Page 56 of Ruthless Sin
“It doesn’t matter where I learned it.”
“It matters to me.”
“It matters that I learned it.” I keep my hand on the folder. “Now you’re going to tell me about the source inside Casa Lucia.”
He gives me the shrug the restraints allow.
“There is no source inside Casa Lucia.”
I take the photograph out of the folder and slide it across the table.
It stops under the bulb. Izzy’s catch. Korvan in the doorway of the Tremé shop with a man in a Casa Lucia polo, the logo clean on the chest, the kind the front desk wears. Three-quarter profile. A small red dot inked over the man’s ear, where Izzy circled him in the dark hours before dawn and said quietly, him. The thread she’s been pulling since summer.
Korvan looks at it.
“You have a photograph. You do not have a name.”
“I have the photograph. I’ll have the name in fifteen minutes.” I let that sit. “I’m asking you to give it to me in five.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he pivots.
“You are Nico Santoro,” he says. “The Consigliere. The one who speaks multiple languages.” He sets the pause down like a card. “You are also the Canadian.”
I keep my hand down. I keep my breath where it is.
“The one who walked into the warehouse in Moscow three years ago and walked off the face of the earth. Morozov has been hunting that man since. He doesn’t have a name to hunt.” His mouth moves at the corner. “I could give him one.”
I have run this conversation from the other chair. Not the man asking. The man answering. Three years ago, in Moscow, a bulb in my eyes, Alexei Morozov reading my own life back to me in a voice with no heat in it. The folder. The names. The patience of a man who owns the whole night and knows it.
I learned this room there. Not from the asking side. The answering side. I am good in this room because I sat in this chair, and I know what breaks a man and what doesn’t because I watched myself to find out.
The recitation I just gave Markov is Alexei's. The rhythm of the pages. The offer wearing the face of mercy. It is what he used on Yelena but she didn't break.
She traded months of Bratva names for her family's rescue, her mother, her sister, herself, a deal she made with her eyes open and her chin up. I have used Alexei's method in this room a dozen times since. I am good at it. I have never let myself think too hard about what that means until right now, sitting across from a man I am threatening with the same method she faced.
I do not let any of it reach my face. He is watching for the face. They always are.
“You won’t get the chance,” I tell him.
“I might.”
“You won’t. You don’t get to a phone, and there’s no one in this building who’ll carry a word out for you. Nobody on your side knows where you are, or that you’re alive to be somewhere. Morozov can hunt the Canadian as long as he draws breath.” I keep my voice flat. “He doesn’t get him from you.”
His eyes drop to the photograph. I stay where I am. I keep my hand on the folder and I let the silence do the work. This is the part Alexei was best at. The silence after the offer is made. The patient sitting. I can do this all night and Korvan knows it.
His shoulders drop a quarter inch. Not surrender. The decision before surrender. I have watched enough men make it to know what it looks like.
“Andrei Volin,” he says. “Reception. Nine months he has been there.”
I do not write it down. I will not forget it.
“He is not Bratva. He has a sister in Naples and a debt to the family that took her. He has not paid it.” A breath. “That is his leash.”
“How long has he been giving you the list.”
“Six weeks.”
“What does he give you.”
