CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Kael — Sable
I called the one person left alive who I trusted with anything real, which narrowed the field considerably, and told her what I needed.
Sable Ruiz had been my father’s head of security for the last six years of his life, which should have made her the last person I’d trust with anything — except she’d walked away from that job the week after his funeral, cut every tie to what remained of his organization, and spent the years since doing private security work for people who needed protection from exactly the kind of men she used to work alongside.
I’d found her two years into my own investigation, half expecting a threat, and instead found the only person in my life who understood, without explanation, exactly what it cost to be shaped by Dimitri Sorokin and spend the rest of your life trying to be something else.
“A bank job,” she said, when I laid it out over a table in the back of a diner that didn’t ask questions. “You want me to case a Water Street branch on the theory that Vane’s people might be watching it.”
“I want you to tell me if they are, before Nadia walks in there tomorrow morning.”
Sable studied me for a long moment, the particular assessment she gave everything, weighing risk the way other people weigh a purchase. “You care about this woman.”
“That’s not relevant to the job.”
“It’s entirely relevant to the job, Kael, because a man thinking clearly doesn’t ask his security consultant a question he already knows the answer to.
” She said it without judgment, which was somehow worse than if she’d said it with some.
“I’ll case the branch tonight. If Vane’s got eyes on it, I’ll find them.
But you should think hard about what happens tomorrow if he does — because a man who’s spent four years watching from a distance is about to walk into daylight next to the one person he’s supposed to be protecting, and that’s a very different kind of exposed. ”
She wasn’t wrong, and I told her so, and she left to do the work she was better at than almost anyone I’d ever met, and I sat alone in that diner turning over the calculation I’d been avoiding since the storage unit: that every step closer to the truth about Nadia’s mother was also a step further out of the shadows I’d used to keep us both alive.
Sable called near midnight. “Two men,” she said, no preamble. “Rotating shifts, parked half a block down since this afternoon. Not subtle if you know what you’re looking for, which tells me they’re not expecting anyone who does.”
“Vane’s people.”
“Or whoever Vane answers to now — I’ve been asking around, and the word is he’s not running his own show anymore.
Someone above him took over what your father left behind about eighteen months ago, and Vane’s been managing the visible parts ever since.
Cleaner hands, better suits, same rot underneath. ”
That was new information, and it settled into my chest with the particular weight of a piece finally clicking into a puzzle I’d been assembling badly for years.
Vane had always felt like a manager rather than an owner — too careful, too controlled, a man executing someone else’s patience rather than his own.
If he wasn’t the one giving the orders, that meant there was a name above his that I hadn’t found yet, and the person who’d waited four years to make a move on Nadia might not be the person standing in front of her at all.
“I need a way past them tomorrow that doesn’t put her in the open,” I said.
“I’ve got three,” Sable said, and for the next hour we built the kind of plan I’d spent four years hoping I’d never actually need to execute — the kind that meant the danger around Nadia Kessler was no longer theoretical, no longer something I could manage from a parked car in the dark.
It was real now, and it was close, and for the first time since I’d started this, I was glad she wasn’t going to face it alone.