39. Dmitri
DMITRI
Four days had turned my office into something closer to a war room than anywhere I actually did business, and by the night before the gala there was no surface left uncovered.
The floor plan of The Ambrose took up the whole conference table, marked in three colors now instead of one, Cora's handwriting threaded through Nik's and mine until none of us could say for certain who had suggested which piece of it first. A whiteboard by the window carried a timeline broken into fifteen-minute intervals, starting at the moment the doors opened and ending somewhere past midnight, every block filled in with a name and a task.
Luca stood at the head of the table sorting a case of earpieces into two rows, testing each one against his own ear before setting it down, the particular patience of a man who trusted nothing he had not personally checked.
"Walk me through the loading bay again," I said. "From the moment Kirill clocks in."
"He arrives at four with the rest of setup crew, badge scanned same as everyone else, no special treatment, nothing that tips him to what we know.
" Nik traced the route on the map with two fingers.
"He's assigned the east dock, same as last time, because changing his assignment now would be the one thing guaranteed to spook him.
Luca's on the same dock, in uniform, doing inventory checks that happen to put him within ten feet of Kirill for most of the shift. "
"And if he tries to move early?"
"He won't. He thinks he still has until the reception peaks to make his delivery, because that's the plan he handed his own people weeks ago, back when the gala's schedule still matched what he was told.
" Nik looked up from the map. "We let him believe that.
We do not correct his information. The moment he thinks we know, he either runs or he improvises, and improvising is the version of tonight I like least."
"And Reyes's people?" Cora asked. "Where are they physically, if something moves faster than we expect it to?"
"Two unmarked cars on the block behind the service entrance, a third near the main gate," Nik said. "Close enough to move in under ninety seconds. Far enough that nobody working the gala tomorrow clocks a federal presence before we actually need one."
Cora sat opposite him with her own copy of the guest list spread in front of her, cross-referencing names against vendor badges, the same work she had been doing since the moment I stopped hiding the shape of it from her.
She looked up without being asked, a habit that told me more about how far we had come this week than any speech could have.
"The seating chart still gives us something," she said.
"Kirill's crew assignment puts him near table nine and the east terrace doors for most of the night.
If I keep the donor table rotation exactly where it already sits, nobody adjusts their movement near that terrace without me knowing about it first. Any variance from the plan I built shows up on my board before it shows up anywhere else. "
"That's not a small thing," Nik said. "That's an early warning system built entirely out of a seating chart."
"I built it for centerpieces originally. It appears to also work for treason."
Luca huffed something close to a laugh at that, and I let myself feel, for one unguarded second, exactly how much safer this plan was because she had insisted on being inside it instead of somewhere I could not see her.
"Reyes is dialing in at nine," Nik said, checking his watch. "She wants confirmation on the perimeter before her people commit resources."
The call came through the speaker on the table four minutes early, Reyes's voice as unhurried as it had been the first time I heard it, a woman who had long since stopped needing to sound urgent to be taken seriously.
"Tell me where we stand," she said, no greeting wasted on anyone.
"Loading bay covered, terrace covered, guest list cross-referenced in real time," I said. "Kirill believes his plan is intact. We intend to let him believe that until the exact moment he acts on it."
"And the moment he acts on it, my people need enough to hold him and whoever he's delivering to.
Not just Kirill. I don't want a low-level guard with a bad decision behind him.
I want the account that's paying for it.
" Reyes let that sit a beat. "Your people keep him contained until my people can move on the transaction itself.
That's the arrangement. My agents are not walking into a private security operation to pull civilians out of danger.
That is not what this arrangement covers, and it does not cover Miss Walsh either. "
"Understood," I said, and meant it, though something in my chest went cold at the plainness of the sentence.
"I don't say that to be cold," Reyes said, as if she had heard the thought anyway.
"I say it because I would rather you plan around the truth of it than around a rescue that isn't actually coming.
You keep your people safe. My people take the case.
Those are two different jobs happening in the same building, and the sooner everyone in that room understands which job is theirs, the fewer mistakes we make at eleven o'clock tomorrow night. "
"She's not wrong," Cora said, once the call ended, before I could say anything at all. "I would rather know exactly what we're standing on than have someone tell me it's softer than it is."
"I know."
"I'm not scared of the arrangement, Dmitri. I'm scared of you deciding halfway through tomorrow night that protecting me matters more than sticking to a plan that actually works. That's the version of this that gets someone killed."
"I gave you my word in this exact room four days ago.
I loop you in. I do not manage you around the edges of a decision that's already made.
" I held her gaze across the table, in front of Nik and Luca and a speakerphone that had just gone dark, and did not care who heard the rest of it.
"I intend to keep that word tomorrow night specifically, when it will cost me the most to keep it. "
Luca set down the last of the earpieces, lining the two rows up with more care than the task strictly required.
"For what it's worth, these things cost more than my first car, and until tonight the most dangerous thing I have ever used one for was listening to Nik complain about a bad dinner date through a wall.
It is nice to finally justify the expense. "
"I complained one time," Nik said.
"You complained for forty minutes about a woman who ordered the wrong wine."
"She ordered a cabernet with fish. That is a documented crime in several countries."
"I've eaten worse pairings at your table, Nik," I said.
"That was a different crime entirely, and you promised never to bring it up again in front of witnesses."
"My point stands. Tomorrow these earn their price tag.
" Luca closed the case with a soft click and looked between the two of us, something almost gentle underneath the usual dry delivery.
"Get some rest, both of you. Whatever's left of tonight, you should not spend all of it staring at a floor plan you have already memorized twice over. "
They left within a few minutes of each other, Nik with a final look at the timeline like he could not quite make himself stop reading it, Luca with a short nod that somehow carried more weight than a longer goodbye would have.
Silence settled over the room the moment the door shut behind them, every map and marked-up page still exactly where we had left them, waiting for tomorrow to arrive and make use of all this planning or prove it had never been enough to begin with.
Cora stayed. She always stayed now.
"You've gone quiet," she said, echoing a line I had said to her once, a lifetime ago, in a kitchen that felt like it belonged to different people entirely.
"I'm thinking."
"About the plan?"
"About you, within reach of a man I know for certain wants to hurt the people I care about.
" I sat down across from her, the table between us covered in everything we had built to keep her safe and nothing that could actually guarantee it would work.
"I have run this exact scenario a hundred times in my head over four days, every version of tomorrow night, every place it could go wrong, and I keep arriving at the same problem.
I cannot control this one. Not the way I have controlled every other threat in twenty years of doing this. "
"You don't have to control it. You have to survive it with the rest of us. Those aren't the same job."
"I am aware they are not the same job. I am considerably less certain I know how to do the second one.
" I let the quiet stretch out between us, something I had spent my whole life avoiding in front of anyone who mattered.
"I am afraid, Cora. Not cautious. Not careful.
Afraid, in a way I have never once let myself be since I was young enough that fear still felt like the only honest thing available to me. "
She did not reach for me right away, and I was grateful for that, because I needed the sentence to finish landing before either of us moved past it.
Her hand stayed still on the table between us, not pulling back, just waiting, the same patience she had shown me the night she knocked on a door with no guarantee it would open, instead of turning back toward home.
"Say that again," she said quietly. "Not because I didn't hear you. Because I don't think you've ever said it to me in exactly those words before, and I want to know what it costs you to say it twice."
"I am afraid." The second time came easier than the first, though not by much. "I am afraid of tomorrow night in a way no plan on this table accounts for, because every plan on this table assumes I can think clearly the entire time you are somewhere I cannot immediately reach."
"You can think clearly. I'll be exactly where the plan puts me, doing exactly what I'm good at, and you'll know it, in real time, because that's the whole point of the last four days.
" She reached across the table then, covering my hand with hers, steady, and I understood only then how badly I had needed exactly that.
"I need you thinking clearly tomorrow more than I need you brave.
Bravery gets people killed. Clear thinking gets everyone home. "
"That is uncomfortably practical advice for one in the morning."
"I contain multitudes. Also, I've had four days to think of nothing else, which gave me plenty of time to refine the delivery.
" A small, tired smile crossed her face, gone as quickly as it came.
"I'm not going anywhere tomorrow, Dmitri.
Not recklessly into the danger, and not away from it out of fear either.
I'm going to be exactly where I said I'd be, doing exactly what we planned, and I need the same thing from you. Steady. Not fearless. Just steady."
I turned my hand over beneath hers until our fingers laced together, and for a long stretch neither of us reached for another word, the city beyond the window carrying on the way it always had, oblivious to the two people inside quietly agreeing, without a single sentence spoken out loud, that they intended to survive the next twenty-four hours together or not at all.
"Tomorrow," I said, and for once my voice wasn't quiet because I was controlled. It was quiet because I was afraid, and she was the only person alive I'd ever let hear the difference.