5. Dmitri
DMITRI
Iwatch her come down the jet stairs, and for an instant I forget why she’s here.
Cara stops halfway down. Her hand tightens on the rail, and she stares at me as if Moscow has set a knife in front of her and called it a welcome.
Her clothes are wrinkled from travel. Her dark hair is twisted up, with loose pieces falling around her face.
She looks tired, furious, and more beautiful than memory has any right to keep.
That’s the first problem.
The second is that my body remembers her with the same ferocity it had in Boston five years ago. Her mouth looks the same, made for sin and argument, and the taste of her comes back so clearly, I have to lock my jaw against the want.
The night follows in pieces. Cara under me. Her nails in my shoulders. Her voice breaking on my name like the wanting was unacceptable. I don’t like how fast my body answers the memory.
She’s different now. Softer through the hips. Fuller at the breasts. My gaze moves once, from her mouth to the curve of her body, then back to her face. One look. One mistake. Then I lock the rest down.
She isn’t the woman from Boston. She’s Patrick O’Connell’s message.
“Come down,” I say.
Her mouth curves, and there’s no humor in it. “Orders?” She arches her brow. She looks sexy when she does that. “Comforting to know manners missed you.”
Good. Anger helps. Hers, mine, any anger at all. It keeps my hands at my sides and my mind where it belongs.
The soldier behind her lets out something that might be a laugh if he had more courage. I glance at him once, and he remembers his place.
Cara catches that. She has always watched exits, hands, doorways, and men who smile while reaching for something. Patrick trained that into her the way he ruins trust, then pretends his hands are clean. Very Patrick.
She descends the rest of the steps without taking her eyes off me.
We walk toward the waiting car. She sits in the middle of the back seat, flanked by two of my lieutenants, Nikolai on her left and Herman on her right. I take the front passenger seat, angled enough to see her through the rearview mirror.
The car pulls away from the aircraft and rolls across the service road beside the tarmac. Terminal windows glow in the distance. Ground crews cross between vehicles. Aircraft wait in lines, their tails marked in colors I don’t bother reading.
Cara doesn’t ask where we’re going.
The car turns away from the main airport road and takes a side route along the perimeter fence.
The pavement gets rougher. Her shoulder bumps Nikolai’s when we hit the first break in the road, and she moves away from him immediately.
My eyes stay on her through the mirror. Nikolai gives her more space before I have to say his name. Smart.
The car leaves the paved strip and cuts across a service track. Gravel snaps under the tires. After ten minutes, we stop in front of the receiving hangar.
It sits behind the public terminal, where freight moves through private channels and customs officers know which questions slow paperwork down.
Volkov companies own the bonded storage, the security contract, and three bland offices upstairs where men in cheap badges stamp forms that never reach public systems.
The cameras feed into our servers. The guards wear corporate jackets over weapons. Everything looks legal. We keep it that way.
Nikolai gets out first, and Cara follows. Herman steps down on the other side. She stands between them with her arms folded, refusing to look smaller than she is.
The wind tears loose strands from her twist and throws them across her face. Her cheeks redden in the cold. She fights her hair with slim, stubborn fingers, and I let myself watch. She notices it.
“Nice place,” she says over the wind. “Very kidnapper-chic.”
“You weren’t kidnapped.”
Cara gives me a flat look. “No? I must’ve missed the brochure.”
“You were collected.”
She laughs, short and mean. “Did I come with a receipt?” My eyes stay on her fingers as she drags a strand of hair from her mouth, pins it back, and loses the fight again.
I turn before her expression can get under my skin.
“Inside.”
“I’d love to say no to orders, but I see you brought the emotional support gunmen,” she says and flicks a look at the men behind us.
I keep my mouth in one hard, straight line.
We cross the hangar with two men at our backs and three ahead.
Cara watches everything—freight doors, camera domes, office windows, emergency exit signs, fire panel near the wall.
Five years ago, she walked into a hotel with me because she wanted one bad choice Patrick didn’t arrange.
Now Patrick has arranged every inch of this, and she knows it.
I take her into the secure office at the back of the hangar. It has no windows, one steel door, a table bolted to the floor, two chairs, a water dispenser, and enough signal blockers hidden in the ceiling to make her phone useless even if we had left it in her hand.
Cara looks around and rubs her arms through her coat. “Wow. Warm. Really selling the hospitality.”
I close the door behind us. “Sit.”
She turns toward me with that mouth ready to cut. “Ask prettier.”
My hand stays at my side. My voice stays even. That matters, because her brother has already done damage, and I still don’t know how far the sister is tangled in it.
Yet.
In another Volkov file, I could almost hear Maksim’s dry laugh. Elena Sokolov said something close to that once, when Maksim dragged truth to her feet and expected gratitude. Women who enter the Blacklist rarely arrive meekly. Maybe that’s why they survive long enough to become a problem.
I pull out the chair with two fingers. “Sit, Cara.”
She stands a moment longer on pride alone, then takes the chair across from me. “I want my phone.”
“No,” I say and take the seat opposite her.
Her fingers flex once on the edge of the table. “I want a lawyer.”
“You can want one.” I open the laptop and wake the screen. “That doesn’t change where you are.”
Cara leans back, but her eyes move fast. “So this is the friendly part.”
“This is the part where you listen.”
“Funny. I usually need coffee before men start threatening me.”
I turn the laptop so she can see the first file. “Patrick O’Connell moved seven point eight million dollars through shell accounts tied to Volkov shipping contracts.”
Her face doesn’t break, which tells me she already knew Patrick lived near dirty money. The amount gets her, though. It shows in the tiny pull of her fingers against the table.
“Patrick has always been bad with numbers,” she says. “Usually in cheaper ways.”
I click to the next page. Bank paths. Freight clearances. False vendor IDs. Names she shouldn’t know and one name she does.
Her own.
I marked it in green. Cara sees it. The sarcasm leaves her face, and something older takes its place. Fear. The kind Patrick has been feeding for years, one favor at a time.
I tap the highlighted line. “Your name appears in one Blacklist entry. Three attachments. One transfer authorization.”
“My name appears on plenty of things I didn’t sign,” she says, but her voice has less bite now.
“This one was enough to put you on a plane.”
She looks from the screen to me. “Patrick did that?”
I let the silence answer first, then give her the rest. “Patrick used you to buy time. From Morozov.”
I study her face when I say the name. Her eyes stay on mine, tired and angry, and nothing in her expression reaches for memory. Viktor Morozov means nothing to her yet, beyond another monster dragged into Patrick’s mess.
She may really know nothing. Patrick built disasters by making people do small favors without telling them why.
“Viktor Morozov,” I say, keeping my hands flat on the table. “He runs a rival circle. Your brother has been moving money through his fronts.”
“My brother borrows money from idiots and calls it strategy.”
“Patrick stole from Maksim Volkov and gave pieces of our routes to a man who burns families to make business points.”
Her eyes lift to mine.
She heard the word burns. Some part of her understands I’m no longer talking only about freight, money, or her brother’s talent for surviving other people’s consequences. She studies my face, and for the first time since she stepped off that plane, she seems to lose the next word.
It lasts a few seconds. Then Cara throws her head back, laughs once, and points at the laptop.
“This is digital,” she says. “Patrick can fake digital. Show me paper. Bank copies, contracts, signatures, courier logs. Something he couldn’t rewrite from a hotel bar.”
I flick two fingers toward Nikolai. He opens the wall safe behind the file cabinet and brings over the folder Abramov prepared. The cover is plain black, without any mark or family crest. No wolf, no crown, no warning, only paper, and paper ruins better men than knives.
Nikolai sets it in front of Cara and steps back.
She doesn’t touch it at first. Her eyes move from the folder to my face. Color climbs along her throat. One hand curls against her knee, then opens when she catches herself doing it.
“What did he do?” she asks. It’s almost a whisper.
I open the folder.
The first page is a bank statement from Cyprus, printed and stamped.
The second is a freight clearance form with an altered vessel code.
The third is a courier receipt from a medical supply charity with a Boston billing contact, a Moscow storage reference, and Patrick’s assistant listed as the approving handler.
Cara leans in despite herself. Her eyes run over the highlighted lines. Dates, amounts, vendor names, shipment numbers. A hospital charity that never sent medicine. A disaster relief group that bought no supplies. A renovation contractor paid multiple times for work no inspector signed off on.
“This isn’t one theft,” I say, turning another page. “Patrick didn’t walk in and grab money from one account. He opened little doors. A clearance change here. A vendor substitution there. A payment route that looks harmless until the same names repeat across six countries.”