“Noted.”
“Gregory.” Illyana again. Lighter. Carrying the particular undertone of someone who had observed something they found amusing and was going to make you aware of it, without making it obvious that they were making you aware of it. “You do remember why Matvey specifically chose you for this mission, yes?”
I said nothing.
Which she interpreted correctly as the confirmation it was.
“Mm.” The sound she made was entirely too satisfied.
“I’m focused on Tomas,” I said flatly. “Who is currently sitting across the room with a notoriously corrupt politician at a fundraiser that costs more per table than most criminal operations make in a quarter. Which seems relevant.”
“Tomas is no angel,” Illyana said, and the amusement dropped out of her voice, replaced by something crisper. “In fact, he is the reason for this secret mission. Don’t let the tailored suit confuse you.”
“Nothing about this situation is confusing me.”
A pause.
“Of course not,” Kirill said. Deadpan. In eleven years of working alongside Kirill Petrov, I’d heard him be deadpan approximately six thousand times, and I’d never once failed to recognize when it was doing the work of a sentence he’d decided not to say out loud.
I didn’t dignify it.
“Buy something during the auction,” Kirill added, back to operational. “You’ve been standing near that column for forty minutes. Cover requires participation.”
He disconnected first. Illyana a half-second after, and I was nearly certain I heard the beginning of something that might have been a quiet laugh before the line went clean.
I pocketed the comm.
***
The auction was already running when I crossed toward the outer edge of the crowd, taking a position where I’d have clean sightlines to both the stage and the tables. The auctioneer’s voice moved through its practiced rhythms—an antique, provenance noted, significance emphasized, opening bid established with the gravity of a man who understood that the value of things was mostly a story you told well enough that everyone agreed to believe it.
I scanned the room with the peripheral efficiency of long practice.
Tomas at his table, composed and attentive, his posture the practiced openness of a man performing transparency. Nothing in his body language suggested anything other than a wealthy businessman enjoying a charitable evening. Which was either evidence of innocence or evidence of very good training, and at this stage of the investigation, I couldn’t determine which.
Maverick two tables over, carrying the particular stillness of a man who was always listening even when he appeared to be speaking. His steel-blue eyes moved at intervals—assessing, the unconscious habit of someone who had been operating in rooms like this long enough that surveillance had become instinct.
Calderon, somewhere in the middle distance, having reassembled himself after the earlier interaction with the specific controlled blankness of a man who had processed what happened and filed it underdeal with later.I noted that. People who filed things underdeal with laterwere worth watching, because they always came back to it.
And Sofia—
Sofia was at her father’s table, spine straight, hands in her lap, face turned toward the stage. She looked composed. She looked entirely present and attentive and appropriately engaged with the proceedings.
She was also, at irregular intervals that she clearly believed were less noticeable than they were, looking at me.
I caught the third one.
Held it for exactly one second—long enough to be deliberate, short enough to be deniable—and then looked back at the stage.
I was going to buy the watch.
Not because Kirill had told me to, though that was the official reason, and I was keeping it. But because standing here with my hands empty and my chest doing things I’d no framework for and my eyes conducting their own unauthorized surveillance of a woman I’d touched for approximately thirty seconds was making me acutely aware that I needed to do something with my body that constituted a clear, purposeful action.
The auctioneer reached the piece in question. An antique watch, the kind with a history attached to make it worth more than its materials, which was, again, just a story told well, but the Bratva had spent enough on stranger things, and Kirill’s instruction was sound.
I raised my hand.
“Two million.”