Chapter 19
DANIIL
The mirror in my room knew my face before I did.
Pale at the temple where the small scar sat, the one that did not fade no matter how many seasons piled on top of it.
My hair was still damp at the ends. I set the cuff straight at one wrist, then the other, working each link through the slit of the white shirt with the slow, exact motion my hands always remembered, even when my head did not.
The watch went on last. Heavy. Cold against the bone.
I tightened the clasp and let the weight settle.
A meeting waited downstairs. My brothers and I had pulled enough thread from the warehouse intel two nights ago to start unraveling something serious, and Alek did not call us together twice in one week for nothing.
I rolled my shoulders and squared the lapel. The man in the glass looked like he had been doing this a long time. He had. The small scar on the left index knuckle caught the light when I flexed my hand. I had stopped wondering where that one came from. There were bigger questions to chase.
The door behind me opened without a knock.
I knew the rhythm of her step before I caught her in the glass.
Quick today. Light, but not light-hearted.
Chloe came around my shoulder with her hair tied back and her sleeves shoved past her elbows, her mouth set in a line I had only seen on her twice before, once over Rhea's fever and once over a busted lock.
"Can I sit in on the meeting?" she said. "We have to hurry."
She did not give me the long version. She did not even give me her usual half breath of nerves before asking a hard thing. I caught her eyes in the mirror, and the green-brown in them was steady.
"Okay."
It came out faster than I meant. Sharper, too. She nodded once, the way someone nods when they have bet on an answer and won, and her hand closed around mine before I had turned all the way from the glass.
"Come on."
She did not pull hard. She did not need to. I followed.
The hallway felt shorter than usual. Her grip was warm and a little tight, and I could feel her pulse jumping in her thumb. She was running on something, and it was not fear, and it was not coffee, and the part of me that always read a room read her like a folded letter.
The meeting room door stood open. Alek had taken the head of the long table, his eyepatch dark over the left side, the working blue right eye flicking up the second we crossed the threshold.
Mikhail had not sat down yet. He leaned a hip against the back of his usual chair, sleeves rolled, one hand wrapped around a glass of water he had clearly forgotten he was holding.
Ivan was already seated, a tablet in front of him, his refrigerator shoulders making the chair look like furniture built for a smaller man.
Three heads tracked us. Three sets of eyes ran the line from my face down to my hand and the smaller hand laced through it.
Mikhail's eyebrows went up first. He was always the fastest with his face.
Chloe did not slow. She let go of me three steps into the room, planted herself at the foot of the table, and went.
"I caught Pyotr on the phone before dawn, around the back of one of the outbuildings on the grounds," she said.
"He did not see me. He was speaking English the whole time.
He said the brothers had come back near midnight, both walking, both carrying marks.
He said you do not suspect him. Not a glance, not a question.
He said Mikhail is blaming a leak from the office side. "
She took one breath. Then she kept going.
"He said the recon last night went the way the man on the other end wanted. Bruised, not buried. He said they can move on the rest whenever that man says the word. The man on the other end he called Tomasz. The call ended with one word from Pyotr. Understood."
Mikhail had stopped pretending to hold a glass. He set it down without looking.
"After he hung up," she said, "I stepped onto the gravel loud enough for him to hear me coming, and I called his name from a polite distance like I had just come out for the air.
I thanked him for yesterday with my ankle.
I apologized for how you handled him. He warmed up.
He stopped watching me like I might be a threat.
I stepped in close and kissed his cheek like a sister would.
While my face was at his I lifted his phone out of the right pocket of his coat.
It is in my coat now. The screen is locked but it is warm and it is recent. "
Silence. The kind three brothers make when they are simultaneously impressed and recalculating.
I opened my mouth. The smart thing came up. The cold thing. The strategic thing, even. None of those were what came out.
"Wait. You kissed him on the cheek?"
Her head whipped toward me so fast her ponytail snapped.
"That is not the point, Daniil. Is that really all you took from what I just told you?"
She was glaring. She was also half smiling at the corner of her mouth, the way she did when she could not decide between hitting me and forgiving me in the same second. My jaw tightened. I wanted to say something. I did not know what yet, but I was going to say it.
Alek did not let me.
"Give the phone to Ivan." His voice did not lift. It never had to. "Mikhail, take your men and bring that asshole in. Do not kill him yet." A small beat, just long enough to be deliberate. "Daniil." Another beat. "This is not the time to be possessive."
The blood in my face did something stupid. I did not show it. I gave my brother a short nod, because the alternative was making a worse fool of myself in front of the same audience.
Chloe slid the phone from her coat pocket and crossed to Ivan. She set it down beside his tablet like a waitress laying out a plate.
"I'll go keep Rhea clear of the chaos," she said, half to the room, half to the wall.
She turned for the door. I caught her hand before she reached it. Quick. Not rough. My fingers closed around hers and stopped her just outside the line of the doorway, where my brothers could pretend not to see and would absolutely see.
"We talk later."
She bit her lip. Her eyes had that wet shine they got when she was trying not to laugh in a serious room.
"Do your job first."
Then she was gone. The hall swallowed the small shape of her, and I stood there one second too long with my hand still half curled, as if it had not yet been told.
When I turned back, Mikhail was studying the ceiling. Ivan was studying the phone. Alek was studying me with the patience of a man who had seen this exact play before and had a comment loaded but was choosing mercy.
I walked back to the table.
Ivan already had the phone in his palm. He hit the side button. The lock screen lit a faint blue across his face.
"No biometric reset," he said. "He set the cheap pattern lock. Give me thirty seconds."
It took him forty. He turned the phone toward us. Contacts opened, scrolling slow. The names came up in a Cyrillic shorthand I recognized at a glance. Tomasz K. Dario M. A burner labeled with only three letters. Another marked by a single asterisk.
"Call log," Ivan said. "Last call placed at five forty-one this morning. Six minutes, eleven seconds. Tomasz K." His thumb moved. "Outbound calls last night at twenty-two ten, twenty-three forty, and zero two seventeen. Three different burner numbers. He was reporting in waves."
He flicked over to the messages.
"Texts to Dario," he read. "Two days ago. He says, and I quote, the older brother left the compound at nine, came back at eleven, one car, two men in front, no rear chase." He scrolled. "And here. The middle brother went to Krov until two in the morning. Drove himself."
Mikhail snorted softly. "That's me. He clocked me, the little rat."
Ivan was not done. He swiped again. A screenshot. A bank app. A transfer received three weeks ago in numbers that would make a normal man swallow.
"Money," Ivan said. "From an account routed through a shell I recognize. Marchetti's bookkeeper uses it. I have seen the prefix before."
Alek leaned forward. The blue eye moved over the screen and registered everything in a single sweep. He said nothing for a long moment. Then:
"Chloe is a lucky charm."
The words landed. Affection, from him, is a thing he allows himself once a year, maybe twice.
I should have been proud. I was proud, somewhere underneath.
But on top of the proud sat a hot small splinter I could not pluck out, and the splinter looked like a smug guard getting a kiss on the side of his face in a back hall.
"I am not sure I am happy about this," I said.
Ivan did not look up. He did not even blink.
"She is using her brain more than you are right now, Daniil."
Mikhail made a sound I refused to dignify by calling a laugh. I held the line of my mouth and looked at the wall behind Alek's head. The wall was, helpfully, neutral.
"Bring him," Alek said. "Now."
Mikhail pushed off the back of his chair and was out the door before the word finished.
I gave it twenty minutes. I gave Mikhail's men time to dig Pyotr out of whatever corner of the compound he had been pretending to do honest work in, and I gave myself time to put the cold back where it lived. Then I went down.
The holding room sat past the side stair, through the steel door, under a single hard light that washed everything flat. The walls were unpainted concrete. The floor had a drain. One chair was bolted into the center, and Pyotr was in it.
His face was wrong already. His left cheekbone was sitting where his eye should have been.
One of his front teeth had relocated. A slick of red ran down his shirt, already going tacky at the edges.
He was breathing through his mouth, wet, ragged.
Two of Mikhail's men stood by the wall, knuckles scuffed, faces empty.
Mikhail himself leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded, watching me come in like a man at a play.