Page 66 of The Enforcer’s Pawn

Cara’s mouth curves.

I move closer and stop before I touch her.

“You know systems,” I say, and my voice comes out rough. “You know Patrick. You know Kathryn. That makes you useful in three directions.”

“And dangerous in at least four,” Yuri says.

“Yes.”

Cara smiles, showing the neat line of her teeth and the mouth I’ve spent five years trying not to remember, and I have to keep my hands on the table. I need her beside me. Patrick chose her because he thought she would never trust me, and I need him wrong.

Maksim’s phone rings. He turns from the trace screen. “Speak.”

His face changes as he listens. First his eyes, then his mouth.

He lowers the phone. “Petrov. Freight strike outside the Riga bonded warehouse. Humanitarian route.”

Abramov moves before the sentence finishes. One of his men throws the feed onto the main wall, and the screen fills with a loading bay, gray pavement, open crates, men running, and blood near the rear wheel of a truck.

Cara’s fingers stop on the table.

Yuri leans toward his monitor. “That route touched the false clearances.”

Ilya reads from the incoming report. “Medical refrigeration crates, winter-aid pallets, and children’s clinic equipment.”

My chair scrapes back as I stand. On the screen, a guard kneels beside a dead driver. Another man staggers near the truck, face split open, hands raised as if he expects another blow.

Abramov takes a headset from his deputy. “Camera four is down. Camera two caught the aftermath. Dispatch says one driver killed, one guard alive.”

Petrov bursts into the comms room with his coat still on. “Several crates were opened and photographed before the attackers left. Forged Volkov clearance notes were placed on top of the supplies.”

Elena scans the incoming reports. “They staged it.”

“Message?” Maksim asks.

Abramov listens, then looks at him. “Surviving guard keeps repeating one phrase. Volkov feeds on aid.”

No one moves.

Morozov wants us angry first.

Elena stands beside Maksim with her arms folded. Her foundation’s name is already close to this mess, and now Morozov has put children’s clinic equipment on camera beside forged Volkov notes.

He wants the world to think we used aid shipments to move money, guns, and people, and Elena’s work becomes the stain he needs. He’s counting on the lie traveling faster than the proof.

I turn to Maksim. “Pakhan.”

Maksim’s answer cuts through the command room. “No.”

“They hit a Volkov route.”

“They hit a camera,” Maksim says. “The route was the setup.”

“They killed a driver.”

“And left us a line to repeat.” His gaze stays on the screen. “You won’t repeat it for them.”

My hands close at my sides. On the wall, the injured guard folds forward, blood dripping onto gray pavement.