Which meant either he was smarter than I’d given him credit for—unlikely, given his recent operational decisions—or he was afraid, which was more useful and more dangerous in equal measure, because afraid men didn’t behave predictably and I’d been counting on Nico’s predictability for weeks.
The widow stood at the graveside.
Daniela Wiese was beautiful, with cheekbones that had been her most valuable asset for twenty-five years and eyes that currently held tears of a woman who understood exactly how she was being looked at and had made peace with that being part of the role. She wore a black dress that was both entirely appropriate and specifically chosen, and she wept with a control that never quite crossed into messiness, and I watched her with the dispassionate attention of a man trying to determine how much she knew versus how much she had survived by not knowing.
Tomas said, from the corner of his mouth, barely moving it, “She called me yesterday.”
I kept my eyes forward. “What did she want?”
“To tell me she had nothing to do with any of it.” A pause. “She said Maverick kept her out of the business. She said she found out about Nico’s involvement after the funeral arrangements began.” Another pause, the considering kind. “She sounded genuinely frightened.”
“She should be,” I said. “She married a man who used his stepson to run weapons through a civilian business and tried to destabilize the Bratva’s hold on the entire city. Whether she knew or not, she’s standing in his shadow.”
Tomas was quiet for a moment. “I believe her.”
I looked at him briefly. “Compassion or strategy?”
The corner of his mouth moved in the way it did when he was acknowledging a question he had already asked himself. “Both,” he said. “They’re not always opposites.”
That was the thing about Tomas Alvarez that had taken me the longest to recalibrate to—the way he held complexity without flattening it, the way a man who planned five moves ahead could simultaneously choose to believe a frightened widow because it was true and because it was useful. For most of the investigation, I’d read him as purely strategic, armored all the way to the center. Then I’d watched him receive the news of his daughter’s pregnancy in a hospital hallway and understood that the armor had rooms inside it that I hadn’t seen.
The priest finished. The crowd began to move in the slow, purposeful way of people transitioning from performance to the next scheduled obligation. I stayed where I was and let the movement flow past me, watching faces, watching hands, watching the specific choreography of men who were rearranging their alliances in real time and doing it behind the cover of condolence.
Yegor appeared at my left shoulder with the soundlessness he had cultivated over a decade of doing exactly this kind of work. He had been on the perimeter for the last hour, running the extended surveillance while Tomas and I held the visible position. He smelled of cigarette smoke and cold air, and he stood beside me without looking at me, which meant he had something.
“Routed through Pilsen,” he said. Low, even, the voice of a man reporting facts. “Kirill confirmed it forty minutes ago. Three trucks, different plates than the ones we burned last month—new acquisition. Moving tonight, we think, or possibly tomorrow morning, depending on how rattled he is by the service.” A pause. “He sent someone. To the funeral. Not himself—a proxy. Young, standing near the east colonnade for the first half. Left before the committal.”
I processed this. “Reconnaissance or message?”
“Both, probably.” Yegor’s jaw shifted. “Someone wanted eyes here. Wanted to see who showed up, how we positioned.”
“He knows we’re coming for the new routes.”
“He’s known for a week.” Yegor’s voice held no particular inflection on this. He was not a man who wasted tone on things that were already resolved. “He’s been moving the schedule since his father was confirmed dead. He’s resourced enough to keep going for a while without Maverick’s political cover, but not indefinitely. He needs a decisive shipment through before we can cut the new arteries.”
I looked at the grave one last time. The workers were beginning the mechanical finalities—lowering, filling, the unglamorous logistics of interment that the mourners had already begun to look away from. Daniela was being guided toward a black car by a woman I didn’t recognize. She looked back once at the grave with an expression that was the first entirely unguarded thing I’d seen from her, and then the car door closed.
“Luka?” I said.
“Already called. He and Damir are at the staging point. Stephen is running the back route.”
“Tell them two hours.” I turned away from the grave. “I need to go home first.”
Yegor looked at me. He did it briefly, with the controlled attention of a man who understood whathomenow meant for me and had not yet decided how he felt about that development, or possibly had decided and was keeping the verdict to himself in the way Yegor kept most things. He nodded once. He walked away.
Tomas fell into step beside me on the way back to the car. He waited until the crowd had thinned enough that the distance between us and the nearest mourner exceeded practicality for listening, and then he said, “Tonight?”
“Tonight.” I looked at him from the side. “Not your operation, Tomas.”
“He used my trucks,” Tomas said. His voice was level, but there was something underneath it—not fury, which would have been easier to read, but a quieter and more durable thing, the outrage of a man whose reputation had been borrowed without permission and worn like a mask over someone else’s crime. “He used my name. He put my daughter in a basement. I want to be present when you end this.”
I considered the request. Not out of indecision—the decision was already made—but out of the particular respect of telling a man directly rather than dressing the refusal up as something else. “You’ll know within the hour of it being done,” I said. “What you won’t do is come along and turn a clean operation into a personal one. Nico is dangerous when he’s cornered, and he is currently very cornered. I need the men I have to be doing exactly what I need them to do, and I can’t run that if someone in the team has a different reason for being there.”
Tomas looked at me for a moment with those deep hazel eyes. He wasn’t a man who accepted being managed, and he was not performing the acceptance now—he was actually weighing it, turning it over the way he turned everything, and arriving at the same conclusion I’d.
“Fine,” he said. One word. Clean. “Call me when it’s done.”
He walked to his own car. I walked to mine.