Chapter 21
SEVASTIAN
Gleb stops testing me one morning and starts trying to kill me by that afternoon. He does it everywhere at once.
The morning starts ordinary. Espresso, reports, the city out the glass minding its own business in the early sun. I have time to notice the coffee’s good before the phone goes.
The first call comes at nine. A currency storefront on the east side, one of my laundry fronts, burning to the foundation with two of my men still inside.
I’m still getting the shape of that when the second call comes.
A convoy moving product up from the south, hit on a stretch of empty highway by men who knew the route, the timing, the exact count of guns riding with it.
Three dead before the survivors could even return fire. I’m standing in the penthouse with a phone in each hand, watching my morning come apart in real time, when the third thing happens. The third thing is the one Gleb actually wants me to feel.
He hits the casino.
Dust to Dust. My house, my seat, the gleaming public face of everything I am, in the middle of a business day with the floor full of civilians.
Two of his men walk in past security that should have stopped them at the door.
One of my floor bosses goes down on the black marble with a hole in his chest.
His name is Gennady. He’s worked my floor eleven years, comps the old ladies’ breakfasts when corporate isn’t looking, and he dies under a painted heaven before the second scream gets organized.
The room turns to screaming and stampede, a body cooling under the painted cathedral ceiling while four hundred tourists trample each other for the exits.
The whole property drops into lockdown. My palace, the thing I built to look untouchable, stuffed full of police, panic, one of my soldiers dead on the floor where the whales play.
The gaming commission calls twice. My lawyers call the gaming commission.
Somewhere in the middle of it a junior floor manager throws up in a trash can, apologizes to me personally, then goes back to work, and I make a note to promote him.
By noon I’ve lost six men and a building. The war I spent two years trying to talk both sides out of has arrived in full.
There’s a particular thing that happens to a man when his certainties start coming down around him, and I feel it begin in the penthouse with those two phones in my hands.
Espresso going cold on the glass, and eleven miles east, a block I own putting smoke on the skyline.
Dust to Dust was never supposed to be touchable.
That was the entire point of it. A casino is a fortress that calls itself a party, cameras on every square foot, armed men dressed as pit bosses, a hundred small redundancies between a threat and the floor.
Gleb walked two men through all of it like it was a bus station.
Somewhere in my house is the man who drew him the floor plan.
I can feel the page missing. He wanted me to understand that nothing I own is safe, that he can reach into the brightest, most public, most defended room I have, leave a corpse on the marble in front of four hundred witnesses, and walk his people back out into the daylight.
Message received. He’s not here to bleed me slowly anymore.
He’s here to take the whole thing, and he’s willing to set it on fire to do it.
I run it from the war room under the casino, the count room’s uglier cousin, a windowless concrete box with screens on every wall. It smells like burned coffee, gun oil, men working through fear. For hours I do the only thing there is to do, which is hold. I move men. I close gaps.
I get our people off the streets, our guns pointed the right way, our dead handled before the police can turn them into a story. I keep my voice level and my face still while the room around me runs hot, because the second the pakhan looks rattled, the whole structure starts to come down.
I have not survived this long by looking rattled. There’s a trick to it. You slow everything down, the voice, the hands, the breath, until the room takes its tempo from you instead of from the fire. My father taught me that with his fists.
I use it anyway. Good tools don’t care where they came from.
My men’s eyes keep coming back to me, checking that the one steady thing in the room is still steady.
What they need from me isn’t anger, isn’t grief, just the appearance of a man who has already seen the end of this and knows we come out the other side of it.
So that’s what I give them, whether I believe it or not.
I send Kir’s brigade to lock the LA-facing routes.
I send another to sit on the survivors of the convoy in case Gleb tries to finish what he started.
I order the storefront let burn, because there’s nothing left in it worth a single living man, and I add the two who died in it to a list that’s getting long today.
Roma appears at my shoulder somewhere in hour five with a plate I didn’t ask for. “Eat,” he says. The pakhan gets one word today. Everyone’s rationing.
The body count climbs on both sides through the afternoon.
We give back worse than we got. By dark we’ve answered in kind, which buys back exactly none of the morning.
We find one of the casino shooters in a motel off the Boulder Highway, and he does not make it to a conversation.
The men who found him wanted me to know it was quick.
I didn’t ask whether that was mercy or scheduling, and they didn’t volunteer.
That is the closest thing to satisfaction the day provides, which is to say not very close at all.
None of it feels like winning. It feels like bailing a boat with both hands while someone I can’t see keeps drilling holes in the hull.
Underneath the holding, cold and clear, a worse thing is forming.
The strikes are too good. That’s what I can’t get past, even with the building burning and the bodies stacking up.
Gleb didn’t get lucky three separate times in one morning.
He hit the storefront that mattered. He took the convoy on the one stretch with no cover.
He walked men past the one security gap I’d been meaning to close for a month.
Every blow fell exactly where it would hurt most and cost him least. Nobody fights like that from the outside.
Somebody on the inside is drawing him the map.
There’s a traitor in my house.
I’ve half-suspected it since the stash-house raid, the one that went loud because they were sitting there waiting for us.
I told myself then I couldn’t be sure. I’m sure now.
Nobody beyond these walls knows the things Gleb used today.
The routes. The schedules. The soft spots in my own security.
The number of men on a convoy nobody outside my circle should be able to count.
That came from a table I sit at, from a mouth I trust, from one of the handful of people who carry my whole operation around in their heads, and the thought goes down in me like swallowed glass.
I have spent my entire life keeping that circle small exactly so this could never happen. It happened anyway.
I don’t know who. The chaos is too loud right now to hear one false note inside it. Today is all smoke, triage, a dead man on my marble. A hunt for a traitor needs the opposite of all that. It needs quiet. It needs patience.
It needs me watching faces with nothing else pulling at my attention, and at the moment I have nothing but other things pulling at my attention.
So I bank it. Move on a suspicion in this much smoke and I’ll guess, and a wrong guess buries an innocent man and warns the guilty one.
I’ll find him. Not today. But I will find him, and when I do, there won’t be enough left of him to bury.
Late in the afternoon, with the immediate fires contained and the floor of my casino taped off as a crime scene, I sit down for the first time in nine hours.
That’s when I notice the blood on my cuff.
Not mine. I don’t remember whose. And in the stillness that comes with finally sitting, the second realization arrives, the one I’ve been outrunning all day. It’s so much worse than the traitor.
I can’t win this clean. That’s the first half of it.
Gleb has decided to burn my world down in order to take it, and a man willing to burn the thing he wants can’t be beaten by a man trying to keep it whole.
I’m going to have to become worse than I’ve let myself be in years.
Fine. I remember how to be worse. I built all of this on being worse, and I have only ever pretended to set it down.
Somewhere in Los Angeles an old man is hearing about my day in detail, from a voice I’d know if I heard it. I don’t have the voice yet. I have the certainty, which is worse company.
It’s the second half that stops my breath.
Because I sit there in the war room with another man’s blood drying on my shirt, going through every exposed point in my empire the way your tongue keeps going back to a cracked tooth, and the most exposed point isn’t a storefront, or a convoy, or a gap in my security. It’s a woman.
A blond dancer behind the walls of my ranch forty minutes north of here.
A woman I’ve spent weeks calling an asset, a job, a problem to manage.
A woman I lied about to myself in a count room with her still warm against me.
A woman who fed my entire garrison one night and beat them at cards with their own faces, while I stood in a doorway holding my ration like a fool.
And the truth I’ve been refusing to hold arrives now all at once, with the worst timing it could possibly choose.
I love her. I have been pretending otherwise, badly, the whole time.
And in this life, the thing you love is not a private comfort.
It’s a handle. It’s the exact place they reach for when they want to make you do something you’d never otherwise do.
The moment Gleb Morozov works out what that woman is to me, she stops being a stripper I claimed for a cover story and becomes the most valuable object in the state, the one lever in the world that can move a man who otherwise cannot be moved.
Gleb is good. As good as I am, on a bad day better.
If I worked it out sitting here with a dead man’s blood on my cuff, he can work it out too.
He has eyes. He’s had eyes on her since the desert.
Sooner or later he looks at the woman the untouchable pakhan hides behind walls and tends like a secret.
He understands what she is. Then he goes hunting for the softest way to reach her.
He won’t come at the walls. The walls are hard.
He’ll come at the soft edges instead, the ones I can’t fortify, the people in her life who live out in the open with no detail and no gate.
The whole world she had before me, the one I can’t drag behind concrete without telling her exactly how afraid I’ve become.
Her dancers. Her landlord. The bartender who knows her usual.
A whole city of soft doors with her fingerprints on the knobs.
So I make the calls. I order her locked down completely. No city, no leaving, the ranch and nothing past its gate. I already know she’ll fight me on it. I already know I’ll win, because on this one thing I have to. Then I do the colder thing, the one I don’t let myself look at straight on.
I put quiet eyes on the people in her life.
Not a detail, nothing she’d ever notice, nothing that would frighten her.
Just watchers, the way you watch the roads into a place you’re guarding.
If I’ve found her soft edge, Gleb will find it too, and I would much rather have men already standing there when he reaches for it than be one move behind on the single piece of this whole war I cannot afford to lose.
Cover every angle, I tell myself. Protect the asset.
The truth is plainer. I just wrapped the full weight of my organization around one woman because the thought of her getting hurt does something to me that no burning building did all day, and that, more than the dead men, more than the lost ground, more than a traitor at my own table, is the thing that ought to frighten me most. A pakhan with a weakness this size is a pakhan with a clock already running.
I sit in the war room with the blood on my cuff, the screens full of my ruined day, and I let myself think it once, all the way through, the sentence I’ve been stepping around since the count room.
If they take her, I will burn this entire country down to get her back, and everyone who matters will see exactly how far I’ll go, which means everyone who matters now knows where to cut me.
I have just named the thing I can’t lose. Even alone. Even silent. Even only to myself, in a concrete room nobody else can hear.
It feels like painting a target on the one person I’d die before I’d lose, and the worst part is that I can’t take it back, because the truth doesn’t care that I waited until the worst possible day to admit it.
It’s true now. It was probably true out in the desert.
And somewhere past my walls in the dark, a patient old man is already searching for the place where I bleed.
I spent my whole life making sure I had nothing soft enough to lose. I gave myself one rule, the only rule that ever mattered, and I broke it. The break has a name. Cynthia.
God help us both.