9. Nine
For the first ten seconds after Fin left, I wasn't Aleksi-the-vor.
I was a forty-year-old man with another man's spit drying on my dick and the taste of him still in my mouth.
Coward hung in the air where he'd left it.
My body hadn't caught up to my brain telling it to be in charge again.
My hand was still on the dresser where I'd caught myself.
My pants were open and my dick was still out.
And I was hard again.
That was the part that didn't make any fucking sense.
I'd just come. Twice. I hadn't done that with a woman since I was nineteen.
Rallying for a third round was uncharted territory.
The whole thing had been a script. That was the truth of it.
I'd bought the toy two days ago with my collar up like a man buying a gun off the books, and I'd run the scene the way I'd run an interrogation — orders, distance, me holding all the exits.
Command was the one language I trusted myself in.
As long as I was giving orders, I didn't have to know what the hell I was doing.
Then he'd put his mouth on me and the script had burned down with the rest of it.
So I stood there, hand on the dresser, looking at the door he'd slammed.
Then my training kicked in, and I tucked my dick away and zipped up my pants. I poured myself another glass, drank it, and poured again. The whiskey didn't taste like anything.
I threw the glass at the wall, and that helped for about two seconds.
Then I was standing in my bedroom with broken glass on the floor and cum on my stomach and a hard-on I had no use for.
I stepped over the broken glass and walked out of the bedroom.
His door was shut when I passed it. I went to my office, locked the door, and got out the folder Nikita had given me. There was a single page inside with three names on it:
Dmitri Holland.
Tony Marek.
Doug Reeve.
Pavel was efficient. Three names, a one page of summary on each, the timeline of who knew what about Keystone and when, and the windows where each man could have made the call.
I'd read intelligence files my whole adult life. I knew how to read them. You started with the name you didn't want to see, and you worked outward. The name you didn't want to see was always the one that mattered.
I started with Dmitri.
I'd known Dmitri Holland for fourteen years. He'd come into the crew from Cleveland when he was twenty-six, and we'd done every warehouse, every collection, every cleanup together since.
Pavel's summary on him was four bullet points and a paragraph. Recent travel: nothing. Recent comms: clean. Recent financial activity: nothing flagged. The only mark against him was that he'd been in the room when I'd laid out the Keystone plan and he had the standing to do the damage.
That was it. That was Pavel's whole case against Dmitri. He had access. Everyone with access was a candidate.
Tony Marek was thirty-eight and had run the dock side of the operation for the last eight years. He'd built the timing matrix for the Keystone shipments. He knew the shipping windows better than I did.
Pavel's summary on Tony was longer than Dmitri's.
The bullet points told me what I already knew.
Twice in the last three years Tony had come to me about money.
The first time it was the Hard Rock in Cleveland and twenty-two thousand dollars, and I'd paid it because Tony was good at his job and the alternative was finding someone who knew the docks half as well as he did.
The second time it was a private game in Cincinnati, and I'd paid that too.
I'd told him both times that if he came to me a third time he'd leave without his right hand.
Tony hadn't come to me a third time. I read his name three times before it stuck, because the taste of Fin was still in my mouth and it kept pulling my eyes off the page. I swallowed. It didn't help. I read the line again.
Maybe he'd stopped gambling. Or it could mean he'd stopped coming to me.
Pavel had Tony's financials going back six months.
Nothing was hemorrhaging out of the accounts the way it had before.
Nothing was coming in either, which was harder to read.
Either he'd quit, or he'd found a new source of liquidity, or someone was moving money for him in a way Pavel hadn't yet tracked down.
Doug Reeve was forty-five. He'd been in Nikita's office for seventeen years as a secretary and bag man.
He'd been in the building the morning I'd been briefed on Keystone, and he'd been in the building when I'd brought the file back upstairs after, and there was nothing that crossed Nikita's desk that hadn't crossed Doug's first.
Doug had come up under Simeon. He'd been a foot soldier when I was a kid running errands for my father, and the smart money in those years had been on Doug to make captain inside of five.
He hadn't. He'd been passed over for it three times that I knew of, and the last time had been mine.
Nikita had given me the spot years ago when Doug had been the obvious next man for it.
Nobody had said anything to me about it at the time.
Doug had shaken my hand and said congratulations, and gone back to his desk in the office.
Pavel's summary on Doug ran two pages. Recent travel: Vegas, two weeks ago, a long weekend with his wife.
Recent comms: heavy, but heavy was Doug's normal.
He talked to everyone. Recent financial activity: nothing flagged.
Lifestyle within means. Doug lived in the same house in Worthington he'd had for twenty years.
I was halfway down the second page before I noticed I hadn't read a word of it. My hand had stopped moving on the desk. I was thinking about Fin’s fingers, the way they'd worked on the hide, sure and slow, like they had all night. The way they'd wrapped around his cock.
Not now.
I put my thumb on the page to hold my place and made myself read the line under it. Then read it again, because the first time didn't take.
The motive case Pavel had built on Doug was a single line at the bottom of the second page. Doug had been there the longest. Doug had seen the most.
One of these three men had betrayed us.
One of these three men needed to die.
The question was, which one?
I leaned back in the chair and ran my hands down my face. The vodka was thin in the glass at my elbow. The clock said twenty past two.
I'd done leak hunts before. Three of them in twenty years. One of those times I'd put a bullet in the wrong man, and I still thought about him most weeks. I was going to think about whichever one of these three I got wrong in the same way.
Dmitri didn't add up. Tony added up too easily. Doug added up the way Pavel wanted him to.
That last part stayed with me. Pavel had given Doug two pages and the others one each, and Pavel had ended Doug's file with a line that wasn't analysis. It was a verdict. He has seen the most.
A good file doesn’t tell you what to think. It lays out what’s there and lets you do the thinking. Pavel’s told me what to think. He’d built three cases and stacked the whole deck on one of them, and the longer I looked at the deck, the more I thought about the hands that had shuffled it.
I’d known Pavel twenty years. He was the one who taught me how to read a file like this in the first place. Which meant he knew exactly how I’d read this one.
It wasn’t a name. A feeling and a page count don’t make a name, and you don’t put a forty-year man in the ground over the way he formats a report. But the thought sat down in my chest and got comfortable, and I already knew it wasn’t going to leave.
I finished the glass. Down the hall, Fin’s door was still shut.
The phone buzzed on the desk.
Gregori.
You want gyros for lunch tomorrow?
I set the phone down. It buzzed again.
Gregori
Also, that Italian place you like is opening a new location. Greek Village.
God dammit. The Italians had opened up shop in Greek Village.
The Greeks and the vory had a line that had held since before my time, and the Italians had to come along and fuck with everything.
If we didn't sit down, somebody somewhere was going to shoot the wrong fucking person and then it'd be Nikita and Nigel sitting down to stop a war. Better for us to nip this in the bud.
I texted Gregori back.
Gyros sound good. Where and when?
Then I closed the folder. I picked up the bottle and walked it back to the kitchen and put it where I'd left it earlier in the night, because the apartment had to look like a normal apartment in five hours when Irina came in for the morning.
Irina knew everything about me she needed to know and not a thing more, and I was going to keep it that way for as long as I could.
On the way to the bathroom, I passed his door.
No light underneath. The undershirt was still on me and his cum was still on the undershirt, dried stiff over my ribs.
I peeled it off in the hall. The smell of him came up off it, and my body answered before I could stop it.
Hard again. Fast. The fourth time tonight, like a teenager who'd never been touched.
I put the undershirt in the laundry like a normal person.
I went to take a cold shower at half-past three because it was the only thing I had left that might work.
The water punched me in the chest. I stood in it and let it. After a few minutes my dick went down and the want went with it, beaten back the only way I had left to beat it. The headache helped.
Fuck. I had until Friday morning to give Nikita his name. If I was late, he was going to give Fin to Pavel and then...
Then he'd go to Yuri's boys and come back a jar of ash.
I stood under the cold and thought about giving him to Nikita early. I could. Nobody would ask. Nobody would even care.
No, that wasn't true. I'd care. Not because the Scottish bastard meant anything to me. I'd just miss having someone around to yell at.
The suits hung in their row. Charcoal, navy, charcoal, black, navy, charcoal. I'd used the same tailor for fifteen years.
Yer suit doesnae fit.
I stopped with my hand on the navy. I'd heard his voice as clear as if he'd been standing right beside me. What was it about him? My hand stayed where it was.
Pop had met a French woman in a Paris bar, and he went back to her every three months for the rest of his life. While he was gone, my mother sat at her sewing machine, letting out his pants, waiting for him to come home. I thought about Fin's delicate fingers threading a needle.
I yanked the navy suit off the rod and started pulling it on. My suits had been fine for fifteen years and some redheaded brat in handcuffs wasn't going to change that.
But as soon as I had it on, I knew it was wrong.
The shoulders sat the way they always sat. The chest pulled the way it always pulled. The collar pressed against my throat. None of it had changed. It was the same suit I'd been wearing since I was twenty-five.
Except now I knew.
I picked up my phone and texted Gregori.
Schedule me with the tailor. ASAP.