3. Ronan
RONAN
I don't go far.
She told me to get out of her house, and I did.
But I didn't get out of her life. I told her I wasn't going to, and I meant that shit with my whole fucking chest. So I stand on her stoop in the dark, with the busted front door leaning against the railing, gazing up at the two windows where her children sleep.
Navi finds me there. He stops one step below me so we're eye to eye. It's a courtesy. He's always thought his extra inch of height over me was God's funniest fucking joke, but he knows now is not the time to be acting the fool.
"I thought she threw us all out," he says with a raised brow.
"She did."
"And yet here you are."
I just grunt in reply.
He pulls a cigarette out of his jacket, then thinks better of it and puts it away.
Not out here. Not with kids twenty feet up and windows that might be cracked.
He learned that from me, and I learned it from watching my mother waft smoke out a window because Igor liked to light up in the house, even though he knew it made her asthma go haywire.
But without a cigarette, he gets fidgety. His oral fixation has always been a bitch on his nerves.
He glances over his shoulder, down the street at our two men posted at the corner, and then at the other duo patrolling the opposite intersection. Even then, he lowers his voice, though there's no one remotely close enough to hear.
"Something's been bothering me since we got here," he remarks.
"Join the damn club," I mutter, cracking my knuckles.
"It's the detail," he says. "The men who were on the house before this. I've been going over it again and again, trying to figure out how a guy with a bag full of zip ties just waltzes right past four of our people and up your girl's stairs."
I eye him. "And? Any conclusions?"
"That's the weirdest part. I interviewed them separately, and they both swore that we told them to stand down."
That catches my attention. "But we didn't."
"Of course not. Why would I pull them off fifteen minutes after I first told them it was the most important job of their lives?
But they said again and again that the confirmation codes were correct, and only we know those codes.
I checked 'em over, too, and there's no signs of coercion or drugging or anything. "
"So then someone got to them," I suggest.
"No." Navi shakes his head. "Ro, I trust these guys with my life. They aren't traitors and nobody has leverage to make them act against us. They just got bad orders. I'm trying to figure out how."
I get the nasty feeling that he has a theory, and I'm not going to like it at all.
"As far as I can tell, someone did tell them to stand down. I'm pretty comfortable assuming it wasn't you. And it wasn't me. So if that's true… You know these codes, Ronan. They're old protocol. Dating back from the Igor era."
I have to put my hand on the railing to steady myself.
My father founded the Bratva in his youth.
He set up all the systems that first brought it to life, and many of them have stood the test of time.
The methods we use to move men from place to place, to issue orders that the police will never be able to decipher…
He drilled those things into all of the men in the brotherhood. Sometimes literally.
And in this life, you learn very quickly not to question orders. If someone gives you a command in the language you were taught to listen to, then you obey, simple as that. Questioning got you flayed or killed.
Hell, that was the whole point. Igor wanted men who moved when he snapped his fingers and didn't stop to wonder why.
So that's the answer, then. Someone who speaks the Bratva tongue snuck into our comms and pulled the soldiers off Cali's house so that this mystery man could sneak in instead.
Navi watches as I reach all the same conclusions he did. "It's not their fault, Ro. It's not even really our fault. Whoever sent that order knew exactly what to send."
I look up at Cali's windows again.
Drifting out of the dark—not the literal dark, but the dark undercurrents of my memory—comes my father's voice: You thought you were too good for the old ways, didn't you, boy?
You were so certain that you didn't have to be as hard and rigid as me.
Well, look what it's cost you now. The boogeyman walked right up your woman's stairs, because you were too soft to stop him.
A hand on my shoulder drags me back to the present. "You alright there, man?" asks Navi. "Looked like I lost you for a sec."
I shrug him off. "I'm fine."
I make myself breathe and reorient. The only alternative is standing here letting a dead man talk me into circles, and I don't have that kind of time.
"So it's an inside job," I conclude.
He nods. "Has to be. Nobody outside the family knows those codes. Whoever sent that order was one of ours, or they got it from one of ours."
"Lev knows them."
Again, he nods. "Lev knows all of them. He helped Igor write half of them. If anybody alive still speaks that language fluently, it's him."
It fits. It fits way too well, which I don't like, because things that fit too well are usually things somebody wants you to see, for reasons only they fully understand.
But I set that aside for now. One piece at a time. That's how she'd do it. Cali. One clean data point, then the next. No jumping ahead to rash conclusions.
"Plus, the scale," I say.
Navi tilts his head. "What scale?"
"The one in her bathroom. It sent her a weigh-in just before this happened." I look at the door again, the broken hinges, the splintered frame. "That's how she knew someone was inside. The scale told her."
Navi shudders. "Christ. That's a spooky coincidence."
"It's not a coincidence at all." The more I think about it, the more sure I am. "You don't break into a woman's home to take her, and detour to see if your diet is working. This was deliberate. A message."
Navi's frown deepens. "I dunno about all that, brother. A message for who? And why? She's the only one who'd know what a weigh-in on that thing means."
"Exactly." And there it is, the thing that makes my skin crawl. "Whoever sent that man knew the story. A scale sending her a number in the middle of the night is the single most terrifying thing you could do to Calista Meadows specifically. They know shit. From the beginning."
"Who could know something like that?"
I eye him and say something I would much rather not say. "Me. Her… and you."
Navi's face goes ashen. "Ronan, you're not serious."
Even as he says it, I know how fucking wrong it is. I shake my head. "No. Of course not. Just that someone we don't want looking at us is staring without blinking. I'm just not sure where their eyes are directed."
The night gets very quiet around us. We both look in separate directions, at the Bratva patrols manning their stations, ensuring not one single pigeon sets a toe on this block that doesn't belong here.
"Okay," Navi says. "Okay. So it's Lev, and Lev's got somebody close. A mole, whether they know it or not." He blows out a long breath. "That tracks with the leverage angle. And it explains the other thing. He took Pyotr for the money trail, so now, he wants to snatch Cali up for… what, precisely?"
"He doesn't want her for leverage." I hear myself say it before I've fully thought it, but the second it's out, I know it's right.
"Or—not only for leverage. Think about it.
If all he wanted was something to hurt me, he'd take one of the kids.
God forgive me for even saying it, but a man like Lev, that's his move.
Kids don't wield knives, so you nab the six-year-old who can't fight back. "
"Then why her?"
"Because he doesn't want a hostage." My mouth has gone dry. "He wants the operator. He wants the person who can actually run the machine. That tool's no good to him sitting on a server if nobody knows how to run it. He wants her hands on the keyboard. He wants what I wanted, in the very beginning."
Navi's jaw dropping tells me I'm on the right track.
"That's it, isn't it?" I say as I gather steam. "He wants her tech and he wants her running it, and he doesn't care whether she comes willingly or in the back of a van wrapped in a blanket. Because to a man like Lev—and to the man I used to be—those are the same thing."
"You're not that man anymore."
"Aren't I?" I laugh in self-loathing. "I did enough bad shit to seem like I still am.
And now, some ghost of my father's is doing the exact same thing to her, using my own dead father's codes to lock my own men in place while he reaches for the one thing I love.
" I dig the heel of my hand against my eye, but it doesn't lessen the pressure of this oncoming migraine.
Navi whistles an overwhelmed breath. "Where do we even start?" he asks aloud. "There's so many possible leaks."
I start running through the list in my head.
There's Grigor, who's been with us since before my father died.
He handles the crews on the docks. Old-school kind of guy.
He misses the old days, sure—half of them do—but Grigor's got a bad hip and a granddaughter he dotes on and he's never once, in twenty years, done a single thing to make me look twice at him. It doesn't feel like Grigor.
But then, a good mole never does. That's the whole problem with the exercise. The ones who feel wrong are usually too obvious, and the ones who feel right are the ones you'd never suspect, which is exactly why they're useful.
There's Anatoly. Younger, hungry, ambitious in a way that could go bad if it ever got pointed the wrong direction. But Anatoly wasn't around for the Igor era, certainly not enough to long for those times. Somebody would've had to persuade him, recently, which is possible but it's a tall order.
There's Yuri, who used to run with Lev's crew back in the day before he came over to me.
Yuri would know the codes. Yuri would know Lev.
But Yuri came to me precisely because he hated the old ways, all the filthy shit Lev and my father made him do, and I've never seen him waver from that.
Unless the whole thing was a long con, fifteen years deep, it's not the right answer, either.
Beyond that core group, there are a handful of others, each less likely than the last. The half-dozen men who were on the house tonight—but no, they got played, they didn't play.
There's the guys who handle the money now, the ones who were supposed to replace Pyotr. Any one of them could be it. None of them feels like it.
That's the issue: None of them feels like it, and all of them could be it, and I'm standing on a stoop at three in the morning with a splitting head, trying to solve it fast because so much hangs in the balance.
"I can't narrow it," I admit. "Every name I put up, there's a reason it's not him. Grigor's too soft. Anatoly's too new. Yuri's too clean. And that just tells me I'm not seeing it right, because it is one of them, or someone like them, and my own trust is fogging the glass."
Navi nods. He's been doing the same mental exercises nonstop, I'm sure. "So what do we do?"
I look up at the windows again. There's a soft light burning behind the shade on the left—Isabella's room, her seashell nightlight—and I think about her asking me if I'd be there for pancakes, and me hearing myself say yes and meaning it, and how I want to be up there right now more than I've wanted anything in my whole life.
Not out here running amok on a list of men who might want me dead. Up there. On the floor by a shoebox with a caterpillar in it.
Too bad I'm not allowed to be there ever again.
"We find him," I say. "The mole. Whatever it takes. I don't care how long it takes or what it costs. But I want the traitor, and I want him dead."
"That's a big job," warns Navi.
"It's the only one that matters."
Navi studies me. "You sound like her, you know."
"Like who?"
"Like your girl." He nods up at the house.
"I was eavesdropping—sorry not sorry—while you two were talking, and she said that she'd deal with everything herself because she's the only person she trusts to get it right.
" He raises an eyebrow. "Now, you're standing right here, saying the exact same thing.
You two are the same brand of stubborn. It'd be funny if it wasn't going to get one of you killed. "
Fuck me.
He's right.
We're the same. She's up there right now, refusing every hand that reaches out to help her, sure that the only safe pair of hands are her own. And I'm down here doing the identical thing, telling myself that the only way through this is me and me alone.
My judgment, my hunt, my kill.
Two people convinced they can only trust themselves.
Two people with the exact same blind spot, standing on opposite sides of a broken door, each one so busy protecting the other that neither one will let the other help.
It's a hell of a thing, to see your own worst habit staring back at you in the form of someone you love.
"Get some sleep," I tell Navi. "Then start pulling everything on Lev. Where he's been, who he's been drinking with, every man who's had a private word with him in the last six months. And do it quiet. If there's a mole, he's watching us watch, so don't let him see us looking."
"And you?"
I look up at the light in the little girl's window one more time.
"I'm going to stand right here," I say, "until the sun comes up, and make sure nobody else comes up these stairs."
Navi nods. He puts a hand on my shoulder for a second, heavy and warm, the closest thing to comfort either of us knows how to give the other. Then he goes down the steps and disappears into the dark toward the corner.
And I stay.
On the stoop. Under her windows.
Guarding the door I'm not allowed through.