25. Thea
THEA
I light the study fire before the sun is up. The smell of it is the only thing that settles my stomach anymore, and my stomach was a beast last night. It’s not that great this morning, either.
Maxim’s in the city. He kissed my forehead at five, already in a suit, and somewhere behind his own eyes. “Stay inside today.”
“What? Why—”
“Lev is picking me up. We’re finalizing things at the pier. I’ll call at noon.”
“Why am I grounded, Max?”
He sighed. “Not grounded. But there are many trees around the fenceline. A forest near the rear of the property. Too many places for a sharpshooter to perch.”
I audibly gulped. “Oh.”
“The pier is the trickiest time of this, so I ask that you remain inside until that is settled.”
“Why wouldn’t he have done this before?” I hesitated to explain what “this” means because I couldn’t say it out loud.
“Because if I’m off my game before the pier, it does him no good. If I’m off my game during the pier—”
“Then he has an easier time of fucking with you.”
He nodded. “Da.” Then he kissed my forehead again. “Inside, bratty girl.”
I nodded and watched him walk away, and now, I find myself holding my arms as a poor imitation of Maxim when he wraps his arms around me from behind. Still, it’s a comfort. I’m even wearing his house cardigan because it smells like him.
So, I’m in love. It happens.
That’s the only way I can think about him, though. It’s love. It has to be. No one has ever felt like home to me. Not the way Max does.
He’s even warmed up to Potato, who has returned the favor. My cat gave him a leg weave yesterday that perplexed Max until he understood what it meant. He’s Potato’s family now, whether he wants to be or not. I’m pretty sure he wants to be, considering the amount of petting that followed.
Back to work.
I spread everything across the desk, every manifest and intercept and note. They’re half-truths and bald-faced lies and bits of real truth hidden in code. I don’t trust a single word of any of it, but that’s why I’m going over it all again. Decoding.
Something nagged me all night, which might have had something to do with my stomach’s rumblings. The port intel. Lev’s certainty about this going down at the ribbon cutting.
It’s clean, when nothing else about this has been.
Every arrow points at that pier. The invitation list. The dais. A day ripe for a bloodbath… It all feels too easy. Too obvious.
Real information comes in fragments and whispers. Things that almost fit but don’t. It takes work to put it together.
This came gift-wrapped, with a bow on top. It rubs me the wrong way.
Maybe the real clue isn’t what it says, but why it says it. When it was said. And by whom.
I follow the sourcing through the chain that Lev relied on to build his confidence. It takes me about an hour and two cups of the decaf I don’t really enjoy. Potato moves twice. The fire dies down, so I feed it and keep going.
Then I find the routing. And the routing is wrong.
A transshipment code is embedded in the confirmation string, indicating the container’s route from one port through a hub to another terminal.
However, the hub and terminal are swapped, with two fields transposed, causing the entire route to appear reversed if mapped out—even though most people don’t verify the routing code order.
I’ve fixed this error before. I corrected it twice for Klaus—once on a Rotterdam filing and once on the Antwerp reroute—saying, “You did the codes backward again.”
Both times, him waving me off. “That’s literally what I have you for, Thea.”
It’s his mistake. His repeated mistake, the one he never once learned to stop making because there was always someone standing behind him to catch it.
There’s no one standing behind him now.
So the mistake made it through because, in the rush to fire him, I wasn’t there to look over his shoulder. The error climbed into intel Lev trusted, and it sits on this desk with Klaus’s fingerprints all over it, in a language only I can read.
Klaus planted the intel about the ports.
It sounds insane, except for the fact that it doesn’t. It sounds like him.
Klaus fed Lev a tidy, backward-routed lie, and Lev believed it because it fit. Why wouldn’t he buy it? Then Maxim believed it because Lev believed it, and right now every gun the Vernigoras own is getting arranged in careful rings around a pier in Elizabeth where nothing is going to happen.
I sit back in Maxim’s chair. The ports are a decoy. You only create a decoy when you’re targeting something else.
Which means the real target is somewhere else. Somewhere Klaus knows Maxim can’t ignore. Somewhere that would gut him. Irina’s grave? There’s nothing to be gained by defacing her grave, not by Klaus or Alexei. Unless something else is buried there.
I remember seeing something about doing that kind of thing in documentaries about the Bratva. A fortune inside someone’s coffin, instead of a body. It took people years to figure it out, and by the time the law caught up to the situation, the people who robbed the grave were long gone.
Maybe that’s been Klaus’s plan all along. Take a chunk of the family fortune—
Wait… Maxim would never have allowed Irina’s body to be moved for something as unimportant as money, and to be honest, as much as Klaus has gone off the deep end, I don’t think he would do that, either.
So, her grave is her grave. That’s off the table…
I run down the short list of what Maxim truly cares about, and it takes maybe four seconds.
All the air goes out of my lungs at once. It’s not the ports. Not the company. Not the money or the piers or his wife’s grave.
The heir. Me.
The estate is the target. Klaus aimed everything at the pier so that the mansion would be vulnerable. He knows the layout. Likely knows the gate rotations and the camera angles and where the panic room is and how to reach it. He knows everything he needs to take this place apart.
I call Maxim, and it rings. “Come on, come on, pick up!” I’m already on my feet, moving toward the door with some animal need to find Pasha. Max has to call off the pier. He has to send everyone here, right now, before—
The study door bangs open right as I reach for the knob.
It’s Pasha. The soft boy who teaches me chess is gone. What’s standing in the doorway is a man with his weapon already out and his voice flat and fast. “The gate cameras just went dark. All of them, at once.”
“What does that mean?” But I know what it means. I’m just stalling.
He’s scanning the windows as he says it. “The internet’s down too. It’s been cut from outside.”
It’s happening. Right now. “Fuck.” The phone in my hand still rings. Why the hell hasn’t Max picked up?
Pasha checks the door he just came through, then me, then the door again. “My orders in an emergency are you. Only you. I do not leave your side, and you do not leave mine. Understood?”
“Pasha.” The phone is still ringing against my ear, unanswered, ring after ring. “Listen to me. It’s not the ports. The ports are a decoy. Klaus planted them. I can prove it. The real target is here, it’s—”
He nods once, and it steadies me more than any reassurance could. “Panic room. Now. Follow me.” He’s already got a hand on my arm to take me there.
“Give me a gun.”
That stops him for half a second. “What?”
“A gun, Pasha. You have two on you, so please give me one. I don’t want to sit in a steel room as a package you’re guarding, waiting for Klaus to come and collect. If they manage to get through you, I want to be armed and ready.”
“You know how to use one?”
“I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, shooting tin cans and paint buckets before I could drive.”
He crouches, pulls the backup piece from his ankle rig, and puts it in my hand grip-first. It’s heavy, but my palm closes around it like some part of me kept the shape all these years. “Safety’s here,” he says, tapping it. “You point it at people you wish to kill, and that’s all.”
“I know.”
The phone’s still ringing in my other hand. Come on, Max, pick up, pick up, pick—
The ringing finally stops. It’s not connecting anymore—it’s just stopped. The screen suddenly goes black in my hand, and almost immediately, the entire room goes dark, too.
All lights go out instantly, leaving only the fire, which casts an orange, flickering glow and shifts. The silence rings in my ears, as the house’s many tiny sounds suddenly die. Pasha curses, then grabs my arm to haul me toward the panic room.
That’s when the door bursts open a second time. It’s Galina.
In her quilted robe with blood on her that shines in the firelight. A butcher knife in her fist, and it’s wet to the handle. Her lip is split and bleeding down her chin. Her gray hair has come loose, and her eyes are wild. She’s breathing hard.
Galina rambles. “The kitchen hall. They came through the kitchen, three of them, maybe more—go, go—”
In the swinging beam of a flashlight out in the corridor behind her, I see him.
The bald head. The scars hooking down through one eyebrow like a crack in a plate. The red smile.
He’s got a gash torn open high on his arm, dark and wet and running down to his fingers. Galina’s knife or a dead guard’s last act. He does not appear to have noticed it happened.
The face peeler isn’t hurrying.
That’s the thing that turns my spine to water. Everyone else in this house is moving fast, and he’s strolling like this is a day in the park.
Galina slams the door and throws the heavy bolt. Through the wood, muffled but clear and almost warm, like an old friend spotting me across a restaurant, comes his voice.
“Good to see you again, little witness.”