"How many containers?" I ask Lex. I should take this in my office. I stay where I am.
"Three. Weekly rotation. Viktor's using a shell company registered in Delaware."
"Delaware incorporation is child's play. He's laundering the documentation through a second shell. Check the Caymans."
"Already on it."
I hang up. Siobhan is looking at me with an expression I'm learning to read: curiosity layered over calculation. "A supply route through Revere."
"You heard that."
"I'm sitting three feet from you." She closes her laptop. "Shell companies registered in Delaware with Cayman layering. That's a standard dual-jurisdiction wash. If he's running shipping containers, the customs declarations will have discrepancies — tonnage versus manifested weight. That's where you'll find the real cargo."
I stare at her.
"My clients include a maritime logistics company that was targeted for smuggling last year. I restructured their compliance framework." She shrugs. "Different context. Same mechanics."
She's right. The tonnage discrepancy is exactly where Lex should look. My wife just handed me an operational insight that my intelligence team hasn't reached yet, and she did it between sips of black coffee at my kitchen island.
I almost tell her about the broader war plan — the safe houses, the alliance structure, the Dmitri question that hangs over everything like a blade suspended by a thread. The words form. I catch them. She's my wife, not my lieutenant.
Except she's already acting like both, and the line between them gets thinner every morning she sits at this island with her laptop and her risk matrices and her mind that works like mine. She sees angles. She reads silence. She identified a smuggling vulnerability in thirty seconds that Lex's team has been circling for a week.
"Thank you," I say.
"You're welcome." She opens her laptop. Goes back to work. Like she didn't just shift the trajectory of a criminal intelligence operation before 9am.
The evenings are harder.
Dinner is takeout, because neither of us cooks beyond eggs and toast, though she mentioned once that she makes a good carbonara and the thought of Siobhan in my kitchen with pasta and a glass of wine is an image I've been unable to dislodge. She likes Thai. I learn this and store it beside the peonies and the Tartt and the coffee-black and the bare feet and the collarbone. The inventory of her grows daily. I'm building a map of a woman I married for strategy and the map keeps revealing territory I didn't know existed.
We eat at the kitchen island. We talk carefully, the circling conversation of two people who know what they want to say and choose not to say it. She tells me about a difficult client — a tech company that ignored her risk assessment and is now hemorrhaging board members. The satisfaction in her voice when she says "I told them in March" is the same satisfaction I feel when an operation I planned executes cleanly. We're the same species, her and I. We just hunt different things.
I tell her about a property dispute with the Romanos that's more tedious than dangerous. Normal things. Things that married people discuss. The normalcy is the knife. It cuts because it shouldn't fit, and it does.
Then the hallway. Then the doors.
"Goodnight, Siobhan."
"Goodnight, Nico."
The same words as every night. Heavier each time. She pauses at her door longer tonight — two seconds, three. Her hand on the handle. Her eyes on mine, twenty feet of hardwood between us. Something passes between us that is not a goodnight. It's a question, and an answer, and a deferral of both.
She goes in. I go in.
The door closes. The penthouse is silent.
I stand in my room in the dark. Press my palm flat against the wall — the same wall, the same spot. The plaster is cool and solid and she's on the other side of it, thirty feet of silence and one unlocked door, and I've been standing at this wall every night for five nights telling myself it's enough. That the waiting is the right thing. That giving her the choice is worth the cost of not making it for her.
The wall is cool under my palm. The penthouse is quiet. She's on the other side — close enough to hear my heartbeat if walls were thinner and we were different people.
I say it to no one. To the wall. To her.
"Knock."
Chapter 10
Siobhan