24. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
The hallway is still half-dark when I step out of my room.
Downstairs, Marta has the radio on low, cabinets opening and closing, and the sound of water running. The house wakes up the same way every morning, the same order, the same sounds, and I’ve been here long enough that I move through it without thinking.
I’m buttoning my cuff when Nina comes around the corner.
She hasn’t seen me. She’s looking at her phone, hair loose, white T-shirt, shorts that sit high on her thighs, bare feet on the hardwood. She pulls up two feet from me, blinks, and looks up.
We’re close enough that I can see the crease along her cheek from the pillow.
She looks at me for a beat. Then her eyes drop back to her phone, and she walks past me toward the stairs.
My phone buzzes in my jacket pocket.
I stand there for two seconds before I take it out.
Rico’s message reads: Shipment in two days early. At the warehouse. Come now.
Downstairs, Nina is at the counter with her back to me, talking to Marta about something I don’t catch. The shorts are a problem I’m going to deal with at another time. I take my jacket off the back of the chair.
“Something came up,” I say. “I’ll be back before six.”
“Hm,” she says, not turning around.
I go.
The warehouse is three blocks from the port, a low building with no signage and a rusted door that looks like it hasn’t been touched in years. Rico is at the side entrance when I pull up, hands in his pockets, breath visible in the cold.
He falls into step beside me. “Supply chain adjusted without notifying us. Either they moved the timeline or something spooked them on their end.”
“Which do you think?”
“I think they moved the timeline.”
Inside, the air is cold and flat, the kind of cold that sits in a building overnight and doesn’t move. Overhead lights wash the floor yellow. Sixteen crates are stacked along the east wall in two rows, the outer packaging intact, my men’s check marks on each one from last night.
I start at the third crate in the center row.
“You don’t trust the checks,” Rico says, behind me.
“I trust the checks.” I pull my knife from my pocket. “I also do my own.”
I run the blade along the tape, open the outer layer, then the inner wrapping beneath it.
The product is white, consistent, packed tight with the kind of density that tells me the people on the supply end are still doing their jobs properly.
I open one sachet along the seam, take a small amount on my fingertip, and touch it to my tongue.
The quality is there.
“Better than the last shipment,” I say.
“It should be,” Rico says. “After that conversation.”
I move to the next crate. Then the next. Rico walks the row behind me, hands still in his pockets, saying nothing while I work.
The warehouse smells like cold concrete and cardboard and the faint chemical edge of the product, a smell I stopped noticing years ago.
I check five crates in total. All the same.
Before I close the last one, I reach in and take a sachet, tuck it into my inside jacket pocket.
“The other matter,” I say.
Rico tips his head toward the partition wall at the back of the warehouse.
I go around it.
Emil Sloan is sitting in a chair, his wrists zip-tied to the armrests, which was not something I asked for but which tells me my men assessed the situation correctly when they brought him in.
He’s forty-one years old, has been with the East Side operation for four years, and is the kind of man you stop watching after the first two because he gave you no reason to keep watching. That was his advantage, and he used it well.
He looks up when I come around the partition.
I pull a chair from the wall and sit across from him.
The fluorescent light above us flickers once and holds.
“Emil,” I say.
He opens his mouth.
“Don’t apologize,” I say. “I don’t want that. Tell me who approached you first, how they made contact, and what they asked you to look for.”
He talks. It takes four minutes. His voice is flat and even, a man who has already made his peace with the situation and is not going to waste his last conversation on performance.
He tells me the name of the man who approached him, the channel they used, and the specific information they were after.
East side fund flows, rotation schedules, and the timing of the port shipments. I listen to all of it.
“Was it greed,” I say, when he finishes, “or did they have something on you?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Both,” he says. “In that order.”
I nod. I stand up.
I handle it the way it needs to be handled, clean and without theatre, and I tell Rico to take care of the rest. I walk back through the warehouse without stopping.
Outside, I stand by the car for a moment.
The port road is empty at this hour, a container ship visible in the distance past the dock, moving slowly against the gray sky.
I get in the car and drive home.
At the house, I go upstairs first. I open the top drawer of my bedside table, push the watch to one side, and put the sachet underneath it. I close the drawer. Then I shower, change, and go to my study and work through the morning.
Rico calls at four. “Warehouse is clean. Distribution is moving on schedule. The name Sloan gave us checks out, we’re running it down now.”
“Good. I want Lev and Peter here tonight. Tell them seven fifty.”
“They’ll be there.”
I hang up and go back to work.
At six, I pass the library, and Nina is inside, cross-legged on the sofa, laptop open, glasses on, the ones she only wears when she has been reading for a long time. She looks up when I stop in the doorway.
“Guests for dinner at eight,” I say. “Two of my men. Lev Orlov and Peter Voss.”
She takes her glasses off. “Should I be concerned about them?”
“No.”
She looks at me for a moment. “Should they be concerned about me?”
“Probably,” I say.
She puts her glasses back on and looks at the screen. I go to the kitchen.
Lev and Peter arrive within a minute of each other at seven fifty, which has not changed in twenty years.
Lev is sixty-four, broad, the kind of man who carries himself like the room is already his and is simply allowing everyone else to use it.
Peter is sixty-one, leaner, quieter, the kind of man who doesn’t commit to a room until he’s decided it’s worth his time.
Nina comes downstairs at eight exactly.
She shakes their hands, uses their names, and sits. She picks up her wine and looks at Lev, and asks him how the northern route is handling the new customs protocols out of Helsinki.
Lev stops reaching for his glass.
He answers her.
Fifteen minutes later, he’s walking her through the structural problems of the northern corridor with the enthusiasm of a man who rarely gets to talk about his work with someone who follows it.
Nina listens, asks one follow-up that takes the conversation somewhere Lev didn’t expect, and he sits back and laughs and says she’s right, and he wishes she’d been in the room last spring when they made the wrong call.
Peter watches all of this without expression.
By the main course, the table has moved to private capital flows across Eastern European markets, regulatory pressure, compliance changes, and what it means for businesses operating in that corridor as the rules keep shifting. Nina makes three observations.
Peter sets his fork down.
He picks it back up after a moment. Says nothing. But by dessert, he’s directing his answers to her instead of routing them through me, which is the most Peter Voss has ever said to anyone without opening his mouth.
At ten, I walk them to the door.
Peter shakes my hand, nods once toward the dining room, and goes to the car. Lev lingers. He glances back toward Nina, still at the table with her wine, and then he looks at me with the weight of old familiarity, old evenings, arrangements from years before certain lines existed and mattered.
“She’s something,” he says, and the way he says it carries everything he doesn’t say out loud.
“Lev.” My voice stays where it is. “If the next thing out of your mouth is anything other than a remark about how intelligent she is, I will make sure you regret it in a way that is specific, thorough, and that Rico will be asked to clean up. We are very clear.”
He holds my eye for a long moment.
“She’s exceptional,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “She is.”
He goes.
I close the door and stand in the hall for a moment. Then I go back to the dining room. Nina is still at the table, one leg tucked under her, turning her wine glass slowly in her hand.
“The faction,” she says, without looking up. “How long?”
I sit down across from her. “Thirty days,” I say. “Maybe less.”
She nods slowly. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
She looks at me across the table, steady and direct, and something sits between us that was not there at the start of the evening, solid and unannounced.
“Okay,” she says quietly.
That’s all.