If I'm going to keep her, and I am going to keep her, there's no ambiguity about that, the decision was made the moment the click happened, then I need to know what I'm keeping. Every detail. Every scar, visible and otherwise. Every person who has ever touched her and every person who failed to. I need to understand the full topography of what I've claimed so that I can hold it properly, the way you need to understand the fault lines in a piece of land before you build on it.
I call Yuri.
Yuri Petrov is my intelligence man. Former FSB, recruited by my father twenty years ago and inherited by me along with the rest of the operation when my father died. He doesn't sleep, as far as I can tell. He exists in a permanent state of caffeinated alertness in a basement office on the Lower East Side, surrounded by monitors and servers and the quiet hum of information being gathered, sorted, and weaponized.
He picks up on the second ring.
"Voronov."
"I need a full workup. Everything. Name is Wren. She was Lot Seven at the Morozov auction tonight. Father is the debtor. I need his name, her full name, her history. Education, employment, medical, financial. I need to know where she'slived, who she's lived with, and what happened to her there. I need it by morning."
A pause. Yuri is not a man who asks unnecessary questions, which is one of the reasons he's still alive and employed.
"By morning," he repeats.
"Is that a problem?"
"No. I'll call Morozov's office for the intake file and build from there."
"Do it. And Yuri?"
"Yes?"
"Her father. I want everything on him too. Every debt, every bookie, every bar tab, every dollar he's ever owed and every dollar he's ever lost. By the time I wake up tomorrow, I want to know that man's life better than he knows it himself."
"Understood."
I hang up. Pour myself a drink.
Sleep doesn't come. I don't expect it to. I've never slept well, and tonight the usual insomnia is compounded by something else, a low-frequency vibration in my nervous system that I eventually identify as anticipation. The incessant boner doesn’t help.
I sit in the dark and I wait.
At 6:47 a.m., my phone buzzes. Yuri.
I open the file he's sent to my encrypted server and I start reading, and by the second page my hands are so tight around my phone that the case creaks.
Her name is Wren Calloway. Twenty-three. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Dennis Calloway and a mother named Sarah who died when Wren was four. Cause of death: complications from an untreated infection, because DennisCalloway didn't have insurance and didn't take his wife to the hospital until she was already septic. He told the ER doctors she'd been sick for "a couple days." The medical records say it was closer to two weeks.
Wren was four years old when her mother died because her father was too cheap or too drunk or too indifferent to drive her to a hospital.
I set my phone down. Pick up the Macallan. Put it down without drinking. Pick the phone back up.
It gets worse.
After Sarah died, Dennis fell apart. Or rather, Dennis fell further apart, because from what Yuri's assembled, the man was never particularly together to begin with. The drinking escalated. The gambling started. Small-time at first, off-track betting, weekly poker games with other men who couldn't afford to lose. Then the casinos. Then the private games with people who don't advertise and don't forgive.
Wren started working at fourteen. Under the table, because she was too young for a legal paycheck. She bused tables at a diner six blocks from their apartment and brought the cash home and her father took it. Yuri pulled the diner's records. The owner, a woman named Rosa Gutierrez, kept informal logs of hours and pay, and according to those logs, Wren worked four to five shifts a week during the school year and six or seven during the summer.
She was fourteen.
At sixteen, she added a second job. Cleaning office buildings at night through a temp agency that paid in cash and didn't ask questions about age. The agency's records are spotty, but Yuri cross-referenced them with the building's access logs and foundthat Wren Calloway was regularly swiping in at 10 p.m. and swiping out at 3 a.m. on school nights.
She graduated from high school with a 3.8 GPA. I read that number three times. 3.8, while working two jobs, while feeding a gambling addict father, while living in an apartment where the heat got shut off every winter and the water got shut off twice.
No college. There was no money for college. There was no money for anything. Every dollar she earned went into the black hole of her father's debt, and the debts kept growing because Dennis Calloway had the kind of addiction that doesn't plateau. It escalates. It evolves. It finds new and creative ways to consume everything within reach, including his daughter's future.
She worked at a grocery store. A dry cleaner. A call center. She did data entry for a medical billing company from 9 to 5 and waitressed at a sports bar from 6 to midnight. On the weekends she picked up odd jobs through an app that paid by the task. Dog walking. House cleaning. Furniture assembly. Anything. Everything. A relentless, exhausting, mechanical accumulation of small amounts of money that disappeared into her father's pockets the moment it materialized.