Page 59 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

By eleven the tedium had turned almost meditative, the specific blank calm that comes from doing something methodical enough that the brain stops manufacturing anxiety long enough to just work. I matched business names first, alphabetically, holding each entry on the summit list against three years of my own history, and found exactly what I expected: nothing, because in this line of work, expecting nothing is usually the safest bet. Every florist checked out. Every rental company checked out. The AV vendor Naomi had once threatened over an acoustics argument came back so spotless I felt almost disappointed on his behalf.

So I switched approaches, the way I always did when the obvious method ran dry, and started matching addresses instead of names, because addresses lie less often than the businesses attached to them, a fact I had learned the hard way and never quite forgotten.

Eighteen months ago, a rental company called Silverline Party Supply had taken a six-thousand-dollar deposit from a bride two weeks from her wedding and then stopped answering calls entirely, the kind of vanishing act that turns an ordinary week into a full-blown crisis and a professional relationship into a lawsuit nobody has the energy to actually file. I spent four days tracking down their registered address myself, certain I could shame somebody into a refund if I just showed up in person and looked disappointed at them properly. What I found instead was a beige mailbox unit in a strip of light industrial buildings past the warehouse district, unit 4C, no office behind it, no employees, no company at all beyond a name on a lease and a stack of forwarded mail nobody was collecting. I paid the difference out of my own account, wrote the address down in the green tab of my notebook under a single unhappy word, and told myself I would check that exact detail before I ever signed another contract.

I had not thought about unit 4C in longer than a year. I would not have remembered the number at all if I had not spent four days memorizing it out of pure, useless spite.

It was the ninety-fourth address I checked against the summit list, tucked under a vendor called Beaumont Table and Linen Co., a name I did not recognize, attached to an insurance certificate that looked, on its face, entirely unremarkable. It was registered, according to paperwork Nik's people had approved without apparent objection, to unit 4C, in the same beige strip of buildings past the warehouse district, under a lease dated four months ago.

I read the entry three times, the way you reread a word until it stops looking like a real word at all, waiting for the second read to correct the first one. It didn't correct anything. It just sat there, patient and ordinary and completely wrong, the exact same four characters I had once written down under a note that still said NEVER AGAIN in red ink dark enough to mean it.

I pulled up my own file on Silverline, the deposit, the calls that went unanswered, the little map screenshot I had saved from the day I drove out there myself and stood in a parking lot understanding, for the first time in my professional life, that a business could be entirely fake and still have a working lock on the front door. It was the same unit. It was the same block. A different name had been stitched over the top of it like a coat thrown over a stain, except this time the coat had somehow made it past a security review run by men who checked doors for a living.

I thought about calling Naomi, who would ask good questions and mean well and have absolutely no idea what to do with the answers. I thought about calling Beckett, who would want to help and would not understand, not really, what this actually required. I thought, for one long, complicated second, about not calling anyone at all, about sitting with this exactly the way Dmitri had once sat alone in an office with a folder full of wire transfers, deciding on his own what someone else deserved to know and when. I understood that instinct now in a way I hadn't fully understood it a week ago. Sitting there with unit 4C glowing on my screen, I also knew that I did not want to be the kind of person who kept something like this to herself, not even for an hour, not even to be certain first.

The address on the shell vendor's paperwork matched an address I'd flagged once before, eighteen months ago, on an unrelated job, for an entirely different reason. I sat very still for a long moment. Then I picked up the phone.

31

DMITRI

The conference table in my office had disappeared under paper for the third day running. Floor plans of The Ambrose sat weighted down at the corners with coffee mugs nobody had gotten around to washing, a marked-up guest list ran two pages longer than the version Cora had built for her own purposes, and a block map of the streets around the venue carried red tape over every entrance a man with no business there could use. Cora's call the night before had added one more piece to the wall, a printout of the Unit 4C paperwork pinned under its own mug, proof solid enough that it had moved three separate conversations from theory into certainty before sunrise.

Nik stood over the largest map with a marker in one hand, working through a rotation he had already rewritten twice that week. Luca sat backward in a chair near the window, boots up on the sill, looking more alert than either of us had any right to at this hour, which had become its own kind of unsettling. A second pot of coffee sat cooling on the sideboard, untouched since somebody had made it out of habit rather than actual thirst. Nobody had eaten since the afternoon. Nobody had mentioned it either, the way men in this life learn not to mention small discomforts once the larger one takes up all the available room.

"Three weeks," Nik said, without looking up. "Give or take. The invitation deadline closed yesterday, so the guest count is final unless somebody dies or gets engaged in the next twenty-one days, which at this rate would not shock me."

"Where are we on the perimeter?"

"North stairwell, east loading doors, and the service entrance off the alley all get a man apiece from six until close, rotating every forty minutes so nobody stands still long enough to become a habit somebody else can plan around." Nik tapped the laminated map with the flat of his marker. "The east corridor rotation is fixed. Real hallway this time, not the one on the old schematic. I had someone walk it with a stopwatch to be sure."

"Good."

"You should know it was fixed because of her, not because of us. I want that on the record before you forget who caught it."

"I haven't forgotten."

"I know you haven't. I like saying it anyway." Nik moved the marker to a cluster of red circles near the loading bay. "Kirill's still on the roster for the night. Pulling him now, without proof anyone else could act on, tells him exactly how much we know and gives him a reason to move early. Leaving him on it means watching him watch us the entire evening."

"Leave him on it. Luca takes the loading bay that night personally, not the north stairwell. I want Kirill within arm's reach of someone who already knows what he is." I turned the guest list a quarter turn on the table without quite meaning to. "And I want a second man on him during setup, someone he won't recognize as watching. Not to spook him early. Just to make sure the only surprise that night belongs to us."

"Already have someone in mind," Nik said. "He won't clock it. He's not as careful as he thinks he is anymore. Confidence does that to a man eventually."

Luca dropped his boots off the sill and sat forward. "Happy to. I've been wanting a reason to stand next to him for an hour without being polite about it."

"You'll be polite about it."

"I'll be professionally polite. There's a difference." He reached for the folder at his elbow, flipping it open with the brisk efficiency he only used when he had something worth saying and wanted to say it before somebody talked over him. "Basile's people haven't moved on the warehouse in six days. No trucks, no lights after dark, nothing on the camera we still have eyes on. That's either very good news or very bad news, and I genuinely could not tell you which one."

"Give me your instinct."

"My instinct says bad news. I have a bad feeling."

Nik kept his eyes on the map. "Is 'a bad feeling' going in the written report?"

"It's going in verbally. Right now. To both of you. Consider yourselves briefed."

"That's not intelligence, Luca. That's a mood."