Chapter 25
Arkady
“What aren’t you telling me?” Vik says, standing in the doorway, twirling a coin between his fingers.
“About?”
“Nik’s death.”
I grimace at him and indicate for him to shut the door. He moves silently, closing it and then leaning against it as if that will help block out what I’m about to say to the rest of the house. “There is a theory that this was intentional.”
Vik’s left eyebrow goes up, but that’s it. He absorbs it for about five seconds and then says, “Was this theory thrown out there by the new Mrs Saranova?”
“Maybe,” I say, sounding petulant. “Does it matter? It’s in my brain, and I can’t stop the thought that she’s right.”
“Okay, but why would Nik have someone kill him?”
“To make me pakhan so someone couldn’t kill me without a fuss.”
He frowns. “That’s an elaborate plan. Why not just take out the fuckers threatening you?”
I sigh loudly. “I don’t fucking know. I don’t know anything.”
“Do you think she’s right or not? Truly?”
“My gut says no. But the way she laid it out, she is so convinced, it’s hard to ignore her.
I had a moment last night when I thought, without a doubt, she was, but it doesn’t add up.
It doesn’t make sense. Nik was not the type to just roll over.
He was a fighter. Literally. He didn’t take shit from anyone.
He was the most self-serving man I have ever known, with impossible to reach self-preservation instincts.
It doesn’t make sense that he did this deliberately. ”
“So why are you entertaining it then?”
I lean back in my chair and swivel to face the window. “Because of her.”
“Don’t,” he says shortly. “She knows nothing. She is a party girl who has been sheltered from her father’s life. From our life. She knows nothing,” he says again.
“Or maybe she can see things we can’t? Maybe she sees the emotional side.”
“Does she have a suspect?” he clips out.
“Miro,” I say slowly.
“Well, if it were anyone, I’d say him. But I’m not accepting this.”
“And who are you to accept anything?” I ask, turning back to face him.
“Don’t give me that bullshit. I’ve known you forever, arsehole. I know you don’t really believe this. But the question is, why aren’t you doing anything about it?”
“What do you think this meeting is for tonight?”
“To weed out the suspects.”
“Exactly. To make them think the attention has been diverted elsewhere, so they relax enough to cock up. Alina is all of the things you said, but she read me the second she met me. She deserves credit where it’s due.
She can see through people, see through bullshit, and maybe her distance from this world helps. ”
“That’s why you want her there. Not just to parade around your new bride.”
“Yeah. She will spot the liar a million miles away.”
“If there is one, and if there is, then what? Without solid proof, you can’t accuse anyone. Not with this.”
“I know. Someone in the family is responsible for this. I need to find out who.”
Vik’s coin stills. “Then we treat tonight like a loaded corridor. You keep them moving forward until only one door remains.”
“That’s the plan. I want jammers up.” I tap the desk. “I want the premises searched and locked down from four o’clock.”
Vik nods once. “Elena will hate me.”
“She already does. Check the vents. The basement, the attic. Check every hinge.”
He pockets the coin and goes.
I stay in the office and go through the ledger Vik has compiled over the last few days.
Every communication, every movement, every financial transaction that pinged across the Saranov network since Nik died.
It’s dense, and most of it reads like white noise, but white noise has patterns if you listen long enough.
Dmitri Baskov. Still dark. No phone activity, no border crossings under his name or any of his known aliases. His second, Orhan Petrosyan, sent a single text to an unregistered number forty-eight hours ago. Three words: All as agreed. The number is dead now.
All as agreed.
I stare at those three words until they burn into my retinas.
It could mean anything. A shipment. A meeting point.
A routine confirmation between men who operate in shorthand because paranoia is a professional requirement.
But the timing is wrong. From a man whose boss has gone dark, to a number that no longer exists.
That’s not routine. That’s a thread being cut.
I photograph the entry on my phone and lock the ledger in the safe. Then I pull up the financial logs and start a detailed analysis of Nik’s bank account.
The numbers don’t lie. They never do. That’s why Nik kept two sets.
The first set is clean. Immaculate, actually.
The kind of bookkeeping that would make a forensic accountant weep with admiration.
Every rouble accounted for, every transfer documented, every payment linked to a legitimate source through a chain of shell companies so elegant it borders on art.
This is the set Morrison would see if he ever got a warrant, which he won’t, because the judges who issue those warrants have houses paid for by companies that exist in the second set.
The second set is buried three layers deep in an encrypted partition that took me twenty minutes to crack because Nik used the same password structure for everything—a date, a name, and a number that only makes sense if you know the context.
His mother’s birthday. My mother’s name.
The year he came to London. Sentimental bastard.
I scroll through transactions going back six months.
The usual flow. Protection payments in, disbursements out.
Club revenue funnelled through Grisha’s laundering operation, cleaned, and reinvested in property and construction through Yury’s network.
Imports logged through Kaspar’s shipping manifests.
Everything checks out. Everything balances. Which is exactly what makes me suspicious, because Nik’s books never balanced this perfectly unless he wanted them to.
I go back further. Nine months. A year. Looking for the anomaly, the single transaction that doesn’t fit the pattern. It takes me four hours and three cups of coffee that I fetch myself because Elena is busy preparing enough food to feed an army, which is essentially what’s arriving tonight.
But I eventually spot something off. A payment.
Eight hundred thousand pounds, routed through a construction company registered in Cyprus that I’ve never seen before.
Meridian Holdings. It doesn’t appear anywhere else in the books.
Not before. Not after. A single transaction, dated eighteen months ago, was sent to an account that terminates in a bank in Nicosia.
The receiving account is numbered, no name attached, and the reference line reads simply: Completion.
Completion of what?
I screenshot the entry, cross-reference the Cypriot company against our known shell network, and come up empty.
Meridian Holdings doesn’t belong to us. It’s clean.
Too clean. The kind of clean that costs money to maintain, the kind of clean that requires lawyers who charge by the minute and ask no questions because the retainer ensures they never have to.
I pull up the company registry in Cyprus and run Meridian Holdings through every database I have access to.
Incorporated fourteen months before the payment.
Single director listed: a nominee service based in Limassol.
No beneficial owner on record. No filing history beyond the bare minimum required to keep the entity active.
It was created for one purpose, used once, and left to sit like a loaded gun in a drawer nobody opens.
Someone set this up to receive eight hundred grand from my father to do—to complete—something.
I lean back in my chair and steeple my fingers under my chin. Eight hundred thousand is not nothing, but it’s not catastrophic either. Not for Nik. He moved larger sums without blinking. Which means this wasn’t about the money. It was about what the money bought.
Completion.
I pull up the date again. Eighteen months ago.
I try to map it against what was happening in the family at that time.
Nothing jumps out immediately. No major operations.
No territory disputes. No deaths. Just the steady hum of a machine that runs itself because the man who built it made sure it would.
I pull up my calendar from that period. Meetings, movements, the usual rotation of business that Nik ran with the precision of a Swiss watch.
Nothing out of the ordinary. I cross-reference with Grisha’s financial logs, looking for any parallel transactions that might illuminate what Meridian Holdings was created to receive payment for. Nothing.
I try a different angle. Instead of looking at what was happening, I look at what wasn’t. What was missing from the picture eighteen months ago that should have been there?
It takes me another forty minutes to find it.
Dmitri Baskov.
Eighteen months ago, Dmitri went quiet for three weeks.
Not dark—not the way he is now—but quiet.
His regular reports to Nik slowed from weekly to nothing.
His revenue from the northern operations dipped by twelve per cent, then corrected itself overnight when he resurfaced.
At the time, it was chalked up to a supply-chain disruption.
Logistics. Weather. The sort of mundane bollocks that makes everyone nod and move on because the alternative is asking uncomfortable questions.
But twelve per cent is a specific number. Not ten. Not fifteen. Twelve. The kind of number that suggests someone calculated exactly how much could disappear without triggering an audit. Someone who knew where the threshold sat because they’d been watching the books.