Chapter 20
VALENTIN
The courthouse records wing smells like old paper and floor wax. Zavid secured the robing room on the second floor through a standing request as legal counsel, which gives us a controlled fallback inside the restricted section.
Nathan is positioned in the public gallery one floor below with a clear sightline to the records wing entrance.
Nadia is in the sedan outside with comms running on a frequency Kolya’s console can’t access.
Kolya is outside the building. I told him the building layout didn’t require internal security, which is a lie he accepted without argument, and the ease of his acceptance bothers me as much as his answers in the strategy room did.
Margot walks into the records wing wearing Katya’s gray blazer, Katya’s earrings, and an expression I’ve watched her build over two months of impersonation. She’s Katya from the neck up, and she’s Margot from the hands down. I can tell the difference because Katya’s hands never trembled.
The courier is waiting in a reading room off the main archive corridor.
He’s the same replacement from the warehouse exchange, younger than Dmitri, head shaved, and no expression.
Two men stand near the corridor junction, not close enough to hear the conversation but close enough to intervene.
I’m positioned in the robing room twenty feet away with the door cracked open, a concealed camera feed on my tablet, and Nadia’s voice in my earpiece confirming sight angles.
The exchange begins. The courier runs through the standard verifications and Margot delivers each answer with the right cadence. The courier checks his phone. “Did you handle the south-corridor March shipment routing adjustments personally?”
“I handled the corridor adjustments. The south route was my recommendation based on the driver’s schedule overlap.”
“Which driver?”
“The one who stopped showing up after the Bridgeport warehouse flagged a timing error.” Margot doesn’t elaborate. Katya wouldn’t elaborate.
The courier nods. “Kirill was satisfied with the routing but not the documentation. He wants the back-up ledger address verified against the current account before the next cycle.”
“Send me the account. I’ll verify within twenty-four hours.”
She’s handling the operational dialogue without a single misplaced beat. On the monitor, her posture is perfect, her chin at the right angle, and her hands below frame. Her posture reads as three years on the courier route, not eight weeks of memorization.
Then his tone changes. “The Carlstrom file.” He sets a folder on the table. “Your team pulled the original intake documentation six months before you disappeared. Kirill wants to know whether the intake was your initiative or a directive.”
Margot’s expression on the monitor doesn’t change, but I catch a micro-beat of recognition when she hears her own sister’s name spoken by a man who works for the people who buried the murder.
She recovers. “That was my initiative. I was tracking the adjudication pattern. The Carlstrom case matched three other evidence-suppression operations your people were running through the same paralegal firm.”
“Specifically the toxicology findings?”
“Specifically the ligature analysis.” Margot corrects the misdirection without hesitating.
“The toxicology was clean. The ligature pattern showed strangulation with force applied primarily from the right, but the murder charge against the suspect was dismissed. Mabel Jimenez joined the defense request to seal that finding, and the court granted it before trial preparation could expose the inconsistency. It’s part of a larger pattern I’m tracking. ”
“Why?” he asks with suspicion.
Margot is cool. “Call it a retirement plan, job security, or plain old leverage, if you want, but a girl has to have a back-up plan.”
“You’re planning to blackmail Kirill with this?”
She sounds careless when she laughs. “I hope it never comes to that.”
The courier nods slowly. He’s satisfied, if a little stunned that she so easily admitted why she’s gathering the information. It isn’t true, but she invented it on the fly, and it’s exactly the kind of thing Katya would say. I’m impressed. I just hope Kirill accepts it.
He picks up the folder and slides a sealed envelope across the table. “Kirill will be in touch about the next meeting.” He stands and leaves through the corridor junction with his two men.
He’s also just confirmed that Kirill’s network had access to Mara’s autopsy, to the sealed physical evidence, and to the forensic findings that proved her death was murder.
Margot delivered the answer he wanted, and in doing so, she learned the full scope of what these people did to her sister’s case.
Margot sits alone in the reading room for a long moment.
I watch her on the monitor and keep myself from crossing the corridor before the courier’s men have cleared the building.
She just held character through a conversation about her dead sister’s autopsy.
She corrected a misdirection about toxicology versus ligature analysis without breaking stride.
She knows Mara’s case file well enough to catch deliberate errors. She’s been studying it for months.
Nathan’s voice comes through the earpiece. “Courier’s men are clear. Corridor is clean.”
I’m out of the robing room and down the corridor before I’ve finished deciding to move. Nathan sees me from the gallery and adjusts his position to cover the reading room entrance.
Margot is clutching the table and breathing through her nose.
It’s the slow, controlled exhale of a woman holding herself together through the worst confirmation of her life rather than frantic panting.
She’s managing the adrenaline aftermath better with each meeting.
I hate that she’s having to adapt to this.
I reach Margot and put my hand on her arm. She flinches, then recognizes the touch, and the composure she’s been holding since the courier said her sister’s name cracks. “Not here.” Her voice is barely controlled. “Not where anyone can see.”
I pull her into the robing room and close the door.
She doesn’t collapse. She stands in the middle of the room with her hands at her sides and her breathing controlled. The color is gone from her face, and she’s absorbed a blow that would have dropped most people, but she’s clearly decided she doesn’t have the luxury of falling.
“He had the autopsy.” Her voice is steady, barely. “They had the ligature analysis. They knew Grant strangled her, and they twisted the finding. Mabel Jimenez helped bury the evidence that proved my sister was murdered.”
“Margot—“
“Don’t.” She holds up one hand. I step back to give her space.
“Don’t comfort me. Don’t tell me we’ll use this.
Don’t turn my sister’s autopsy into operational intelligence.
” Her voice cracks on the word autopsy, the first break I’ve heard since the reading room.
“Mara was twenty-seven. She was a paralegal who helped me file the divorce paperwork. She took me into her apartment the night I left Grant for the final time and sat with me on the floor while I shook for three hours. She was the only person who believed me when I said he was dangerous, and he proved it in the most brutal way possible. The people in that corridor just proved they had the evidence that Grant killed her, and they buried it.”
I don’t speak or reach for her. I hold my arms loose at my sides until she closes the distance, then hold her because there is nothing else I can do with the information she just received except be the person standing closest when she falls apart from it.
She puts her forehead against my chest and breathes, and I hold her. For thirty seconds, the robing room is just a room with two people in it who are both afraid of what they’ve learned.
“I’m going to burn that channel.” I keep my voice low because the walls are thin and the corridor outside isn’t ours. “Every person who touched that file. Every payment that sealed the evidence. Every name in the chain between Grant and Mabel and Kirill.”
She lifts her head. “Including your own people?”
“Including my own people.”
“Including Nathan?”
The hesitation comes before I can stop it. Half a second of silence between her question and my answer, and the half-second tells her everything. “The access logs still point in his direction.” I don’t look away. “I can’t clear him until the false-schedule results come in.”
“You can ask me to walk into a building controlled by the people who buried my sister’s murder and hold character while a courier tells me the details of Mara’s autopsy, but you can’t risk believing your brother might be capable of betrayal.”
I deserve that. I take it without defending myself because that would require admitting I’ve been protecting Nathan from the same evidence I’d act on if it pointed at anyone else, and the selective blindness Zavid warned me about is exactly the weakness a careful traitor would exploit.
Her eyes are wet, but she doesn’t cry. She grips the lapels of my jacket and pulls me closer without tenderness.
It’s anger looking for somewhere to land that isn’t the autopsy report, the courier, or the sealed evidence room two corridors away where her sister’s murder was taken apart by the people she’s been pretending to work for.
She kisses me. The kiss is hard, desperate, and tastes like grief she can’t process in a building full of Kirill’s people. I kiss her back because the alternative is standing in a robing room making promises I don’t know how to keep.
I lock the door. She pulls at my jacket, and I let her take it off my shoulders. She backs against the door and pulls me with her. She works my shirt open while I brace one arm against the door and push the blazer off her shoulders.
“Don’t be gentle.” She grips my collar. “I don’t want gentle right now.”