Chapter 13 #3
“They establish surveillance,” he said. “Multiple positions. The café shot was taken from across the street—second floor, probably. The angle’s too high for street level.
The car shots were taken from a following vehicle.
The Dover Street shot was taken from the end of the block, which means they had someone positioned there for at least the duration of her arrival. ”
“The guard.”
“Boris is clearly visible in frame three. The holster. His position relative to the car. They’re showing us they’ve identified our security protocols.”
I looked at the first photograph again. Ksenia stepping onto the sidewalk outside The Glasshouse. My coat around her shoulders. Her face turned slightly toward Ilya, mid-sentence, unaware.
She had been smiling.
I reached for my phone. The instinct was immediate and total—call her, tell her to stay inside, tell her to lock the doors, tell her not to leave Dover Street until I said she could. The words were already forming.
My thumb hovered over her name.
The phone rang. Not Ksenia.
Kostya.
“Daniil.” Kostya’s voice was measured. Careful. The tone of a man choosing each word before releasing it. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”
“You’re not.”
“Good. Good.” A pause. I heard background noise—traffic, maybe. Or a restaurant. The ambient sound of a man calling from somewhere public. “I wanted to speak with you. Man to man. Before the situation develops further.”
“Which situation?”
“The situation with the Voronins.” Another pause. Longer. “I understand they’ve reached out to you.”
I said nothing. Nikita’s head turned fractionally toward me. I kept my eyes on the photographs.
“I think you need to consider your next move very carefully,” Kostya said.
“Viktor is not a man who makes idle proposals. If he’s offering terms, it’s because he believes he’s in a position to enforce them.
And I think—” Kostya paused again. The careful pauses of a man constructing a sentence he could later deny having said.
“I think taking Ksenia somewhere away from the city for a while might be a sensible precaution.”
“Ksenia.”
“She’s visible, Daniil. A man in your position, with a wife in her position—”
“In her position?”
“With a wife who is visible. It would be prudent to reduce that visibility.”
“You think I should send her away.”
“I think you should consider it. Among other options.”
The car turned onto the BQE. The harbor appeared below us—grey water, container cranes, the distant silhouette of the Red Hook waterfront where the bathhouse stood. I watched it pass.
“Kostya.”
“Yes.”
“When did you begin discussing this offer with Viktor?”
The silence was different this time. Not the careful, constructed silence of a man choosing words. The involuntary silence of a man who had not expected the question.
“I’m not discussing anything with Viktor.”
“Then how do you know about these details?”
Nothing. The background noise continued—traffic, a horn, the ordinary sounds of a city that did not care about the conversation happening inside this car. Kostya breathed. I heard him breathe.
“The terms were communicated to me this morning,” he said finally. “Through channels. I assumed—”
“What channels?”
“Mutual contacts. People who move between organizations. You know how information travels, Daniil.”
“I know how it travels when someone wants it to travel.”
Another silence. Longer. I let it hold. I did not fill it.
I sat in the back of the car with five photographs of my wife on my lap and the phone pressed to my ear and I waited for Kostya to explain why he already knew the terms of an offer that had been made to me less than an hour ago in a private dining room.
“The information reached me through intermediaries,” Kostya said. “I took it seriously. I’m calling to advise you, as someone who has your interests at heart.”
“Thank you for the advice.”
“Daniil—”
“I’ll be in touch.”
I hung up. I set the phone on the seat beside me. I looked at Nikita.
He had heard every word. His phone was already in his hand, his expression unchanged—the smooth, pleasant mask that concealed whatever was happening beneath it.
“Find out when Kostya began communicating with Viktor,” I said.
“Directly or through intermediaries?”
“Both. Start with the timeline. When did he first receive information about the terms? Before or after the meeting was requested? Before or after the Maspeth fire?”
“You think he’s compromised.”
“I think he knew the terms of an offer that was made to me in a closed room less than an hour ago. I think he called to encourage me to accept it.”
Nikita typed. His fingers moved across the phone with the focused efficiency of a man who had been given a task he intended to complete before the car stopped.
Kostya had been at Volna. Kostya had raised the issue. Kostya’s circle had received the schedule that burned. And now Kostya knew the terms and wanted me to comply.
I picked up the phone. I dialed Ksenia.
She answered on the second ring.
“Hi.”
“Are you at home?”
“Yes. I called Luis. He’s handling Henry Street. I’m at the kitchen table with Galina’s soup and Nikita’s dispatch files. Are you—”
“Oleg threatened you.”
The words came out without softening. I had no patience for framing. She deserved the truth delivered straight.
Silence. One second. Two.
“How?” she said.
“Photographs. Of you. Leaving The Glasshouse yesterday. In the car. Arriving at Dover Street. He had them on the table when I sat down. Five images. Timestamped. He told me to take you somewhere far away.”
Her breathing was steady. I heard the creak of a chair—she was standing up. The sound of a door closing. She had moved to another room. Away from Galina.
“Are you safe right now?” I asked.
“I’m at Dover Street. Boris is here. The house is locked.”
“I’m coming home. Twenty minutes.”
“Daniil.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t drive like a man who’s panicking. Drive like a man who’s coming home.”
She was standing in the hallway when I came through the door. She had been waiting since the call.
I closed the door behind me. Boris locked it. The sound of the deadbolt was loud in the quiet house.
I took the envelope from my jacket. I held it out.
She took it. She opened it. She pulled out the photographs.
Her hands were steady. She looked at the first one—herself, stepping onto the sidewalk outside The Glasshouse, the oversized coat around her shoulders.
She studied it for three seconds. Then she looked at the second photograph.
Her profile in the car. The third. Boris.
The fourth. Dover Street. The fifth. The wide shot from the end of the block.
She laid them on the hall table. One beside the other. Five images from Monday.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
We went to the library. I sat in the armchair. She sat across from me. The lamp was on—the same amber light, the same room where we had signed the agreement, where I had spanked her, where we had pressed our foreheads together and breathed.
I gave her Oleg’s terms, then told her about the call from Kostya. He had urged me to consider the offer and send her out of the city.
“Kostya.”
“Kostya. He knew the terms, Ksyusha. I had not told him. Anton had not told him. The meeting with Oleg happened less than an hour before the call.”
She was quiet. Her eyes moved to the photographs on the hall table, visible through the open library door.
“The false schedule,” she said. “The one that led to the fire. That was the version distributed to his circle.”
“Yes.”
“And now he’s advising you to accept Viktor’s terms.”
“Yes.”
“You think he’s working with the Voronins.”
“I think he knew something he should not have known. I think Nikita is tracing the timeline now. I think—” I stopped. I pressed my hands together. The knuckles were white. “My first instinct, when I saw those photographs, was to call you and tell you not to leave this house.”
She looked at me. Waited.
“I wanted to say: you are not going anywhere. You are staying inside. I am locking the doors and you are not leaving until I say you can.”
“I know.”
“You know.”
“You would have called and said exactly that. And I would have told you that you don’t get to arrange my life without speaking to me. And we would have had the argument. And you would have been right about the danger and I would have been right about the method.”
“Yes.”
“And then you would have changed the instruction. Because that’s what you do.”
I looked at her. The hazel-green eyes. The set of her mouth. The woman who had stood in this hallway and waited for me to come home because she had heard the car and known that whatever I was bringing back was heavy.
“The fifth photograph,” I said. “The wide shot. From the end of the block. Dover Street. Our house. Our porch light. Our guard on the corner.”
She understood. I watched her understand—the shift in her expression, the way her eyes moved to the window and back.
“They’re already watching the house,” she said.
“Confinement doesn’t solve it. If they can photograph our front door, they can reach our front door. Keeping you inside doesn’t make you safe. It makes you stationary.”
“What do you want to do?”
I looked at my hands. The white knuckles. The tension I had been carrying since the Meridian Hotel, since Oleg’s smile, since the first photograph.
“I would give up being Pakhan,” I said. “If I believed it would genuinely keep you safe. I would step down. I would hand over the operation. I would take you out of this city and never come back. If I believed Viktor’s promise was worth the paper it wasn’t written on.”
She held my gaze.
“Why should we trust a promise from the people who killed our fathers?”
The question sat between us. I had no answer. She had not expected one.
Viktor had murdered Lev and Mikhail. He had burned Maspeth. He had photographed my wife. And now his son sat in a hotel room and offered me safety in exchange for surrender, as if the word of a man who killed fathers could be trusted to protect a wife.