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“The balance is accounted for,” I say. “Whatever arrangement existed because of it is over.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

She studies me, suspicious even now. “I still have a job?”

“If you want one.”

“And the apartment?”

“Yours as long as you need it.”

“Without strings?”

I step between her knees where she’s leaning against the counter. “There are always strings with me.”

Her eyes narrow.

I put my hands on the counter beside her instead of touching her.

“But not financial ones.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Sophia

Iopen the drawer.

It’s a Tuesday. Nothing special about the day, nothing that triggers it, no dramatic confrontation or shocking discovery. I wake up in Dominic’s bed with his arm around my waist and the doubled heartbeat steady in my chest. I get dressed and go to work and sit at my desk and review vendor contracts and eat lunch with Katya, and come home to the apartment I haven’t slept in for two weeks. I come here because I left a sweater I want, and while I’m pulling it from the closet I look at the nightstand and the drawer calls to me.

I sit on the bed. I pull the notebook out. I open it to the pages I haven’t read.

The last section. The entries I’ve been rationing, saving, avoiding.

I decode them one by one. The process is mechanical now, the cipher second nature, my pencil translating his letters into English automatically.

The first entry I haven’t read is dated five weeks before his death.

I’ve gathered enough. The temperatures. The speed. The eyes. The howling. They change.

The family I’ve worked beside for fifteen years. The men whose books I’ve balanced and whose families I’ve fed. The men who trusted me with their money, their businesses, and more secrets than they probably realized.

They are not human. They are something else. Something old. Something that wears human skin the way I wear a coat.

The second entry. Four weeks before.

I’ve started to wonder about the others. The people on the edges of the organization, the ones who aren’t inner circle but who move with the same fluid certainty, who run the same fevers, who go quiet when the moon is full. How many of them are there? How deep does this go? The entire operation, the construction company, the properties, my restaurant that eventually became part of their network.

All of it, a cover for something that has nothing to do with money or territory or power in the human sense. The power is biological. They are what they are, and everything else is camouflage.

I turn the page. My hands are steady. The tears are coming but they’re not here yet.

Three weeks before.

I confronted V.V. today.

V.V. Viktor Voronov.