Page 44 of My Wedding Night Massacre

“I’ll think about it,” I say. His own words returned to him. There’s a silence on his end, half a second longer than his usual silences.

“Good,” he says. “That’s all I’m asking. I’ll be in touch, Pavlina. Take care of yourself.”

The line goes dead.

I set the phone on the table. My hands are shaking now, a fine tremor in my fingers, the body releasing what the voice didn’t allow. I look at the phone, at the morning light across the stone floor, at none of the things in this room that require me to have a face.

Slava’s hand covers mine.

No words. Just that.

29

Slava

The emotion goes in a drawer.

Not gone, not resolved, not finished with me, just filed, because there’s work to do and I’ve always been better at work than at sitting inside feelings that don’t have anywhere productive to go. Pavlina is in the back of the villa with coffee and the clothes Misha found for her. The drawer is firmly shut. I’m at the table with the maps, my phone, and three years of preparation that’s about to get used faster than planned.

Misha sits across from me without being asked. That’s the whole of our communication for the next twenty minutes, the two of us working through what we have, what we need, and what moves before anything else can move.

“The Napoli crew,” I say.

“Ready,” he says. “Waiting on positions.”

I pull the city map toward me and mark eight points, spread across the east side, residential coverage without clustering. Luigi and Francesco on the north perimeter, Diego and Giorgio covering the two main arterial routes in and out, Romeo at the south end where the residential grid meets the commercial boundary. Lorenzo, Nico, and Valentino in a rotating pattern through the middle, close enough to move fast but spread enough not to read as a formation.

“Tell them quiet,” I say. “Nothing visible, nothing provocative. Bogdan can’t know the net is tightening until it already has.”

Misha makes the calls while I work through the property list. Bogdan’s known holdings span sixteen addresses across the city, all of them mapped, all of them watched at intervals. Denis was moved to something smaller, something off the official inventory. Pavlina said her father would use a property she didn’t know about. She knows his properties better than most of his own men do because she’s been inside all of them at some point, the dinners, the meetings, and the visits she was permitted when she behaved.

That leaves the unofficial ones. The properties held under names that don’t connect to Bogdan directly, the ones Misha flagged in the research but couldn’t fully verify, four addresses on the east side that came up through secondary sources but never appeared on any document with Bogdan’s signature on it.

I pull those four to the top of the list.

“Residential?” I ask Misha, who’s off his call now.

“Three of the four,” he says, leaning over the map. He puts his finger on two of them. “These two fit the profile. Small, discreet, and established enough that the neighbors wouldn’t notice new occupants. The third is too close to a commercial street, with too much foot traffic. The fourth.” He pauses. “The fourth, I’m less sure about. It might be storage.”

“Denis isn’t in a storage facility,” I say.

“No,” he agrees.

We mark the two, then I assign Romeo and one other to each, close observation, no contact, report only.

The trap scenario gets its own column. Bogdan told Pavlina he’d think about a visit. That’s not generosity. Bogdan doesn’t do generosity. It’s either confidence, he believes his leverage is intact, and a controlled visit serves his interests, or it’s a mechanism; he’s planning to use the visit to pull Pavlina back inside his orbit and neutralize the problem without the noise of open conflict. Both scenarios require contingencies.

Confident Bogdan: he’ll offer the visit on terms, a specific time and place of his choosing, supervision he controls, the access calibrated to remind Pavlina what she’s getting and what she stands to lose. He’ll use Denis as the reward and himself as the gatekeeper. The whole thing will look like a father trying to help his daughter reconnect with her son.

Mechanism Bogdan: The visit is a trap. The location is controlled, the exits are his, and once Pavlina is inside the perimeter, she’s back in the leverage system, whether she walked in willingly or not. In this version, Denis is the bait.

I write both columns and their contingencies. I don’t do unprepared. I’ll refuse to be caught off guard ever again.

Pavlina appears in the doorway. She’s changed into the clothes Misha found her, a dark shirt and pants, her hair pulled back. She looks at the map, at the columns, at the eight positions I’ve marked, then at me.

“Two properties,” I say, pointing to the marks. “We’ll have eyes on both by this afternoon.”

She crosses the room, stands beside me, and leans over the map. I watch her scan it, watch the part of her brain that grew up inside her father’s thinking engage with the geography, the distances, and the logic of the positions.