Page 87 of You Can Run

Their eyes met across the room. Just for a second—a flash of recognition through the crowd, her face showing everything at once: fear, relief, anger, love. Fury, too.

Dante looked back at Borya before the connection could register on anyone else's face.

“Ah,” Borya said softly, as if greeting someone he'd been expecting for dinner. “There she is.”

The mezzanine was empty.

Sofia had counted on this and it still surprised. For four years, she'd never been on this level without Borya's presence filling it. Without him, it was just a hallway with bad carpet and a locked door at the end.

This time, the door wasn't locked. Borya's security had followed him downstairs, exactly as she'd predicted, and whoever had been last through hadn't engaged the deadbolt. A small mistake. The kind of mistake that happened when a man who'd been careful for thirty years got handed something he'd been waiting thirteen years for, and his attention narrowed to the thing he wanted at the expense of everything else.

She'd been counting on that too.

She moved down the hallway. Borya's private area was three rooms: an office, a small bedroom, and the security room. The office door was open. She passed it without looking in—she knew what was there, the desk, the safe, the framed photograph of the Constan?a harbour that was the only personal object Borya kept in any of his American properties. The bedroom door was closed. She ignored it.

The security room was at the end, behind a door that looked the same as the others but wasn't. Reinforced frame, electronic lock, a keypad she'd watched Borya use hundreds of times from a distance she'd calibrated to look like disinterest.

Four digits. She entered them without hesitation. The lock disengaged with a soft click.

She stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind her.

The room was small—eight by ten, maybe—and most of it was screens. Six monitors mounted on the wall in a grid, each one cycling between camera feeds. Main floor, bar, stages, entrance, mezzanine hallway, and the basement. The images were sharp and clinical, stripped of the pink light and the noise, reducing the Dollhouse to what it actually was: a series of rooms being watched by someone who never had to be inside them.

She looked at the basement feed first.

The lower level was active. She could see the corridor, narrow, low-ceilinged, lit by the flat white of fluorescent strips. Three of the seven doors along it were closed, which meant the rooms behind them were in use. At the far end, a server rack blinked in steady green rows behind a caged partition. Two men sat at a desk near the elevator—not security, technical staff, the kind of men who managed equipment and didn't ask questions about what the equipment recorded.

All of it running. All of it live. Exactly what the FBI needed to find when they came through the door.

She turned to the main console.

The sanitization protocol was controlled from a terminal built into the desk beneath the monitors—a custom system, designed by someone Borya had brought in from Bucharest and then, she assumed, made to disappear afterward. She'd spent two years learning its architecture through observation alone, watching Borya and his technical people interact with it, memorizing sequences she was never supposed to see. Building a map of the system in her head that she'd never written down because writing things down got you killed.

She sat down and woke the terminal.

The screen filled with a simple interface—status indicators for each of the basement systems, a row of controls along the bottom, and in the upper right corner, behind a confirmation dialogue that required a six-digit authorization code, the kill switch. One button. Four minutes. Everything below her feet erased.

She didn't go for the kill switch first. Disabling it without disabling the monitoring alerts would trigger a notification to Borya's phone. It was a security feature she'd watched him test twice. If his phone buzzed with a system alert while Dante was trying to keep him talking, it was over.

She started with the alerts.

The monitoring system ran on a separate process from the sanitization protocol—a redundancy that Borya had insisted on, because Borya believed in redundancies the way religious men believed in prayer. She accessed the notification settings, located the external relay that pushed alerts to his phone, and disabled it. The process took forty seconds. She counted each one.

She moved to the door locks next. The basement level had two access points—the internal elevator, which opened onto the main floor behind the DJ booth, and the service entrance at street level, which connected to the tunnel running under Broad Street. Both were controlled from this terminal. Both were currently locked.

She unlocked the service entrance first. Somewhere beneath her, a magnetic lock disengaged, and a steel door that hadn't been opened from the outside in three years clicked free of its frame. Cole's team wouldn't know it yet. They'd know when they tested it, which they would be doing at regular intervals, because that was the protocol she'd given them.

She unlocked the internal elevator second, then paused. If anyone on the main floor tried to use it in the next few minutes, the open indicator would show on the panel beside the DJ booth. A small risk. She accepted it.

Now the kill switch.

She entered the six-digit authorization code. The confirmation dialogue opened—a red-bordered window with a single prompt: CONFIRM SANITIZATION Y/N.

She didn't confirm it. She accessed the backend through a maintenance mode she'd watched the Bucharest technician use once, three years ago, during a routine test. The memory was precise – she'd been standing in the doorway, bringing Borya his coffee, and she'd seen the technician's fingers move across thekeyboard in a sequence she'd replayed in her head every night for a month until it was permanent.

She entered the sequence now. The terminal responded with a diagnostic screen she'd never seen before—system architecture, process trees, dependency chains. The sanitization protocol sat in the middle of it like a spider in a web, connected to every other system on the lower level. Cameras, locks, servers, environmental controls. All of it routed through the kill switch as a failsafe. If the switch was triggered, everything went dark simultaneously. If the switch was disabled, the systems continued to run independently, unaware that the thing connecting them had been removed.

She disabled it.