Page 8 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
“Where is it.”
“I’ll have everything to you within the hour. I can be at the office by?—”
“The car will be outside your building in forty minutes.” I pick up my coffee. “Be ready.”
Another pause. Shorter this time. “Forty minutes. Yes. Of course.”
I end the call and set my phone face down on the table.
Kostya is looking at me.
“Marchetti,” I say. “Start there.”
He opens his folder. “Their activity in Red Hook has accelerated significantly over the last three weeks. We logged three separateincursions into territory they have no historical claim to. Two were managed quietly. The third was not.” He turns a page. “The pattern is not opportunistic, Roman. They’re not probing for weakness. They know exactly where our rotation gaps are, and they are moving into them with precision.”
“Someone is feeding them information.”
“Yes. And not old information. What they are acting on is current. Updated. Someone with access to operational scheduling is in contact with them now, actively, and has been for at least a month.”
I set my cup down. The particular coldness that comes over me when something inside my organization is broken is not anger. It is something quieter and considerably more dangerous than anger. I have built what I have built on the understanding that loyalty is not a sentiment. It is a structure. When it fails, it does not fail quietly.
“Pull the rotation logs,” I say. “Sixty days. I want every name with scheduling access cross-referenced against known Volkov associates. Anyone with so much as a social connection.”
“Already running.” He turns another page. “Which is a natural point to move to the council.”
“Of course it is.”
He doesn’t smile. Kostya almost never smiles during briefings. “They have formalized the Volkov directive. Grigori had language entered into the last session minutes. You are expected to initiate the alliance arrangement within the quarter. It is no longer a recommendation, Roman. They have put a deadline on it in writing.”
I lean back in my chair and look at him.
The Volkov arrangement means a marriage. It means Grigori’s daughter, or whichever female relative he has decided represents the best political currency, becomes my wife in exchange for his faction’s consolidated support behind my position on the council.
It’s a transaction wearing the clothes of tradition, and I have been managing the pressure around it for four months through a combination of genuine busyness, strategic unavailability, and deliberate vagueness that powerful men use when they want to say no without yet saying no.
The quarter ends in eleven weeks.
“Tell them I received the message,” I say.
Kostya writes something in the margin of his notes. He does not look up when he says, very evenly, “And the woman from last night.”
I look at him.
He looks back at me with an expression of complete professional neutrality.
“Stay out of it,” I say.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“Good. Keep not saying anything.”
He closes his folder and drinks his coffee, and the silence he produces is technically empty and somehow extremely full. I have known this man since before either of us was who we are now, and his restraint, when he exercises it, is one of the loudest things about him.
I look out the window at the terrace. The last of the champagne flutes are gone. The railing is clean. Three hundred people were here last night, and the house is eating the evidence of them one hour at a time.
Her voice on the phone. That slight catch underneath the composure, there and gone so fast I almost decided I imagined it. The two rings instead of one. Theof courseat the end, quiet and quick, like she was already moving before I finished the sentence.
I turn it over once without meaning to, then put it away with the rest.
