Dmitri’s apartment is circled twice.
My father’s warehouse near the rail yard has three lines drawn through it.
Viktor stands across from me, sleeves rolled up, phone in one hand, jaw tight. Alexei is near the window, quieter than usual. That is how I know he understands what this is becoming.
“Kirill has forty men at the main house,” Viktor says. “Maybe more by midnight. If he knows you’re coming, he’ll move Dmitri before you get there.”
“Then we hit both locations.”
“That splits us.”
“I know.”
“It weakens us.”
“It gives Dmitri fewer places to hide.”
Viktor looks at me for a long second. “It also gets men killed.”
I look up from the map. “Men die.”
“Yours too.”
“If they’re afraid, they can leave.”
“No one is afraid,” he says sharply. “That’s not the point.”
I straighten.
The room goes still.
Viktor has argued with me before. Quietly. Carefully. Never like this.
Good. At least one man here is still thinking.
“Then make your point,” I say.
He puts both hands on the table and leans forward. “You are reacting.”
“I’m acting.”
“No, you are taking every man we have and throwing them at the Volkovs before we know where Anya is.”
My hand closes around the edge of the table. The wood creaks.
Alexei shifts slightly near the window but doesn’t speak.
Viktor continues, because he has always been braver than is healthy. “We found blood. We found her ring. We don’t have a body. We don’t have Dmitri. We don’t know if Kirill has her, if Dmitri has her, or if someone else picked her up after the canal.”
“Dmitri shot her.”
“We don’t know that.”
I look at him.
He doesn’t back down.
“We know there was blood near the water,” he says. “We know Dmitri staged the photo. We know there was a car. That’s not enough to burn the entire old house tonight.”