Page 113 of Cruel Kiss

I close the folder. "Where is he now?"

"Home, probably. Sleeping peacefully like a man who thinks he's clever." Navi's eyes are drifting. The morphine's pulling him under. "Ro. Don't do it stupid. He's worth more talking than dead. You need what's in his head."

"I know."

"I mean it. I didn't take two in the chest so you could go kill the one man who can tell you what Lev's actually planning." His eyes close. "Go slow. Be smart. Don't make all this work go to waste. It's some of my best, I think."

"Get some sleep, cousin," I tell him.

"Tell Cali," he mumbles, "that when I'm out of here, I'm cashing in. Someone owes me a lifetime of favors and I intend to collect from both of you."

Then he's gone, out, the machine ticking his heart along steady behind him.

I stand there a moment longer with the folder in my grasp. Then I go out into the hall where my wife is waiting.

We find Crosby at his brownstone in Cobble Hill just before four.

I don't kick in the door. I'd fucking like to, but that's not what the moment requires. Grigor rings the bell, three times, like a normal visitor, until a light comes on upstairs and a shape moves behind the frosted glass.

Then Crosby Hess opens his own front door in a monogrammed robe with his hair standing up and the last of sleep still on his face.

He sees me and the sleep leaves him all at once.

"Ronan!" He looks past me at Grigor, at the second man behind him, then at the black car at the curb. "It's four in the morning. What's happened?"

"Invite me in, Crosby," I snarl. "You don't want to have this conversation on your stoop, and neither do I."

He hesitates. Then he stands back and lets us through.

His study is exactly what you'd expect. Leather, brass, a wall of law books nobody's opened since the bar exam. He goes aroundbehind his desk, which is his mistake, because it tells me he still thinks he can wriggle his way out of this. It reminds me of Todd, tossing a stack of hundreds on my desk to show me he was serious. Men who think the room is on their side.

I put Navi's folder on the desk in front of him and open it to the last page.

"This is your death warrant," I inform him simply. "Do you care to explain?"

Crosby looks at the page. I watch him decide whether to try it.

In the end, he opts for the bald-faced lie. "Ronan, I don't know what you think?—"

"The retainer," I say, turning the page. "You copied Todd Bradshaw's file at two in the morning with no case reason. The badge—a real Bureau case number on a forged production order, because you're one of three men at the firm with standing to pull a live case number, and the other two can account for their whereabouts. The gala. Semyon's wedding. And a side door on the thirty-eighth floor of Whitmore Stearns, six weeks ago, during a pitch you got pulled into by accident."

His face contorts. He knows he's fucked. It's a strange feeling, watching the moment a man realizes the receipts are already gathered, that the only choice left is how he decides to die.

He folds fast. Faster than I expected. Faster than Todd, even, and Todd folded the second his pride ran out of road.

"The guns," Crosby gasps. He plops back heavily in his own chair. "You turned off the guns, Ronan. You know what that did to me?"

"You've been skimming off the gun-running trade, yes?" I ask to confirm.

He nods, pale and trembling. "Pyotr never knew. For thirty years, I've taken a slice off the top of every dollar that moved through that firm, and you and Igor before you never so much as blinked.” His hands are shaking now, the old-man tremor. "And then you got a conscience. You shut down the one thing that printed real money, you moved a woman and two kids into your life, you startedbleeding out on purpose, and the whole time, my slice is getting thinner and thinner until it's nothing. Nothing! After thirty years."

"So Lev came to you."

"Lev came to me." He laughs bitterly. "He promised the old arrangement back. The guns. My percentage. Everything the way it was. All I had to do was hand him a few things he couldn't get himself." He can't look at me. "It was just information, Ronan. I never touched anyone. I never fired a shot. I just… passed things along."

"You passed along the location of my men," I rumble, "so that a killer could reach my wife."

I don't hit him. I want to. My father would have. My father would have broken a glass against the wall by his head and made him sweep it up. But I sit down across the desk from him instead, at his level, so he has to see my face.