. He did not acknowledge the statement. He turned the cup in his hands, the tremor visible in the rotation.
I stepped forward.
“Yuri.”
He looked up. His eyes were bloodshot. The smoke had irritated them, or he had been crying, or both.
“Thank you,” I said. “For the men. For the alarm.”
He blinked at me. Then he said, “What about the loaders? The ones on the east shift? They don’t start until six. They’ll hear the yard is closed and think—”
“The east shift will be notified directly,” I said. “They’ll know their jobs are secure before they hear anything else.”
He nodded. The answer had been what he needed.
Daniil moved through the group. He spoke to each cluster of men, asking about injuries, confirming contact information, giving instructions.
He was quieter than he had been at dinner.
The dry humor was gone. The composure remained, but it had shifted.
It was the composure of a man who understood that these men’s lives were his responsibility and that the responsibility had nearly killed them.
I stood beside the fire truck and watched the sky lighten behind the yard’s chain-link perimeter. Pink and grey. The floodlights were still on, but the natural light was beginning to compete with them, and in the mixed illumination the damage to Shed C looked worse—more permanent, more real.
Daniil returned to me. He stood beside me and looked at the shed. The collapsed roof. The buckled doors.
“I should have been paying more attention,” he said.
His voice was flat. Not self-pitying. The tone of a man cataloguing a failure.
“You were investigating your father’s murder,” I said.
“I was in bed with my wife for four days.”
I did not flinch from it. He was right.
“We don’t know yet whether anything you neglected contributed to this,” I said. I didn’t mean it to sound harsh, but I worried that’s how it came out.
“We don’t know that it didn’t.”
I did not apologize, but I knew we had work to do.
“We find out who leaked the schedule,” I said. “We fix the yard. We go back to work.”
He looked at me. The ice-blue eyes were tired. Dark circles beneath them. He had not slept, and before the phone call he had been lying awake in the amber light thinking about tomorrow and the day after that and the shape of wanting something he had not planned for.
I knew because I had been doing the same thing.
“Okay,” he said.
We stood beside the fire truck. The morning crew began arriving—cars pulling into the lot, men in work boots and Sokolov Freight jackets climbing out, stopping when they saw the cordon, the fire trucks, the blackened shell of Shed C.
Daniil went to meet them. I watched him cross the wet asphalt, his shoulders set, his stride unhurried, and I thought: this is who he is.
Not the man in the library with the leather folder.
Not the man in the bed with the silk scarf.
This man. The one who walks toward the problem.
We arrived at Orlov Marine at nine-fifteen. The morning light was flat and grey, the harbor water the color of tin. A container ship sat at anchor in the channel, motionless, waiting for a pilot.
Anton met us at the entrance. He looked like he had slept even less than we had. His shirt was clean but untucked at one side. He kissed my cheek and held my arm for a second longer than usual.
“Terrible business about Maspeth,” he said. “I came as soon as Nikita called.”
Nikita was already inside, seated at the conference table in the administrative office. His tablet was open. Two printed documents lay beside it. He had coffee. He looked like a man who had been working since the phone call at 2:47 and had not paused since.
We sat. Anton at the head. Daniil to his left. Me beside Daniil. Nikita across from us, his screen angled toward the table.
“Walk us through it,” Daniil said.
Nikita tapped his tablet. A diagram appeared on the wall monitor—four columns, each labeled with a version number and a recipient group.
“The Voronins hit Shed C. East side of Maspeth Yard. That is the location listed on version three—the schedule distributed to Kostya’s group.”
The room was quiet. The harbor fog pressed against the windows.
“So someone who received version three passed the location to Viktor’s people,” Anton said.
“Either a recipient or someone who obtained a copy from a recipient,” Nikita said. “The schedule went to six individuals. All Orlov captains or senior men in Kostya’s circle.”
He produced the list. Printed. Six names in a column, each with a role and contact information beside it.
Roman Belov.
The name was second on the list. I knew it before I finished reading the line.
Roman Belov—captain, waterfront operations, fifteen years under my father.
He had been at our house for New Year’s three years running.
He had brought me a box of Turkish delight from a trip to Istanbul because he remembered I liked them.
He had stood at my father’s funeral with his hands folded and his face grey and his eyes on the casket the entire time.
The other names were familiar too. Men who had been part of the Orlov organization for years. Men my father had promoted, trusted, leaned on. Men I had grown up seeing at Volna, at holidays, at the dock—solid, reliable faces.
I looked at the list. Six names. Six men who had received a piece of information that had ended up in the hands of the people trying to destroy us.
“This doesn’t mean any of them is the leak,” Daniil said. He had been watching my face. “It means the information passed through their circle. Someone in this group, or someone with access to their materials, shared the schedule with the Voronins.”
Anton leaned back. His fingers drummed once on the table—a single, controlled beat.
“You believe Kostya is involved?” Anton asked.