Chapter 10
Ivan
The Orlovs found the first sign of her before the sun rose the next day.
They hadn’t gotten her name, at least not yet. If they had found her name, several people in Chicago would have died before breakfast and Maxim would have received a call he would not enjoy.
But they found enough to make the room around me go very still.
They tagged her as a freelance cybersecurity consultant centered in Boston. Private contract. Likely independent. Their goal was to identify her within seventy-two hours.
Seventy-two hours.
People liked deadlines because then they could pretend it was manageable. Three days. Plenty of time. Time to assess, time to build a plan, time to inform the proper people and distribute responsibility like a well-run organization.
I stared at the monitor in the blue dark of my security suite and understood something simple.
Seventy-two hours was not time.
It was a countdown.
The Orlov analyst who found the trail was not terrible. That irritated me. Terrible would have been easier. Terrible analysts walked straight into planted doors, left fingerprints everywhere, and celebrated too soon. This one had learned caution from someone better than him.
He had three names on a draft list.
Hers was not there.
Yet.
Calloway Security Consulting would appear if he kept narrowing by specialty, invoice trail, and timing.
I knew that because I had already done it.
I knew exactly how many steps stood between his current map and the woman sleeping poorly in a fourth-floor apartment across Boston with my hardware hidden near her windows and one of her cheap blue pens in my jacket pocket.
Four steps if he was careful.
Two if he was lucky.
One if God had a cruel sense of humor.
I leaned back in my chair. The server cabinets hummed behind the glass wall. The monitors cast pale light over the desk, over the untouched coffee beside my keyboard, over the pen I had placed there because putting it in a drawer felt too much like admitting it was stolen.
Everything about this was ridiculous.
A Russian Bratva analyst losing sleep over a woman who would probably stab him if she knew what he was doing.
I picked up the pen, turned it once between my fingers, then set it down again.
“Focus,” I told myself.
For once, I listened. I did not erase the Orlov trail.
Instead, I redirected one breadcrumb into three.
Then five. Then nine. I gave him consultants with similar methods, similar timing, similar access patterns.
I dressed the false routes with enough human inconsistency to feel real because perfect lies often smelled like men who thought too highly of themselves.
One path suggested a retired federal contractor in Virginia.
Another pointed toward a boutique security outfit in Seattle.
The most tempting one led to Boston, but not to Kit.
It led to a vacant unit above a defunct print shop in Allston, leased through a shell company I controlled and tied to a woman who did not exist outside tax records, two conference registrations, and a handful of stale breach disclosures I had written twelve minutes earlier.
Kara Caldwell.
I gave Kara a professional website so bland it hurt my feelings.
I gave her archived talks at industry events no one attended and three former clients that would hold under shallow verification.
I gave her a payment trail messy enough to look authentic and a login behavior pattern that matched the Orlov intrusion if the analyst wanted it to.
That was the important part. People believed lies most readily when the lie complimented their intelligence.
An hour later, the Orlov analyst had found Kara and a few minutes later, he had moved Kit off the primary vector without realizing she had been there in the first place, which was good, but it wasn’t enough for me.
I had bought Kit time, although I did not know how much.
I spent the rest of the day working on strengthening the Kara Caldwell trail until I was finally satisfied that it would hold for some time.
I spent two hours after that removing several cameras I found that were watching Kit’s apartment building and one at her café.
At 7:30 that evening, I went to the Iron Wolf.
The tavern was already loud when I arrived, the front room glowing amber and red, all polished mahogany, velvet, vodka, and controlled sin.
The Iron Wolf had always been our family’s kingdom more than any office or estate.
Men laughed louder there because they wanted to look unafraid.
Women leaned closer because they knew danger wore good cologne in that room.
Deals moved in murmurs beneath the music. Threats slipped between drinks.
It was home, in other words.
Nikolai was at the bar when I walked in, taking up enough space to qualify as furniture.
He had one arm braced against the counter, the other holding a glass that looked fragile in his fingers.
Aleksei sat beside him in a suit that probably cost more than the car the bartender drove.
Sergei leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and his eyes on the front door, because Sergei’s idea of relaxation was finding the nearest threat and silently judging it.
I did not see Maxim, which meant he was in the back room already and probably irritated.
Lovely.
Nikolai spotted me first and grinned. “There he is. You look like you’ve been awake for three days and lost an argument with a spreadsheet.”
“I never lose arguments with spreadsheets,” I said, removing my glasses to clean them with the edge of my sleeve. “They are one of the few things in this family that respond appropriately to logic.”
Aleksei lifted his glass. “Does that mean we respond inappropriately?”
“You once bought a stolen painting because you liked the frame.”
“It was an excellent frame.”
Nikolai laughed loudly enough that two men near the end of the bar looked over, then looked away immediately because they enjoyed keeping their teeth inside their skulls.
Sergei’s gaze flicked to me. “You missed lunch.”
“I’m devastated.”
“You also missed Maxim’s call.”
“Am I in trouble?”
Nikolai leaned closer, lowering his voice in a way that did absolutely nothing to make it quiet. “He used the full-name tone.”
I grimaced. “Ivan Dmitri Morozov?”
“Worse,” Aleksei said. “He paused between each word.”
“Ah,” I said. “So this is an execution.”
“Probably,” Sergei said.
Nikolai clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to move a lesser man. “I’ll say nice things at your funeral.”
“You don’t know any.”
“I’ll improvise.”
“That is exactly what worries me.”
From the back hallway, Maxim’s voice cut through the room. “Ivan.”
Nikolai’s grin widened. “Dead man walking.”
I gave him my glass before I had taken a drink from it. “If I die, delete my browser history.”
Aleksei’s mouth curved. “You have browser history?”
“Of course not. I only wanted to see which of you panicked first.”
Nikolai glanced at Sergei. Sergei did not blink.
“Coward,” I told Nikolai, and went to meet my eldest brother.
The back room was quieter, though the Iron Wolf’s pulse still reached it through the walls.
The round table sat under low amber light, the wood gleaming dark and scarred beneath it.
Maxim occupied the chair opposite the door, as usual.
He always sat there because it gave him the best view of every entrance and because eldest brothers sometimes have the pathological need to make seating arrangements ominous.
I sat down without waiting for permission and that earned me a hard stare, to which I smiled faintly.
“That expression is very bad for your forehead,” I said. “Deep lines. Riley will blame stress. I will blame your personality.”
Maxim did not smile. “We need to talk about the Orlovs.”
“Also bad for your forehead.”
“Ivan.”
The others came in behind me. Sergei took the wall. Aleksei sat with elegant boredom that fooled no one. Nikolai dropped into a chair and immediately reached for the vodka.
Maxim looked at me like the banter had been indulged long enough. “Report.”
I leaned back. “Mikhail’s people are circling a digital intrusion in their financial infrastructure. They have decided it may be operationally significant.”
Aleksei arched one brow. “Is it?”
“Yes.”
Nikolai pointed at me with his glass. “That was suspiciously direct.”
“I thought I would experiment.”
“Don’t. It’s unsettling.”
Maxim’s eyes stayed on mine. “Their intrusion?”
“No. Someone else’s.”
“Who?”
I adjusted my glasses. “Unknown.”
Which was a lie.
Sergei made a soft sound from the wall. I did not look at him, but Maxim did, then his gaze slid back to me. “Unknown but important enough that you disappeared all day and ignored my calls.”
“I did not ignore them. I prioritized.”
Nikolai snorted. “That is what Ivan calls ignoring you when he wants to live.”
Aleksei swirled his vodka. “No, when he wants to live, he says the phone was compromised.”
“Only because Maxim respects compromised systems more than healthy boundaries,” I said.
Maxim’s expression remained flat. “I am about to compromise your ability to make jokes.”
“See? No respect for boundaries.”
Nikolai laughed again, delighted. Sergei’s mouth moved like he might have been suppressing something. With Sergei, that counted as a full comedy festival.
Maxim finally leaned back. “Explain what you did.”
“I redirected their trail.”
“How?”
“Carefully.”
“Ivan.”
“Fine. I contaminated the data set, introduced multiple plausible intrusion sources, and gave them one lead they will find more attractive than the real one.”
“The real one being?” Maxim asked.
I met his gaze for three full seconds.
Then I said, “Sensitive.”
No one moved. No one reached for a weapon. But my brothers heard the line I had just drawn, and every one of them knew it did not belong there.
We did not keep things from each other.
Not operationally.
Not when the family was at risk.
Maxim’s voice went very quiet. “Sensitive to whom?”
“To the current Orlov operation.”