Page 54 of My Wedding Night Massacre

I look at it for a moment. The anger is still there, but it’s changed shape, the pressure of it moving somewhere deeper.

I pull out Gachev’s map and lay it next to the picture.

“Outer boroughs,” I say. “Two guards on rotation, one fixed at the rear entrance. Six-hour cycle. Tell me what’s wrong with it.”

She looks at the map, finding the logic before the gaps. Her finger moves to the rear.

“Fixed guard at the back,” she says. “My father always puts the fixed guard where he thinks the threat comes from. He thinks you’d come in from the rear.”

“He’d be right,” I say.

“So, the rear is hardest. The front is the rotation. Six hours is a long cycle, there’ll be a gap.”

“We move through the gap, front entry, clear the interior before the fixed guard can respond.”

She nods, then looks at me. “What happens to Denis?”

I tilt my head.

“During the extraction,” she explains. “If something goes wrong, if there’s noise, a confrontation, if it moves faster than the plan. He’s two. He doesn’t understand strangers arriving in the dark. He reacts to noise. He’ll scream, Slava, he’ll fight whoever’s holding him. It can turn into a problem that stops the whole operation.”

I don’t answer immediately, because she’s named the gap I’d been filing under workable without closing it. A two-year-old in an extraction isn’t something I’d built around properly. I know it now that she’s said it out loud.

“He doesn’t know me,” I say.

“No,” she says. “He doesn’t know you.”

It sits between us for a moment, the full weight of that sentence.

“He knows Nadia,” I say.

“He’d go with Nadia without question. No noise, no fight, no strangers.” Her eyes are focused now, the argument behind us, both of us pointing in the same direction. “Nadia has to be the one who carries him out.”

“Can she move fast without freezing?”

“She’s been keeping herself together in that house for days,” Pavlina says. “For Denis. She won’t freeze.”

I look at the map. I build the new plan around Nadia as the extraction point, Pavlina at the perimeter where Denis can see her face when he comes out, and the crew clearing the interior before either of them are anywhere near the building. It’s cleaner than what I had. Considerably cleaner.

“Day after tomorrow,” I say. “Rotation gap hits at four in the morning. We go in at three-fifty.”

Misha makes a note, and Pavlina nods. That’s the plan.

The kitchen is quiet. Denis’s picture is still on the table. I look at it, then at her.

The tiredness is still there. The sadness that was there when we walked in, that I clocked and didn’t name, the weight of a woman who held her son and then had to leave him, and then came home to me at the top of my voice.

“I shouldn’t have spoken to you the way I did,” I say.

She looks up.

“When you told me. I was scared, and it came out as anger, and that’s not something you deserve.” I hold her gaze. “Being scared isn’t an excuse. I’m sorry.”

She looks at me for a long moment.

“Thank you,” she says.

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