Chapter 16
SELENE
Ihaven't stopped moving since the video ended.
If I stop moving, I'll see her face.
Emilia's face, swollen and bloody, her blue eyes wide with the kind of terror that comes from being hurt by people who enjoy it.
If I stop moving, I'll hear the sound she made when the man squeezed her shoulder, that small, animal whimper that didn't sound anything like the girl who laughs too loud at her own jokes, and cries at insurance commercials, and held my hand through the worst night of my life.
So, I don't stop.
Michelle picks up on the second ring. I'm in the hallway outside the room, pacing, one hand pressed against the concrete wall because I need to feel something solid and cold against my skin or I'm going to come apart.
"Selene? It's seven in the morning."
"I need a favor. Property records for a factory building in Sunset Park. I'm looking for ownership history, utility accounts, any commercial permits filed in the last five years." My voice is steady. The voice is always steady. It's everything underneath that's shaking. "The address is—"
"Whoa, slow down. Is this for the same client? The one with the Russian problem?"
"Yes." No. It's for me. It's for Emilia, who is bleeding in a chair because she had the misfortune of being loved by a woman who sleeps next to a murderer. "It's urgent, Michelle. I wouldn't call this early if it wasn't."
"Okay. Okay, give me the address. I'll pull what I can from the city database and call you back."
I give her the information and hang up before she can ask questions I don't have the energy to dodge.
Then I lean my forehead against the wall and breathe.
In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way the therapist I saw at seventeen taught me after the nightmares got bad enough that Judge Hart found me sleepwalking in the backyard at four in the morning.
Judge Hart. Emilia's father.
The man who opened his home to a shattered sixteen-year-old girl and never once made her feel like a charity case.
If Emilia dies in that factory, it won't just be my best friend I've lost.
It'll be the last piece of the family that saved me.
The thought hits me somewhere below the ribs and I press my fist against it, hard, like I can push the grief back down through sheer force.
Not now. I can't do this now.
Emilia needs me focused, on my A-game, not crumpled against a wall in the basement of a nightclub having a breakdown.
I straighten up, wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and walk back into the room.
The next four hours are the most focused of my life.
Vincent and I work side by side at the table while the rest of the team cycles in and out, running errands, making calls, pulling together the pieces we need.
I've never worked with Vincent directly before.
He's always been a presence in the background, Cassius's right hand, watching me with the guarded skepticism of a man who's seen too many women come and go from his boss's orbit.
He's not watching me like that now.
Now he's watching me the way he watches Cassius—with the careful attention of someone assessing competence in real time, adjusting his estimation with each new data point.
When I pull up the shell company filings on Marco's laptop and trace the ownership chain from the Sunset Park factory through two holding companies to a Brighton Beach LLC registered to a man named Seymon Orlov, Vincent leans over my shoulder and says, "How did you find that?"
"Beneficial ownership database. It's public record, but you have to know where to look and how to read the filing codes.
" I click through to the next screen. "Orlov isn't a real person.
The social security number attached to his corporate filings belongs to a man who died in 2014.
It's a ghost entity, which means someone went to a lot of trouble to hide who actually owns that building. "
"And you can trace it further?"
"Give me an hour and a decent internet connection and I can trace it back to Zhukov's mother's maiden name if you want."
The corner of Vincent's mouth twitches.
It's not a smile.
Vincent doesn't smile, but it's the closest thing I've seen from him, and it feels like something earned.
Michelle calls back at eleven.
She's pulled the property records, the utility accounts, the commercial permits.
The factory has been listed as vacant for three years, but the electricity usage tells a different story.
Someone's been running serious power through that building.
Industrial-level consumption that doesn't match an empty property.
"Selene, this place is dirty," Michelle says. "The power usage alone would flag an investigation. Do you want me to refer this to—"
"No. Don't refer it anywhere. Don't flag it, don't file it, don't mention it to anyone. Please."
A pause. The kind of pause that means Michelle is putting pieces together that I don't want her to have.
"What's going on?" she asks.
"I can't tell you. Not yet. But I need you to trust me, and I need you to sit on this."
Another pause. Longer. "You have forty-eight hours. After that, I'm reporting the power discrepancy to the utility fraud division, and whatever you're doing with this information, you need to be finished with it."
"Forty-eight hours is enough. Thank you, Michelle."
"Be careful, Selene. Whatever this is, it feels bigger than a client with a Russian problem."
I hang up and stare at my phone.
She's right. It's bigger than anything.
It's Emilia's life, and my sanity, and the last remaining thread connecting me to the person I was before Cassius Wolfe took everything and remade me in the shape of his choosing.
By noon, we have the full picture.
The factory in Sunset Park features three floors, a basement level, loading dock on the west side, and a single vehicle entrance on the east.
Zhukov is running a rotating guard schedule with four men on the perimeter, two inside, and a shift change every eight hours.
The basement is where they're holding Emilia, based on the pipe configuration in the video and the building's original blueprints, which I pulled from the city's digital archive.
I lay it all out on the table.
Floor plans marked with entry points, guard positions, sightlines.
The route from the nearest staging area to the basement access.
Timing windows based on the shift rotation.
Vincent studies it, runs his finger along the approach route I've mapped and looks up at me.
"This is good work," he says. And from Vincent, who has planned operations for three decades and buried the men who got them wrong, that's a lot.
"It's not good enough." I tap the basement access point.
"We know the layout, but we don't know what's down there.
How many men with Emilia. What kind of weapons.
Whether the room is rigged." I look at Cassius, who has been standing at the edge of the table for the last hour, watching me work without interrupting.
Our eyes meet and the thing that passes between us is not romance, not desire, not any of the complicated tangled mess that lives in the space where we touch.
It's something simpler. Two people who need the same thing right now, looking at each other and knowing it.
"We need someone who's been inside," I say.
The room moves.
That's the thing about these people—about Cassius' people, about my people, if I'm being honest about what I've become—they don't deliberate.
A need is identified and they get to work.
Vincent makes two phone calls.
Marco pulls up a list of known Zhukov associates with photographs, aliases, and last known locations.
The twins leave without being told, car keys already in hand.
I have nothing to do but wait.
It's the worst hour of my life.
Worse than the night my parents died, because that night I didn't know what was happening until it was over.
This time I know exactly what's happening. Emilia is in a basement in Sunset Park, and every minute I spend sitting at this table is a minute she spends wondering if anyone is coming for her.
I picture her face. The swollen eye. The blood in her hair.
I picture her hands, the ones that braided friendship bracelets for me when we were seventeen because she read online that repetitive motion helps with anxiety, and I wore that ugly purple and green thing on my wrist for three months because it smelled like her room and it made me feel less alone.
I press my nails into my palms hard enough to leave crescents.
Focus. Stay here. She needs me sharp, not shattered.
Cassius sits across from me.
He doesn't speak, doesn't try to fill the silence with reassurance or strategy or any of the things people say when they don't know how to sit with someone else's terror.
He just sits. Present. Steady. A fixed point in a room that feels like it's spinning.
At one point, without looking up from the documents in front of him, he slides his coffee across the table toward me.
Still warm. Black, the way he drinks it, not like the way I take mine. I drink it anyway.
It tastes like him and I hate that it helps.
Peter calls a few minutes after two. They found someone.
His name is Alexei.
Low-level. Twenty-three years old, born in Odessa, recruited by Zhukov's organization at nineteen with the promise of money and belonging and all the things that young men without fathers will sell their souls for.
Cassius' men picked him up outside a bar in Brighton Beach a couple of hours ago.
He'd been drinking alone, which meant either he was off-rotation or he'd fallen out of favor.
Either way, he was vulnerable.
They brought him to Hell.
To the chair at the end of the east corridor, the same chair I've seen in photographs, the same chair where men have sat and bled and given up their secrets under the kind of pressure that leaves marks you carry for the rest of your life.
Alexei is zip-tied to the arms. He's young enough that the fear hasn't hardened into defiance yet.