12. Twelve
I'd been chewing the inside of my cheek since the church, and the iron taste was the only thing keeping my hands off the steering wheel from the back seat.
Pavel. Of all the men in this fucking organization.
Pavel, who'd stood at Pop's grave with his hand on my back.
Pavel, who'd been in my kitchen three days ago drinking my vodka and showing me pictures of his kid at OSU while Fin was down the hall pretending to sleep.
I'd poured the man a second glass and asked him what she was studying.
The whole time he'd had a wire transfer from Dario Kastelani sitting in a bank account on the south side.
"Boss," Gregori said.
"What?" I snapped.
"You're going to chew through your face."
He kept driving. I kept grinding.
Fin was at my dining table right now with the loupe pressed to his eye, working Pop's jacket like he did every morning, the cuffs loose on his wrists because the little shit picked them every night and put them back on every morning before I came out for coffee.
He'd be on his second cup of tea by now.
Three sugars. Irina was supposed to be at her sister's today, but she'd been losing sleep over him for a week, Aleksi, the boy doesn't eat enough, so it was even money she'd changed her mind and gone to the apartment to make him soup.
I'd get home tonight and the place would smell like dill, and I'd sit at the table while he ate, and I'd figure out what to say.
There was something at the bottom of my chest I hadn't put a word to yet.
The back of a car on the way to my boss with a folder full of betrayal was not where I was going to put one to it.
But it was there, and it had Fin's name on it, and I was going to handle it tonight.
My phone rang. Andrei. The second-shift guard at my door.
"Andrei."
"Boss, boss, fuck, I just got here, the door's gone, Volodya—Volodya's on the floor, boss, he's not breathing, the package is gone, the apartment is empty, what do I— "
Fin. The word landed in my chest like a kick.
Fin, Fin, they had Fin. Volodya was dead on my floor and they had Fin.
They'd walked into my apartment in broad fucking daylight and they had Fin.
My hand closed on the seat next to me hard enough to creak the leather.
The rain on the window roared, then dropped to nothing. I came back clenching my teeth.
"Pull the footage," I said. "Lobby, hallway, service stairs. Send it to my phone. Now."
"Yes, boss."
"And Andrei. Don't call anybody else. Don't touch anything. Stand in that hall with the door and wait for me to call you back. You hearing me?"
"Yes, boss."
I hung up.
Gregori had already eased the car onto the shoulder. He'd heard enough through the line.
"What?" he said.
"My apartment. Volodya's down. Fin's gone."
Gregori grunted. He pulled back into traffic without asking where to.
I watched the phone in my lap. The footage took ninety seconds. Andrei had pulled the right cameras, and he had cued the right window, and when the file opened, I knew before I watched it which face I was going to see.
Pavel.
He came through the lobby with his coat collar up and two men behind him I didn't know.
He took the stairs. The hallway feed picked him up at my door.
The door blew in. He was inside for less than a minute before he came out with Fin between the two men, hood over his head, knees not working right under him.
Pavel walked at the back. He didn't look at the camera.
He didn't have to. He knew where every camera in my building was because he'd helped me set the security plan two years ago.
I watched it twice.
Then I picked up the phone and called Nikita.
"Aleksi."
"Change of plans. I'm handling this myself."
"What's happened?"
"I'll explain later. I'm handling it."
"Aleksi —"
"Later, Nikita."
I hung up, and the silence in the car was the silence of a man who had just hung up on Nikita Volkov for the first time in twenty years and was going to have to live with it.
I scrolled to the number I never called unless I had to.
Murphy had been ours since before I made captain—a watch commander on the city’s east side who’d been cashing Nikita’s envelopes for fifteen years and burying our problems for just as long.
You didn’t spend a man like that on something small.
This was big enough. He picked up on the second ring.
"Murphy."
"Plate," I said. "I'm sending it now. Black BMW sedan. Pavel Antonov, Russian, fifty-eight, gray hair. Two men with him and a kidnap victim in the car. I want every fucking cruiser in this metro looking for that plate inside ten minutes."
"You got it."
"And Murphy. Spotted. Not stopped. He gets pulled over, he runs, and I don't get my package back. Spotted. Called in to me. That is it. We clear?"
"Understood."
I hung up. I forwarded Pavel's plate from the file Gregori had built on him years ago when Pavel had been the man checking the files, not the man inside them.
Then I sat back and let it move.
It moved fast. The first call came within seven minutes. Cruiser on 71 north of Morse had eyes on the plate. The cruiser dropped off at the next exit and didn't follow. The second call came four minutes later. He'd merged onto 161 east. Then 23. Then he stopped.
The third call gave me the address.
It was a clothing store. Bespoke menswear, the kind of place that does suits and ties and the small leather goods men in our line of work liked because they were beautiful and quiet and expensive.
I knew the place. Pavel had a tailor there.
Half the men in our organization had a tailor there, because that was where you bought a suit in this city if you wanted one that fit you instead of hung on you.
Fin would have told me what the place was the second he saw it.
He'd have read the leather from across the room. He'd have known the make.
Bespoke leather. Italian.
I closed my eyes for one beat and let it land.
Pavel was selling Fin back to them. To the men who had taken him out of Edinburgh, killed his father in front of him, and run him out of a workroom on the east side for six months until they'd left him to die in the warehouse where I'd found him.
Pavel had been bought by Dario Kastelani, who men in our line called Mr. K because no one wanted his name in their mouth.
Pavel was about to hand him over inside a shop full of the very product Fin was good enough to make.
I opened my eyes.
"Gregori!"
"Boss."
"Bespoke shop on Bridge, between Third and Fourth. You know it?"
"I know it."
"Get me there. Now."
He took the next exit and sped up. I dialed back the CPD number.
"Murphy."
"He's stopped at the address."
"Pull your cruisers. All of them. Nobody within four blocks of that shop until I call you back. Somebody comes in hot before I'm out and I don't get my package back. You hear me? Pull them."
"You want this on me, Aleksi?"
"You'll be square with us for the goddamn year. Pull them."
"Done."
I hung up. The folder was on the seat next to me.
The photographs of Pavel at Saggio's and the wire transfer, and the woman in the hallway were all useless now.
Pavel had stopped being a problem we were going to solve quietly the second he'd walked Fin out my front door between two men with a hood over his head, and now Pavel was a problem we were going to solve loudly and once.
The shop was twelve minutes out. The car drove through the twelve minutes in silence while I checked my piece, the spare magazine, the second piece at my ankle, the knife at the small of my back.
I'd been carrying all of it since I was twenty-two and checked it every morning like other men checked their watches.
This was my city. Fin was mine.
He thought he could take what was mine.
Mine. I sat with the word for the first time.
Fin was mine. Fin had been mine since I'd cut him out of a zip tie and put him in my safehouse, brought him to my apartment to let him work my father's jacket.
Mine since he'd put his hands on my face on my entryway floor and breathed me through it without asking for anything in return.
Mine on Sunday night, when his lips had been on me and he had been on his knees and I had been too much of a coward to keep him in my bed after I'd come down.
Mine this morning, when I'd walked past his door without a word because I hadn't yet been able to say to my own face what I was about to say to a man bleeding out on the floor of a clothing store.
He was mine, and Pavel had touched him, and Pavel was about to pay for it with his life.
The car turned onto Bridge.
"One block out," Gregori said.
"Pull up around the corner. I'm going in alone."
"Boss."
"Alone, Gregori. You stay with the car. If I'm not back out in ten minutes, you call Nikita and you tell him where I am, and you let him decide what to do next."
Gregori's jaw tightened, but he did what I told him. He pulled up around the corner from the shop and put the car in park and kept his hands on the wheel, because Gregori was a professional.
I thumbed the safety off, slid the piece back inside my coat, and opened the door.
The rain had stopped. The sidewalk was wet under a sky the color of dirty steel. The bespoke shop sat halfway down the block, lights on, the CLOSED sign turned to the street.
The door of the shop had a brass bell hung on the inside. Pavel was going to hear me coming. I didn't fucking care.