40. Ronan
RONAN
I stay on my knees for a long time after she's gone.
The napkin is still in my hand. I don't let go. If I do, then it's real, and I'm not ready for that. So I stay there on the floor by the ugly chair, the one where all this shit began, and look at the elevator doors that closed on her.
She's gone.
And I have only myself to blame.
I get up eventually. My knees hurt. I'm not used to being on the floor. I put the napkin back in the drawer, then I sit in my chair and stare out at the river. I don't do anything at all for a while.
Then my third phone rings.
I know who it is before I answer it. There's a certain kind of ring, or maybe there isn't; maybe it's just that I know Navi and I know that, when everything goes wrong, it goes wrong all at once.
"Yeah," I say.
"Ro." His voice is flat and dead. Navi's voice is never flat. The man has a joke for a funeral. But not now. "It's bad. It's a lot of bad, and it's all happening at once, so just listen."
"I'm listening."
"A subpoena arrived at the firm forty minutes ago. Federal. Real one. Crosby called me because you weren't picking up your other line."
I glance at my other phone. Four missed calls. I never even heard it.
"What do they want?"
"Everything. Billing records. Client files. Wire logs going back three years. They named the accounts, Ro. Some of the shells. Not all, but enough that somebody must have told them where to look."
I close my eyes.
"Todd," I say.
"That's my best guess." Navi lets out a weary breath. "He's been talking to them. I guess 'cooperating' is a better word. And he might not know all that much, but one blabbering mouth is one too many."
I think back on Todd standing in my office weeks ago with his big watch and his sloppy stack of cash.
Your kind will do anything if the price is right.
I let him walk free, but what I should've done is opened the window and hurled him out of it.
It would've saved both Cali and myself a lot of trouble.
"There's more," Navi warns.
"Of course," I mutter. "Why wouldn't there be?"
"It's not just the feds who know. Word's out on the underground networks, too. They know that Todd's a snitch, and because Todd came to you, because he was your client, and everybody saw you fire him at the bank—"
I understand before he finishes. My stomach flips.
"They think it's me," I say. "They think I'm the one who turned."
"Yeah," croaks Navi. "That's how it's playing.
A federal subpoena comes to the Akov Firm, and everybody who's ever handed us dirty money to wash is asking the same question.
Is Ronan talking? Did Ronan flip? Because a pakhan who cuts a deal with the feds is the worst thing there is.
Worse than a thief. A thief is just greedy.
A snitch is a coward and a traitor and everybody who ever trusted him is now exposed. "
It's darkly funny that this is how it's happening. All at once, everything I've worked for is crumbling through my hands like sand at the beach. The only thing I have left is a napkin, and even that won't save me.
"Todd's a loose end," I say slowly. "But he's not mine. He's not on my payroll, he's not in my chain, I can't reach into him and shut his mouth or shut his story. He's out there flapping, and every word he says makes it worse for us, but we can't do a single thing about it."
"That's about the size of it, yeah."
I stand up and walk to the window. As a yellow cab crawls down the road forty stories below, I wonder if it contains Cali. She has no idea what's coming.
That's the thought that clears my head. Not the subpoena. Not the men who now think I'm a rat.
Her.
"Navi," I say. "Listen to me carefully." I regrip the phone in my sweaty hand. "If our people think I flipped, they think Todd flipped, and if they think Todd flipped, who else might they suspect? What will they do when they draw that inevitable conclusion?"
It doesn't take him long to arrive at the answer. "They'll go after her," Navi whispers.
I nod. "Exactly. Todd is under federal protection as long as he keeps snitching.
Me, I'm the pakhan, I've got soldiers and walls.
But Cali? She has nothing. She's a civilian in a brownstone with two kids under ten.
To them, she looks like the easiest way to figure out what I've told the feds and how much they need to burn to get clear of it. "
"Okay," Navi says. "Fuck. Okay. What do you want to do?"
This is the stuff I know. This part, at least, I've done a thousand times. I've spent a lifetime practicing how to set aside everything but the essential facts. My feelings for Cali, as much as they're torturing me, are irrelevant right now.
It's her life that matters most of all.
"Put men on the brownstone. Now. I don't want her to know they're there. Undercover, plainclothes, but make sure they're armed. Two on the front, one on the alley, one on the roofline across the street. Rotate them so nobody clocks a pattern."
"Consider it done."
"Then some on the kids. Both kids' camps, wherever they are this week—Cali will have it in her calendar, hack it, steal it, I don't care how you figure it out, but do it.
Somebody near the drop-off, somebody near the pickup.
If a car sits too long, I want to know the plate before the engine's cold. "
"You got it."
I pause. There's one more thing, and it makes my jaw tighten just to say it, because everything in me that's still my father's son wants to let it happen.
Todd flipped. He's the reason the roof is coming down.
He took a hatchet to Cali's life for a year and a half and did it smiling.
If somebody put the motherfucker in the river tomorrow, I would not shed one tear, and neither would most of the men who work for me.
But…
"Put men on Todd, too," I say.
Navi actually laughs out loud. "On Todd?! Ro, why waste the manpower? He's the snitch. If anything, we should have our people take him off the board—"
"That's exactly why I want eyes on him." I press two fingers to the bridge of my nose.
"I don't give one single damn what happens to Todd Bradshaw's skin.
But if he turns up dead, if some idiot with something to prove decides to do the Bratva a favor and cleans up the loose end…
You know what he is? He's a father. That's Hayden and Isabella's father, dead in a gutter, and no matter what he did or how much he deserves whatever's coming to him, those two kids will spend the rest of their lives knowing their dad got murdered in the middle of all this.
And Cali—" I stop to regather myself. "She'll know it happened while she was in orbit of me.
I'm not going to let those kids carry that.
So you keep him breathing. Not for him. For them. "
Navi's quiet for a second. Then: "Your old man really is dead in you, huh?"
"I don't want to talk about him."
"I mean it as a compliment." But he lets it go. "I'll handle all of it. Give me an hour and there won't be a square foot of pavement around that woman that isn't watched."
"Go," I say. "Call me when it's set."
He hangs up.
I stand at the window and let myself breathe for the first time since she walked out.
She's covered now, or she will be within the hour, and she'll never know it.
That's how it has to be. I broke her trust, and here I am doing it again, but this time, I can't even tell her it's for her own good, because I've used up that phrase.
I've burned it down to toxic ash. She'll never believe another word I say.
Fine. She doesn't have to believe me.
She just has to be alive.
That's when I decide something. I've been trying to do precisely this the whole way through: Be the man who makes the necessary calls.
And every step, she saw a man who decided things for her without her consent.
She was right. She was right every single time.
So I'm going to stop being clever. Cleverness is the whole problem. I've spent this entire relationship measuring her, reading her, learning her, using every scrap of what I learned to build something around her. And she caught me, because she's smarter than all of us.
I don't want to be clever anymore. What I want is to be honest. I'll do it on my knees again if that's what it takes, and if that doesn't work, then I'll spend the rest of my life watching over her from a distance that she chooses.
But first, she has to be safe.
I reach for my keys. I've got a plan forming, a grand and stupid one.
I'll go to her. She can have the napkin and my blackened, shriveled heart along with it, if that's what she wants.
Maybe she stomps both or shreds them to pieces.
But I'll hand them to her on a silver platter and say, Here is the danger, here are your options.
Now, you decide what comes next, and I'll do whatever you say even if what you say is go to hell.
The truth, nothing else.
I've got the keys in my hand. I'm at the door.
Then the third phone rings again.
Navi. It's too soon.
"What," I say.
"Ro." He's out of breath. There's wind in the phone, like he's running outside. "Two things. I don't know which— Fuck, this is all so bad, everything is fucking— Oh, goddammit, no, no, no—!"
"Spit it out, man," I bark. "One at a time."
"Istanbul. My tail. The one I put on Pyotr to watch our loose end, the one who lost him for a while. Remember that? Well, he found where Pyotr's been staying. A dingy little flat near the water, quiet, exactly the kind of quiet retirement the old man was dreaming about."
"And?"
"And it's tossed. Door forced. Chair on its side. Blood on the tile, not a lot, but enough to raise some eyebrows. His go-bag's still there, passport and heart pills and everything." Navi swallows. "Somebody took him."
I put my free hand flat against the door to steady myself.
Somebody bad has the one man alive who knows where every single Bratva dollar is hidden. Who knows the guns. Who knows the shells, the routes, the names. Everything the feds want, everything my enemies want, everything Cali's machine could trace—Pyotr carries all of it between his ears.
And somebody just walked into a flat in Istanbul and hauled Pyotr away.
"Who could it be?" I manage.
"I don't know. My guy's still there, he's photographing the scene, but he didn't see it happen, he was too late, he— Ro, if it's the feds, it's bad, and if it's our enemies, it's even worse. What if…"
"Navi," I interrupt. "The second thing. You said two things."
He stops. I hear him panting. I hear the wind.
"The men I sent to the brownstone… They were supposed to call me back once they were in position. They didn't, so I rang to check on them, but…"
My whole body goes cold. I already know how this little story ends.
"They're not answering," Navi concludes. "None of them."
I'm running now. Out the door, smashing the elevator button with the side of my fist. My heart is a fist, too, hammering, white-knuckled.
"Get everyone," I say into the phone. "Everyone we have. To her house. Now."
"Ro—"
"Now, Navi!"
The doors open. I lunge in. And as they close on my reflection—hollow-eyed, unshaven, the man my father made and the man I swore I'd never be, standing in the same body at the same time—I think of her doing the exact same thing an hour ago, closing her eyes so she wouldn't have to look.
I don't have that luxury.
I keep mine open the whole way down.