Page 44 of The Enforcer’s Pawn

Evan in Boston. Kathryn Walsh’s boyfriend. Finance operations.

Inside my head, Evan Mercer becomes a file. Employment, accounts, travel, associates, phone records, messages, old favors, new debts. Abramov will pull every thread.

Cara sees the calculation settle.

The anger in her eyes catches like a struck match.

“Don’t touch my friend,” she says and gives my phone back.

“She’s your contact.” I pocket my phone and turn toward the library door.

“You don’t get to use my contact.” Her voice rises behind me, rough with anger.

I stop with my hand near the handle. “No. I protect the contact.”

She rushes ahead and plants herself between me and the door. Her dark eyes lock on mine, pupils wide with apprehension and furious with reckless bravery. Something old and hungry moves in my chest, and I put it down before it shows.

“You turn people into case files and call it protection,” she protests.

“I keep people on the map.”

“Yes, where you can reach them.” Her mouth twists around the words.

That cuts closer than she knows. I move her hand away from the handle. It takes surprisingly little effort.

“Tomorrow,” I say, “if Maksim approves, you get paper copies or a locked terminal under supervision.”

She laughs once, thin and bitter. “A leash with a keyboard. Fancy.”

“It’s more than you had an hour ago.”

She wants to refuse me, but Patrick left rot in the system, and she knows a locked machine still has seams. I leave the library with Cara’s face snagged behind my eyes.

She heard the man in Boston breathe something close to Patrick’s name, and every part of her pulled tight before she could cover it. I don’t know what she hides behind Kathryn Walsh, but I know the shape of a leak.

Abramov’s office sits behind the security floor. Glass walls cover two sides, and the third is blind. Feeds run across the inner wall, with two deputies working outside his door. He looks up before I knock because the camera outside has already told him I’m coming.

I step inside and close the door. “Evan Mercer. Kathryn Walsh’s boyfriend. Boston. Finance operations, last known.”

Abramov pulls a secure terminal toward him, and the screen wakes under his thumbprint. “Connection to O’Connell?”

“That’s what you are going to find.”

His fingers move over the keys, and Evan’s name enters the system. Abramov is careful because careful men live longer in this house.

“I want his work history, money, debts, social circle, drinking spots, Patrick O’Connell, and anyone who has paid him or leaned on him for what he hears at Kathryn Walsh’s kitchen table,” I say.

Abramov glances up. “How deep?”

“Deep enough that he stops looking harmless.”

He nods once, and the order moves from his terminal to two internal desks outside his office.

No one repeats names near Abramov’s office. Abramov runs his office the way Maksim runs the estate, with locked files, closed doors, and no loose talk in the halls.

“Yuri is already inside the comms bay,” Abramov says. “He found something in the charity invoices.”

Yuri Sokol sits at the communication bay with a mug of dead coffee and eyes red from screens. Late thirties, narrow face, fast hands, bad posture. He wears thin glasses with chromatic lenses that catch every monitor glow.