Chapter 14
NIKITA
We flew back from Palm Beach overnight and reached Water Mill before dawn, and I never got to sleep.
Platon has the Palm Beach photographs spread across the security room table by the time I come down, arranged in the order he arranges everything, the one that will make sense to me before he explains it.
The lot forty-one images sit in the center, the card holder under angled light, the display card, and the false Delacroix provenance Maren captured from the next case while Lazar had everyone’s attention and I handed him the exact thing I flew there to keep hidden.
“Piper’s awake. I heard her moving around,” Angelina says from the doorway. She came in through the garden. “I heard her talking to Maren in the hallway. She said she was sick again when she got up. She blamed the travel.”
“She was sick again?”
“I’m telling you what I overheard.” Angelina takes the chair across from me. “I’m not the one you should be interrogating about it.”
I let that go, because Vera arrives before I have to answer it, and Adrian is two minutes behind her.
Soon, the room fills with the people who have kept my family alive across four years and one resurrection.
When Mila arrives, I send her upstairs to check on Piper, which is the only reason I’m down here instead of at that door.
“I want the full sequence,” I say.
Platon taps the center image. “The card holder is one of the five that are supposed to be in the Manhattan storage unit. Piper recognized the piece on sight, then used the packet to prove the history false. It builds a fifty-year record for a Delacroix family that either doesn’t exist or never owned this piece.
Somebody pulled it from storage, dressed it, and floated it through a Shilov-linked sale under a clean name. ”
“Which means somebody has access to that storage unit.” I look at the images and not at the people around the table, because I want the facts first. “The account is under the trust. Adrian administers the trust.”
“The account is also indexed against Izabelle’s collection list,” Adrian says, unbothered, because he decided long ago that being useful to this family was the same as being safe in it.
“The people who have seen that list know the inventory numbers stamped under every hinge. With the numbers, you can walk into the right auction house and describe a piece you’ve never held. ”
Across the table, Vera doesn’t move, and the stillness tells me she knows exactly where this is heading. She has held Izabelle’s complete list since the funeral. She produced it herself, in this room, a week ago.
“Vera kept the only complete copy of that list for four years,” Angelina says, because Angelina says the things the rest of us decide to be too polite to say. “You handed it to us like a gift. Nobody’s asked you why you kept it, or who else ever saw it.”
“I was the one your mother trusted to keep it.” Vera’s voice could strip varnish. “You want to make that into a confession, fine, but it’s the opposite. I kept it so that no one who shouldn’t have it ever would. If you’d like to search my apartment, Angelina, I’ll write down the alarm code.”
“That’s not what I—”
“It is exactly what you meant, and you’re right to mean it, which offends me.
” Vera folds her hands. “It shouldn’t. Everyone at this table had access to something.
I had the list. Adrian has the account. The boy has a debt that pays into Shilov’s pocket every month.
Suspecting me is good practice. It’s just also wrong, and better men than the ones at this table have suspected me before and been wrong too. ”
Nobody answers that, because everyone in the room has arrived at the same ugly total.
The evidence doesn’t answer one question.
It opens three vulnerabilities, and each suspect fits a different part of the breach.
Vera knew the complete inventory and every identifying mark stamped under every hinge.
Adrian controlled the storage lease, the trust records, and every access authorization on the account.
Callum’s debt gave Shilov a live route into Piper’s family and a place to extract or plant information.
None of that proves who physically walked the card holder out of that unit or who first told Shilov where to look, and I’ve learned not to trust the version that points cleanly at one person, because that’s the version someone arranged for me to find.
“Lazar reported the necklace and the man behind it up his chain,” Platon says, moving us off the subject before it turns into a scene from Reservoir Dogs. We wrap up the meeting. Vera, Adrian, and Angelina leave; only Platon stays behind.
Only when we’re alone does Platon give me a full accounting.
“Shilov now knows a widow with a Rusakov claim has protection dangerous enough to step between a guest and her throat. He doesn’t know it’s you.
He probably knows it’s someone with your reflexes.
” He sets down a second folder. “Separately, I’ve been through Adrian’s maintenance vendors, the ones Vera wanted checked.
Two of the three do real work. The third billed forty thousand a year against this house for grounds and systems upkeep that visibly never happened, and it routes to a company with no other clients I can find.
It’s not proof of anything on its own. A lazy vendor and a skimming one look identical on an invoice. I’m still pulling the ownership.”
“Then stop doing it quietly.” I’ve spent a week telling myself the silver set was a coincidence and the vendor was laziness, but I’m done spending goodwill I can’t afford.
“Do a full forensic audit on Adrian. Have an outside forensic accountant you choose and Adrian never meets review every account he touches, every vendor, and every transfer since the year I died. If he’s clean, I owe him an apology he’ll never hear about.
If he isn’t, I want it documented well enough to hand a court, because I am not solving this one with a body. ”
Platon writes it down.
“Lazar set it all up as a fishing expedition,” I say. “The card holder was bait, the name was bait, and the reach was bait. He built the whole conversation to see whether anyone in the room would break cover to protect her, and I did.” I regret it but would react the same way again.
Platon doesn’t say yes. He doesn’t need to.
He hands me a coffee instead, black, as I’ve taken it for a decade, and I understand that he made it while I was reading the photographs because he knows I didn’t eat before I came down and won’t until this meeting ends.
He does this instead of telling me he’s worried, and I’ve never once thanked him for it because thanking him would require us both to acknowledge it.
I call Adrian back in. “We use it, then,” he says.
“Malenkov wants to confirm what he suspects. We let him.” Adrian slides a page across the table, already drafted, because he never walks into a meeting without the paperwork finished.
“The next auction contact is in three weeks. We accelerate the estate transfer, move the remaining storage pieces into a public sale under the widow’s name, and dangle exactly the activity Shilov’s people are monitoring.
He sends someone. We’re ready for them. Piper plays the widow one more time, and we close the distance to Shilov instead of waiting for him to close it on us. ”
It’s a good plan. It also puts Piper in a room built to attract the man who wants my family dead. She is the only door Shilov’s people are watching, so using her is the fastest route to him. I hate it but can’t fault the logic.
“I won’t approve that plan,” I say. “Not only because it uses Piper. It’s also built wrong.
You’re staging the sale three weeks out on a fixed date at a fixed address, which hands Shilov the one thing he’s missing, time and a place to prepare his own approach instead of improvising into ours.
A trap the enemy can see is a trap that lets him prepare a countermove.
If we bait him, we do it on seventy-two hours’ notice in a room we’ve held for months, not one we announce.
” I let that sit, because it’s true, and it also means I’m rejecting the plan on the merits and not only on the fear.
“The version you’ve drafted gets someone killed, and it isn’t going to be Shilov. ”
I say it before I’ve run the numbers. The speed of my refusal stops me: I pictured Piper in another room built to draw Shilov’s people and said no before doing any math.
“We’re not using Piper as bait three weeks after Lazar identified her as my weakness,” I say, slower, because the first refusal needs a reason attached or Platon will hear what I heard.
“We don’t accelerate anything that puts her in a controlled exposure this soon after Palm Beach.
Lazar just watched me break cover. If she reappears in three weeks in a public sale, we’re not baiting Shilov.
We’re confirming for him that she’s worth the reflex he already saw.
We slow down. We trace the storage access from the inside, quietly, and we don’t walk her back into a room until I know who opened that unit. ”
“That costs us the fastest lead,” Platon says.
“It costs us the fastest lead.”
Adrian inclines his head, gathers his page back, and leaves without argument. Before Platon can say more, Angelina returns. “I figured you’d be having the real conversation after everyone else left. What did I miss?”
I don’t reply. Platon stays at his end of the table, packing his laptop with more care than the task needs, which is what he does when he’s deciding whether to say a thing.
Angelina sighs with annoyance when we don’t answer.
I don’t look at my sister. “Say what’s on your mind, Platon.”