Page 156 of Ruthless Sin
“Yes.”
“You knew this in your hand on the flight home.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t open it because if you’d opened it you would have come to me and we would have moved on Alexei and Alexei told you he’d find them first.”
“Yes.”
A long beat.
“All right.”
Same register he used yesterday when he said fix it.
“Build the plan around this. Stepan turns in forty-eight hours. Boats forty-eight more. River dawn. We move at first light.”
He looks at the photograph with the crosshairs.
“And Mila.”
“Oksana’s shower is at Casa Lucia this week,” Dante says. “She goes for that. Not the session, the session can wait. A shower is social, unpredictable, no fixed route pattern for anyone watching. We know who’s hunting her now. That changes how we move her, not whether we move her.”
He looks at me. “We keep her inside these walls until the shower. Doubled SUV. Nico drives. Doubled men at the perimeter, plainclothes. She goes, she comes back. One event. Controlled.”
My jaw goes tight. I look at the photograph. The crosshairs.
Cassia speaks for the first time.
“He’s right, Nico. She needs the room. We keep it. We just keep the perimeter.”
I look at Dante.
“All right.”
“You drive. You stay with the car. Engine running. You don’t leave the curb.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t go alone before then.”
My jaw tightens further. A muscle in my neck pulls.
Dante doesn’t make me answer.
He stands.
“Move on Stepan. Build the boats. Briefing tomorrow night before the river.”
He walks out.
The room moves into operational mode.
Marco at comms calling Renzo’s old river crew. Izzy at her laptop already running approach patterns on Stepan’s communications. Renzo with the schematic, drawing entries on the brick building.
I stay at the table long after the family thins.
I open a page of Yelena’s portfolio I haven’t opened yet.
