Chapter 2: The Man Who Buries Whole Crews

"I asked you a question," Simone said.

"No, ma'am. Just the coffee."

I stepped back from the table. Eyes down. Shoulders in. Invisible.

Three years of practice.

Nikolai Volkov didn't move out of the doorway, so I had to pass close enough to smell cold air and gun oil.

He didn't look at Simone.

He looked at me.

"You read the file," he said.

Not a question.

"I set down a tray."

"For eleven seconds. Then you read the file."

Simone laughed too loudly. "Mr. Volkov, she's the dish girl. She wouldn't understand a word of it. Half the kitchen can't spell Dervishi."

Something moved behind his eyes. He walked into the room without answering her.

I made it to the stairs before my hands started shaking.

Tasha found me in the dish pit at midnight with two plates of leftover gnocchi and the face she makes when she has information.

Tasha keeps the books for Moretti's. All of them. The ones the IRS sees and the ones that would get everyone in the building killed. She is the only person here who likes me. She also knows one thing about me, and she has been sitting on it for eleven months like a woman holding a lit match.

"So," she said. "Volkov."

"So."

"Katya is his baby sister. Their parents got shot in a Moscow parking garage when she was seven. He raised her." She stabbed a gnocchi. "Six crews said no. He's not asking a seventh. This is it."

"That's sad."

"Wren." She stared at me. "Wren."

"Don't."

"Last year I watched you re-route a shipment manifest in pencil that would've walked six of our guys into a federal net, and when I asked how you knew, you said, and I quote, 'I read a lot.'" She leaned in. "Dish girls don't read a lot. Dish girls don't fix Simone's routes and slide them back under her door at 2 a.m."

My stomach dropped. "You know about that?"

"Everybody in the back office knows about that. They call it the Kitchen Ghost." She shrugged. "They think it's some retired old-timer wandering in. I have never once told them it's a twenty-nine-year-old woman with a terrible haircut."

"Tasha."

"Whatever you're running from — fine. But that girl on Fulton Street is nineteen."

I said nothing.

She sighed, stood up, and dropped a sticky note on my station on her way out.

PRIVATE ROOM. 4PM. Simone's walking Volkov's people through the breach.

At 3:52, Simone appeared at the top of the stairs.

"Kelly. With me."

"I'm on until close."

"You're on wherever I say. Bring the bar cart, stand by the wall, refill glasses, and do not open your mouth." She fixed her lipstick without looking at me. "Volkov's people want the room served. God knows why. Just stand there and look clean."

I stood there and looked clean.

The room filled. Simone. Don Salvatore Moretti — fifty-six, a wedding ring, a laugh he only uses around her. Volkov's second. Two lawyers. A voice on speakerphone from the Chicago Outfit.

And Nikolai Volkov at the far end, not touching the vodka, not touching the folder, watching everyone the way you watch a card table for cheating.

For twenty minutes it went fine.

Then Chicago said something that made the room go quiet.

"Look, the geometry here isn't new. There's exactly one person who ever pulled a hostage out of a Dervishi cold room alive. Castellane. The Locksmith's kid."

Volkov's head lifted. "Then get Castellane."

"Can't. She's gone. Vanished three years ago after the mother got killed. Rumor was she went into the ground herself." A pause. "That kind of talent doesn't disappear. It just... stopped."

My glass slipped half an inch in my hand.

Simone smiled, easy and gorgeous. "With respect, I don't need a ghost's method. I've walked that building. My plan is sound."

"You're certain," Volkov said.

"I'd stake my life on it."

I stood against the wall in a stained black apron, holding a bottle of Stoli, and thought:

You're staking his sister's life on it. Not yours. Hers.

Volkov closed the folder.

"Fine. Full walk-through tomorrow, nine a.m. My people, your people, in the room. If I'm not satisfied, we're out — the girl and the port."

Sal went gray.

Simone said, "You'll be satisfied."

Then Volkov stood, and as he passed my corner, he stopped.

Close enough that I saw the exhaustion under the ice.

"You're in the room tomorrow," he said quietly.

"Sir, I'm not—"