Chapter 7
Daniil
Ihad slept all of forty minutes. If that.
The heavy bag hung from a chain bolted into the concrete ceiling of the basement gym at Dover Street.
It was a Title Maize leather bag, hundred pounds, and I had been hitting it since five-twelve.
My wraps were dark with sweat. My knuckles ached through the padding.
I drove my right fist into the bag, turned my hip, drove the left.
The sound she made when I pulled her hair.
Right fist. Left hook. The bag swung on its chain and I caught it with my forearm and drove a knee into the center.
Her mouth opening under mine. Her fingers in my coat. The heat of her body against my chest through two layers of wool and silk and whatever the green dress was made of.
I hit the bag until my shoulders burned and my breath came ragged through my teeth and the forty minutes of sleep felt like an insult rather than a deficit.
The basement smelled of leather and concrete dust and the particular mineral tang of a man’s own sweat in an enclosed space.
A single fluorescent tube buzzed overhead.
The floor mat was rolled against the wall. I had not used it.
Every time I stopped moving, the kiss came back. The softness of her lower lip. The sound—low, involuntary, pulled from somewhere she had not intended to share. The way her hands had fisted in my coat and pulled me closer instead of pushing me away.
I drove my elbow into the bag. Twice. Three times. The chain rattled.
Footsteps on the basement stairs. Heavy. Deliberate. Arkady’s particular tread—flat-soled shoes, no urgency, each step announcing itself.
He appeared at the bottom of the stairwell wearing a black jacket over a grey henley. He carried a tablet in one hand and a coffee in the other. He looked at me. He looked at the bag. He looked at my wraps.
“Did the bag insult your wife?” he asked.
“I slept badly.”
“You slept badly and came down here to beat the shit out of a hundred pounds of leather. The bag must have insulted your wife.”
“Arkady.”
He held up the tablet. “Overnight reports. Two things. First—Kozlov’s men at the Maspeth yard ran the shared route without incident. Full load, Orlov cargo, delivered on time. No refusals.”
“Good.” The marriage was working.
“Second. Nikita pulled traffic camera footage from the Hamilton Avenue overpass. The stolen municipal truck was reported missing from a Sunset Park depot at six-forty the morning of the attack. The depot’s gate camera shows a white panel van entering at six-twelve. No plates visible. Driver wore a cap.”
“Facial recognition?”
“Poor angle. Nikita’s running partial matches.”
“Tell him to cross-reference Voronin Atlantic Logistics employee records. Newark terminal staff. Warehouse personnel. Anyone with commercial driving credentials.”
“Already instructed.”
Arkady took a drink of his coffee. He watched me unwrap my hands. The wraps were damp and dark. I dropped them on the bench beside the weight rack.
“You look like shit,” he said.
“Thank you. I said I had poor sleep.”
“How long?”
“That’s enough questions about my night.”
He studied me for two seconds longer than the statement required. Then he set the tablet on the bench and drained his coffee.
“Breakfast is upstairs. Galina made eggs. I’m going to eat some before Nikita steals them.”
He went back up the stairs. I followed.
The breakfast room was bright. The table was set with its usual precision—coffee, toast, butter, jam, sliced fruit, and a plate of scrambled eggs with the dill Galina insisted on adding to everything.
Arkady was already eating. Nikita sat across from him, reading something on his phone, his plate half-empty.
I poured coffee. I sat at the head of the table. I opened the security folder Nikita had left beside my place mat and began reading.
Ksenia appeared at seven-twenty.
She wore black trousers, fitted through the waist. A cream blouse with a high collar. A structured blazer the color of wet stone. Her hair was swept back and pinned at the nape. Small gold studs. My eyes flashed to the ring, proof she was mine.
She looked like a woman going to war.
Her mouth was still faintly swollen.
I noticed. I did not look at it. I looked at the folder. I read the same line about the Sunset Park depot three times without absorbing a single word.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” Nikita answered. Arkady grunted through a mouthful of eggs.
“Good morning,” I said.
She sat across from me and poured coffee. The eggs sat untouched between us. The toast sat untouched. The fruit. The jam. She had not reached for any of it.
She set down the cup. She leaned across the table to reach the sugar bowl and her sleeve brushed my forearm.
The contact was light. Cotton against bare skin, below my rolled sleeve. The friction of fabric on the fine hair of my arm. Less than a second.
My body locked. Every muscle from my wrist to my shoulder went rigid. I felt the contact in my chest, in my stomach, lower. The memory of her pressed against me on the promenade flooded through the point where her sleeve had touched my skin.
I moved. I pulled my arm back and shifted the folder six inches to the right, creating distance. The movement was not subtle.
Ksenia’s eyes tracked it.
She looked at my arm. She looked at the folder. She looked at my face. Her expression did not change—polished, composed, the professional mask she wore like armor. But her hand tightened on the coffee cup. Her thumb pressed white against the ceramic.
Neither of us spoke. Nikita said something about the Kozlov route. Arkady responded. The conversation continued around us.
I ate the eggs. I drank the coffee. I read the folder. Ksenia drank coffee.
She ate nothing.
I wanted to talk about the kiss, was desperate to. But I couldn’t, there was no way in front of my brothers.
“Would you like breakfast sent to the site?” I asked instead. Neutral. Practical.
“No, thank you.”
“You’ve had coffee.”
“I’ve had coffee.”
“That isn’t breakfast.”
“It’s what I’m having.”
I looked at her. She looked at me. The polished, composed woman in the stone-colored blazer and the swollen mouth dared me to push.
I didn’t.
She stood at seven-thirty-five. She thanked Galina for the coffee. She collected her bag—a structured leather tote that contained, I suspected, flat shoes and architectural drawings and—probably—a granola bar. She nodded to Arkady and Nikita. She looked at me.
“I’ll be at Harbor House until five.”
“Ilya will be outside.”
“Fine.”
She left. Her heels clicked down the hallway. The front door opened and closed. Ilya’s voice murmured something to the second man. A car engine turned over.
“So,” NIkita said. “Is married life as blissful as everyone says?”
I wanted to throw something at him.
Idrove to Beard Street with Nikita at nine-fifteen that Sunday morning. The sky over the harbor was the color of wet slate. Rain had been threatening since dawn without committing. The windshield wipers ticked once, twice, then stopped.
“Anton’s expecting us at ten,” Nikita said without looking up. “Maksim is already inside. He pulled the Volna building records himself.”
Maksim. One of Anton’s intelligence people. I had met him once at the funeral reception—compact, quiet, with the watchful patience of a man whose job was to notice what others missed. Anton trusted him the way I trusted Nikita: completely, and with good reason.
“Who else knows we’re coming?” I asked.
“Anton. Maksim. Uncle Kostya is aware there’s a meeting but not what it concerns. Nobody else.”
“Keep it that way.”
Nikita nodded and returned to his tablet.
We pulled into the lot at Orlov Marine & Storage at nine-fifty.
The building looked the same as it had the last time I had stood inside it—the afternoon of the Hamilton Avenue convoy attack, when the operations room had been full of smoke reports and frightened clients and the particular silence of men who had just learned their world had changed.
Anton met us at the stairwell. He wore a dark suit, no tie. His face carried the same fatigue it had carried since the funeral, but beneath it was something sharper now. Anticipation. He had something.
“Upstairs,” he said. “Maksim has the footage ready.”
The operations room on the upper floor of 91 Beard Street was windowless and cold.
Two long tables. Wall monitors. Maps of the waterfront and trucking routes that Mikhail Orlov had hung years ago and that nobody had removed.
The room smelled of stale coffee and the faint chemical tang of old carpet.
Maksim stood beside the central monitor. He was perhaps thirty-five, with short dark hair and the compact build of a man who had once been military and had since learned to occupy less space. A laptop connected to the display. Three image files waited on the desktop.
Anton closed the door.
Nikita set his tablet on the table and took a position where he could see both the monitor and the door. Habit. I did the same from the opposite side.
“Show us,” I said.
Maksim opened the first file.
The footage was from Volna’s third-floor corridor camera.
Timestamp: the evening of the assassinations.
Twenty-one-fifty-seven. The image was grainy but legible—the particular grey-green of commercial security cameras, every face slightly distorted, every movement carrying the stuttered quality of low frame rate.
Leonid Gusev entered the frame from the left. He wore a dark jacket, shirt beneath, nothing unusual. He walked with the measured step of a man who knew where he was going and did not want to appear hurried.
The next clip was timestamped eighteen-forty. The entrance to Volna. Two of our security men stopped Gusev at the door. One patted him down. Standard procedure. Hands along the sides of the jacket, under the arms, across the waist. The other checked his name against the guest list.