Page 60 of My Wedding Night Massacre

The rest of it is still waiting. My father, the pieces that haven’t fallen yet. All of it still there, still necessary, still coming. But that’s not tonight. Tonight is Denis asleep in my lap and Slava’s shoulder against mine and the corridor going quiet around us, and I let it be exactly that.

37

Slava

Morning comes fast.

I’m at the table by six with the overnight intelligence package, Gachev’s map, and a coffee Misha made without being asked, which tells me his shoulder isn’t going to kill him. He’s moving slowly on the left side, his arm held close to his body, but he’s moving. The crew medic spent two hours on it in the back room. The bullet went through clean. He won’t say anything about it, and I won’t acknowledge it, because that’s the arrangement we’ve had for twelve years, and neither of us has any interest in changing it now.

By eight, intelligence starts coming in through the channels Leoni’s network runs. Not much. That’s the first thing I notice. The city’s Russian networks have gone quiet, but it’s too suspicious to be read as calm. No calls between the known players, no visible movement around Bogdan’s east side holdings, no mobilization of the men I’d have mobilized if a two-year-old asset had just been pulled from a safe house while I slept. The quiet is total.

Misha comes in from the back room, sits down across from me, and reads the same intelligence summary over my shoulder. He sets his cup down.

“He’s regrouping,” Misha says.

“I know.”

“Pulling everything in tight. Reassessing.”

“I know that too.”

He sits back, his good arm resting on the table, his eyes on the window where the city lights are getting brighter as we head into the morning. “How long does he need?”

I think about it. Three days, maybe four. Bogdan doesn’t move rashly even under pressure. He’ll want to understand how it happened before he responds to the fact that it happened. He’ll be going through the safe house personnel, the rotation schedule, and the points of failure. He’ll be running the sequence backward from Denis being gone to the first moment something went wrong, and he didn’t see it coming. He’s thorough. He’s patient. He’s been both of those things longer than I’ve been alive.

“Not long,” I say.

Misha nods, takes a sip of his coffee. “He’s never had Denis gone before. He’s never had Pavlina actively out of reach before. He doesn’t know what to do with the board when two pieces he assumed were fixed aren’t fixed anymore.”

That’s what I keep coming back to. Bogdan built the last three years on a specific arrangement of pieces. Pavlina compliant, Denis accessible, the Yeleshev assets absorbed and renamed, the whole structure sitting on the assumption that nothing would shift because nothing had shifted in a very long time. He watched me die, and he built on top of it. He’s had three years of nothing moving.

Now everything’s moving. Collapsing in front of his eyes.

I know this silence. I’ve used it. It’s not hesitation, it’s not fear. It’s a man who lost something he didn’t expect to lose, going back to the drawing board before he commits to a response, because committing early with incomplete information is how you lose more than you started with. Bogdan is too careful for impulse. He’ll think before he acts.

Which means I can’t wait for him to finish thinking.

I pull the financial map toward me, the one Misha built over three months of pulling threads through Leoni’s Italian network and two contacts inside New York’s banking infrastructure who had reasons of their own to want Bogdan’s reach documented. The Yeleshev assets absorbed eighteen months after the wedding are mapped across nine accounts, six properties, and three operational routes. They’re not under my name anymore. They’re not under Bogdan’s either. They sit within a layered structure of subsidiaries and shell entities that appears legitimate from the outside and is designed to be permanent.

Nothing designed by a man is permanent.

“Financial first,” I say, turning the map so Misha can see it from across the table. “The accounts here and here.” I tap two points. “The east side route runs through this entity, which connects to this one, which connects to the Baladin family through a holding company Bogdan set up eight months after the wedding. We cut the Baladin connection before we move on to anything else; the east side route collapses on its own. He loses a third of the operational income without a single direct confrontation.”

Misha looks at the map. “Leoni’s men can do that?”

“Three of them are already positioned. Waiting on this specific signal for six weeks.”

“And the properties?”

“Two of them will revert to the Yeleshev name on paper the moment the account structure falls. My father’s lawyers set that up before the wedding. Bogdan missed it or chose not to clear it.” I lean back. “He was in a hurry. Men in a hurry miss things.”

Misha is quiet for a moment, looking at the map, his jaw working slightly on the left side where he’s favoring the shoulder without realizing it. “And after the financial?”

“The men. Not all of them. The ones who had a choice and made the wrong one. The ones given no choice, I’m not interested in, they fold back into the structure once the structure is mine again.” I look at the map. “Then Bogdan.”

“In that order.”

“In that order.”