Chapter 7
ROMAN
I stand at the kitchen counter in the gray morning light and drink my coffee black and look out at the city.
Sixty-two floors up, Manhattan spreads itself out in every direction, still half-dark at this hour, the skyline doing what it always does, sitting there being enormous, indifferent and not particularly impressed with anyone looking at it.
I have lived in this penthouse for nine years. I stopped being impressed by the view sometime in the third year and started just using it to think.
I have a lunch today that I’ve been managing my feelings about since Kostya put it in the calendar two weeks ago.
I finish my coffee, rinse the cup, and go get dressed.
Elena is at the curb when Viktor pulls up, which means she has been waiting rather than making me wait, which is what she always does. I have stopped remarking on it because it would mean acknowledging that I notice it.
She gets into the car with her bag and her tablet and then pulls the door shut behind her. She says good morning without looking up from her screen.
“Good morning,” I say.
She opens the day’s schedule on her tablet. “Your nine o’clock moved to nine thirty, the Harmon account. Legal sent over the revised Rezenkov annexure overnight, and I’ve flagged three clauses that need your attention before you sign. And your lunch is confirmed at Per Se, one o’clock.”
“I know about the lunch.”
“I know you know.” She scrolls something. “I’m also sending a reminder to your phone at twelve forty-five because last time you had a one o’clock, you were still on a call at five past.”
I look at her.
She looks at her tablet.
“The Harmon account,” I say.
She pulls up the file and we work through it for the rest of the drive, her voice even and unhurried, mine the same, the city moving past the windows at the speed of midmorning traffic.
At some point she leans across to show me something on her screen and her hair, pinned up the way it always is, catches the light from the window at a particular angle and something moves at the edge of my attention.
I look at the document.
“Here,” she says, her finger on the screen. “This indemnity clause. They’ve softened the language, but the liability window is still wider than you wanted.”
“Tell legal to push back. I want it tightened to thirty days, not sixty.”
“Done.” She makes a note. Leans back and pulls her jacket straight.
I look out the window.
Per Se restaurant has tables that are spaced far enough apart that you can have a conversation nobody else will hear, which is why men like Grigori Volkov choose it.
He is seated when I arrive. Grigori is always already seated. It is a small dominance play he has been running for forty years, and I have never once called him on it because there are hills worth dying on, and restaurant arrival times are not among them.
He stands when he sees me, and we shake hands across the table, and we sit. The server appears immediately because Grigori has also already handled that.
He is sixty-three, heavyset in the way of a man who was once physically powerful and has settled into authority instead, gray at the temples and white at the beard, with the kind of eyes that smile readily and mean very little.
He has run the Volkov faction for twenty-two years.
He did not do that by being the man his eyes suggest he is.
“Roman.” He lifts his water glass. “You look well.”
“Grigori.” I open my menu. “You look like a man who has something to say.”
He laughs. It is a generous laugh, full and easy, the laugh of a man who finds himself consistently amusing. “Straight to it. I always forget that about you.”
“You never forget anything about anyone. That’s why you’re still sitting where you’re sitting.”
He inclines his head. Takes it as both a compliment and not. The server comes, we order, and when he leaves, Grigori folds his hands on the table and looks at me with eyes that mean something other than what they show.
“The council session is in two months,” he says.
“I’m aware.”
“I want to make sure we are not walking into that room with unresolved business between us. It creates an atmosphere.” He pauses while the server sets down bread. “Mila is in New York until the end of the month. My niece. I would like you to meet her.”
So it is the niece. I had wondered.
“I’ve met Mila,” I say.
“Socially. Briefly. I am suggesting something more considered.” He breaks a piece of bread. “She is thirty-one. She studied law in London. She is not difficult to be around, Roman, I would not insult you with difficult.”
I drink my water.
“The alliance makes sense,” he continues, his voice in the same register it has been since we sat down, reasonable and warm and absolutely immovable underneath.
“Your position on the council is strong, but strength requires maintenance. The Marchetti situation is evidence of that. Someone moved against your operations, and the council’s response was measured, let us say.
A Volkov alliance changes that calculus permanently.
Nobody moves against a Petrov-Volkov axis. Nobody is that stupid.”
He’s not wrong. That is the irritating thing about Grigori. He is very rarely wrong about the mechanics of things.
“And Mila,” I say. “What does she want?”
He looks at me for a moment. Like the question was one he had not prepared for. “She wants what any sensible woman in her position wants. Security. Standing. A life that is not small.”
“That’s what you want for her.”
A beat. “We want the same things.”
I look at him across the table and think about three weeks and a council session with my name on the agenda and a faction that has been quietly coordinating with Marchetti while sitting across from me, eating bread and talking about his niece’s ambitions.
I think about all of it, and I keep my face exactly where I want it.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
Grigori smiles. “Of course you will.”
Kostya is waiting in my office when I get back.
“Close the door,” I say.
He closes it. Opens his folder. “The Vasin situation is handled. But the Marchetti incursion last Tuesday was not using Vasin’s intelligence. The information they acted on was more current than anything he had access to.”
I take my jacket off and hang it up. “Which means…”
“Which means there is a second source. Someone who either came online after Vasin was removed or was running parallel to him the entire time, and we missed it.”
I sit down. “How deep does their current intelligence go?”
“Deep enough to know about the Thursday rotation change. That was communicated to four people, Roman. Four.”
I look at him.
“Pull all four,” I say. “Full financial review, communication logs, everything. I want it on my desk by Friday.”
He writes it down. “Grigori?”
“Was exactly what you would expect him to be.”
Kostya closes his folder. He asks for nothing else because he does not need to. Eleven years means he can read an entire conversation in three words and a tone.
He leaves, and I sit at my desk and look at nothing for a moment.
Four people knew about the Thursday rotation. One of them is selling that information to a syndicate that is pushing into my territory with confidence.
Meanwhile, Grigori Volkov is sitting across town eating lunch and talking about his niece’s ambitions because he’s certain the walls are closing in on me from every direction.
He’s not entirely wrong about that either.
Elena comes in at five with the revised Rezenkov annexure and the legal team’s response to my pushback on the indemnity clause. She sets it on my desk and stands back while I read through it properly. When I look up she is standing with her hands loose at her sides.
“They moved it to forty-five days,” I say.
“I saw that. I told them thirty.”
“Tell them again.”
“I’ll call them now.” She picks up the annexure and turns for the door.
“Elena.”
She stops. Turns back. “Yes.”
I look at her for a moment. The light in the office at this hour is low and amber, and she is standing in it with her hair up and her jacket still on despite the fact that it is five o’clock.
“The masquerade,” I say. “Did you enjoy it?”
Something moves across her face. There and gone. “It was a lot of work.”
She leaves.
I lean back in my chair, look at the closed door, and sit with her answer for a long time.
It was a good party.
I pour two fingers of scotch, stand at the window, let the city do what it always does. I think about Grigori’s lunch, four names, a second leak, and a strange woman I spent a night with.