Page 18 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
I drink my water.
“The alliance makes sense,” he continues, his voice in the same register it has been since we sat down, reasonable and warm and absolutely immovable underneath. “Your position on the council is strong, but strength requires maintenance. The Marchettisituation is evidence of that. Someone moved against your operations, and the council’s response was measured, let us say. A Volkov alliance changes that calculus permanently. Nobody moves against a Petrov-Volkov axis. Nobody is that stupid.”
He’s not wrong. That is the irritating thing about Grigori. He is very rarely wrong about the mechanics of things.
“And Mila,” I say. “What does she want?”
He looks at me for a moment. Like the question was one he had not prepared for. “She wants what any sensible woman in her position wants. Security. Standing. A life that is not small.”
“That’s what you want for her.”
A beat. “We want the same things.”
I look at him across the table and think about three weeks and a council session with my name on the agenda and a faction that has been quietly coordinating with Marchetti while sitting across from me, eating bread and talking about his niece’s ambitions.
I think about all of it, and I keep my face exactly where I want it.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
Grigori smiles. “Of course you will.”
Kostya is waiting in my office when I get back.
“Close the door,” I say.
He closes it. Opens his folder. “The Vasin situation is handled. But the Marchetti incursion last Tuesday was not using Vasin’sintelligence. The information they acted on was more current than anything he had access to.”
I take my jacket off and hang it up. “Which means…”
“Which means there is a second source. Someone who either came online after Vasin was removed or was running parallel to him the entire time, and we missed it.”
I sit down. “How deep does their current intelligence go?”
“Deep enough to know about the Thursday rotation change. That was communicated to four people, Roman. Four.”
I look at him.
“Pull all four,” I say. “Full financial review, communication logs, everything. I want it on my desk by Friday.”
He writes it down. “Grigori?”
“Was exactly what you would expect him to be.”
Kostya closes his folder. He asks for nothing else because he does not need to. Eleven years means he can read an entire conversation in three words and a tone.
He leaves, and I sit at my desk and look at nothing for a moment.
Four people knew about the Thursday rotation. One of them is selling that information to a syndicate that is pushing into my territory with confidence.
Meanwhile, Grigori Volkov is sitting across town eating lunch and talking about his niece’s ambitions because he’s certain the walls are closing in on me from every direction.
He’s not entirely wrong about that either.
Elena comes in at five with the revised Rezenkov annexure and the legal team’s response to my pushback on the indemnity clause. She sets it on my desk and stands back while I read through it properly. When I look up she is standing with her hands loose at her sides.
“They moved it to forty-five days,” I say.
“I saw that. I told them thirty.”
