Nick tried to keep it together. It wasn’t working very well. He spent too long as the family bastard to take kindly to his grandfather attempting to turn him into the prodigal son now.
Yes, Nick appeared to be returning to the family business, slowly and surely. But there was no love lost between him and Bun. He was tired of holding his tongue, and he finally had enough chutzpah or faith or just plain guts to say what he meant. “Do you know what you did?”
Bun shrugged. He’d embodied the all-powerful business persona for as long as Nick could remember. If Bun ever did something wrong, he didn’t admit it, didn’t ask for advice, and didn’t give a fuck what anyone else thought. In Nick’s eyes, it had not served the old man or the business all that well. While Bun believed he made the wheels turn, Nick was certain the business worked in spite of him.
For a moment he wondered what Bun saw when he looked in the mirror. Did he see a reflection of the young, powerful man he’d once been? Or did he see the rheumy eyes and sagging skin? Had he passive-aggressively screwed over the whole thing, knowing it was about to fall into Nick’s hands and there was nothing he could do about it?
The old man shrugged. “I did what needed to be done.”
It was an exercise in control to not fly off the handle and throttle his grandfather. Years of resentment about Bun’s treatment of both him and his mother put flame to the desire. Nick had always harbored fantasies of killing Bun but he’d never acted on them. Still he held back, only grinding words between his teeth. “You can’t order a hit on a Kurev son and think nothing will come of it.”
Bun leaned easily back into his recliner. “Nothing has come of it.”
“It’s barely been three days.” Nick didn’t like that the old man had no plan to deal with the ramifications of his ill-thought actions. “I’m going to Chicago to check things out.”
That brought the old man sharply forward, barking orders like always. “You’ll do no such thing.”
“Do you propose to stop me?” Not waiting for an answer, Nick rose to his feet, towering over his grandfather, knowing the other could not move as fast, could not react as he once might have. “Are you going to order a hit on me?”
“I could.” A cold stare. A heartbeat.
For the first time Nick felt the power surge in him. He had never wanted a throne like Bun had. He’d only wanted to make a better place for the people around him, the ones Bun pushed down or held back, the same as he’d done to Nick. Bun was a tyrant and a sometimes erratic one at that. Nick harbored suspicions that Bun’s temper was at least partially to blame for the events leading to his own sons’ deaths.
He didn’t want to be like his grandfather, not at all, and consoled himself that Bun’s power led to temper and irrational displays of pride, consequences be damned. But Nick’s surge of power led him to feel safe saying what he wanted. He fed off that inner core. “You can’t put a hit on me because I’m your only heir.”
“I’ll find another.”
“A girl?” Nick tilted his head. Bun would never put a woman into power. “Or would you go outside the family line?”
“Cecilia has a boy. He’ll do.”
“Gavril is your brother’s grandchild, not yours. Besides, he’s ten.”
Bun sat up straighter, his chest—once broad—inflating as though that were a threat. “He’ll be old enough.”
“No, he won’t. You aren’t long for this world, old man.” Nick narrowed his eyes, open challenge directed straight at his grandfather for the first time. And for the first time, he saw his grandfather falter.
“You have no idea how long I have!”
“Yes, I do. And you won’t sit head of this family much longer, unless you run things the way I need them run.”
This time it was Bun who surged to stand toe-to-toe with his grandson. They were alone in the family living room, but muscle was never too far away. “I will take you out if you continue with this!”
Nick sat back down. The very fact that his grandfather gave him an out—an “if”—was indication that the man knew he was cornered. Bun’s own beliefs dictated that blood sit at the head of the empire—if it could be called that. While Vasilescu had cornered most of Atlanta, it wasn’t anything near what Kolya Kurev had once been. He was not an American don on his mafia throne. Nick had plans, plans that had never involved Bun or Bun’s ways. In fact, the man had become too much of a liability. “I will continue and you won’t be able to put a hit on me.”
“Do not underestimate the value of business and do not overestimate the value of your blood, young man.” Bun glared and settled himself back into his seat; to all the world he appeared a man of prestige and power.
Nick let it roll off. Thanks to Bun and his mother, he had never had the luxury of overestimating his own value. He lived every day well aware that his blood was the last of the Vasilescu line, at least of the of-age males. He was also aware that very same blood was tainted in the worst possible way. “I have not improperly estimated either. But I suggest you give it a try: issue that hit, give them my name. Nothing will happen to me and you’ll be in a world of hurt.”
Only a blink or two of the old eyes, a twitch betrayed by spotted skin along his jaw, gave Bun’s uncertainty away. As Nick watched, the power and pride started to peel away, thin layer by thin layer.
So he leaned in again. “Do you want to find out what happens when you put out a hit on an officer of the law in this town? I work in White Oak where your home is. I’ve worked for Fulton and DeKalb Counties. There are hundreds of armed men and women just waiting to come after you and shut down everything you’ve built. I’ll be a hero, putting my own grandfather behind bars. You’ll die in prison.”
“They’ll know you’re a Vasilescu.”
A small grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. It turned out he enjoyed putting his grandfather in his place. “So? If I lock you up, what will it matter? Except to make the story bigger. Then where will you be? Put away by your only heir? Will that show the Kurevs they can’t walk into your territory? Will that keep the hounds at bay? You’ll lose everything.” Nick didn’t say everyone. Bun wouldn’t care.
His grandfather sat there, unmoving.
Nick played another card.
“Don’t worry, it will never happen.”
Another flicker of the old man’s eyes.
“The police force will never hear of it, because if you put a hit on me, no one will carry it out. While you’ve been a dictator at the top of your game, ordering your underlings around, squashing everyone and every hope you can, I’ve been working, too. I know what it takes to lead. So you can order that hit. But no one will even attempt it. All your best men are loyal—to me.”
For the first time in his life, Nick thought his grandfather might just pull out a gun and shoot him point-blank. He thought the old man might finally ignore the fact that Nick was the only heir left and simply remove him anyway. But he bet on the wary look in Bun’s eyes, and stood and walked away, showing his back. Giving his grandfather every opportunity.
He was halfway to the door when he heard the metal slide of a gun coming from the holster.
Will couldn’t stand it.
He’d stayed out of the shit as long as he could. He’d almost started to get back that nice, fresh naïve smell he’d once had so long ago.
Will considered himself to be on his third incarnation in this life. He’d started his first as Lee Maxwell, a man like any other. That Lee had a chosen career—in corporate accounting, an easy job. A wife, a daughter. He worried about paying his mortgage, his beautiful at-home wife maybe having an affair, which preschool was the best, those things. When he worried about crime it was about muggings, robbery, or, at worst, that something personal would happen to his wife or daughter.
He’d never seen it coming. The man he’d been was stupid. The cushy job was for a front organization. It seemed he wasn’t the best accountant to come out of his class, only the most gullible. When he’d balked at laundering money, his mafia bosses had struck back hard and fast, killing Lee’s wife and daughter and letting him come home to find their nearly shredded bodies in a living room splattered with bullets and blood.
It had taken several months to pull himself together and become the second incarnation of Lee. All records of Lee Maxwell had disappeared. That Lee got revenge. Lived off the grid and picked off drug dealers, local two-bit crime lords, and mafia movers and shakers one by one. It was the second Lee who ran into Sin. They had shared goals but entirely different methodologies and theories.
Lee number two had assumed he’d die on one of his self-imposed missions. Sin had not. She always maintained faith she’d live to a ripe old age, though she never made any plans for exactly how she was going to make that happen. Still, when the shit hit the fan, she was the one who worked out an escape for them. She believed they could quit and bury themselves deep enough under paper and background that they wouldn’t be found.
She turned the two of them into Will and Diana Kincaid.
Lee hadn’t believed it would work, but he forced himself into his third incarnation; he became Will. He bought in. And just now, just when he was finally—after five years—embracing his possibilities, here it all came again.
Most people lived life as one person. Will figured if he was very lucky, he was headed for his fourth life. The pessimist, or realist, in him strongly considered the possibility that he was headed straight to his death.
He’d been stupid to think they could chop the head off the Kurev mafia and live to tell the tale. Perhaps it was only shocking that it had taken the Kurevs five years to show up in his town.
Kolya Kurev had been larger than life—a man who believed that he was king on earth. While he didn’t rule everything, he ruled everything he saw. He took what he wanted with no regard to law, life, or love. He’d taken Lee’s family and Sin’s. In return, they’d taken his organization out from under him, man by man.
But Kolya had sons. Three Kurev boys who were too young to be much more than pups at the time. But the pups had grown a lot in five years. Now one was dead in the back alleys of Will’s town. At Diana’s hands.
Will slept. He’d slept Lee’s sleep—light and wary, hand loosely on the butt of the loaded gun under the pillow. He’d pulled the shades, piled two spare blankets on the floor, and curled up to sleep.
If anyone came in, they’d come in aiming for the bed. He wouldn’t be there.
He’d managed only a modicum of rest. The previous night, he pulled on blacks and snuck through the neighbors’ yards to see if the vacant house down the street truly was vacant. Will had sweated that in a way Lee never had. Lee didn’t care if he was caught. Will did. Lee also rarely had to scout through backyards. The mafia’s worst always left themselves a way out and Lee and Sin a way in. Suburbia didn’t fit that model. Now the yards he crept through belonged to people Will knew. He could just imagine Mrs. Wellesley getting an eyeful of him sneaking through her back hedges, and he could imagine how much worse it would be when he was hauled in by people who worked with his wife and when Mrs. Wellesley found out her lurker was none other than that nice Will Kincaid down the street.
But Mrs. Wellesley had no idea that nice Will Kincaid was no such thing.
Tonight, Will had other plans.
He’d bought a second-hand laptop off the Internet. He used a fake name and a prepaid Visa card. He again dressed dark, and while Diana was out on a call he drove out of town, heading down I-75 toward Macon, stopping only to trade out his license plate. He hit the town of Gray and tried a few random turns, winding up—ironically—on Lee Street. Which—even more ironically—sported a yellow diamond of a sign declaring Lee a dead end. Didn’t he know it?
But it had houses nice enough to indicate they had wireless Internet and small enough to not worry about security. They were spaced far enough apart that if he kept his headlights off they’d never know he was here. He booted up and logged in, turning off the engine to avoid drawing even more suspicion should he be seen.
Almost as soon as the engine went off, he was assaulted by the thick Georgia air. It existed in Atlanta, though the humidity was somewhat masked by the bustle of the city. Here, there was nothing holding back the heat. Even in the dark of night, in his car, it pushed in at him, creating a physical pressure to match the mental one he already suffered.
He dimmed the screen and pulled up three wireless signals that reached him where he sat in the dark. “McCullough” was weak to nonexistent. “Homeland Security” was also low signal—apparently one of the neighbors thought they were funny. For a moment the doubt crept in. He should be like these people, not out here stealing their Internet. But then again, over the last five years, at the height of being like these people, he’d been a fake, a wannabe at best. So he shoved the tic of his emotions aside and got to work.
He hooked into the unlocked “Family Internet” signal, emitted by the trusting folks in a nearby home. Then he set up a generic email account with false information and started searching.
There was no information publicly available on the death of Ivan Kurev. There was nothing new on the remaining brothers—Roman and Kaspar—either. Which was odd. They should know by now that their middle brother was gone. They would be doing something about it. The question was what? And did it involve him and Diana?
Something would happen.
You didn’t kill a Kurev and just walk away.
Which was what he’d tried to tell Diana the first time they’d tried to do exactly that.
He spent three hours searching travel records, court documents, police reports, and arrest records. And came up with exactly nothing. The brothers Kurev didn’t exactly look clean, but they sure didn’t look like they were staking out Atlanta either.
He gave up, folded up shop, and headed home before the good people of Lee Street woke up and found him. The Saturday morning traffic was haphazard and made it difficult to find a place to stop and swap his license plate.
He pulled around the back of the house and into the garage, grateful for the high fences. They made it harder for him to scope the neighbors but also masked the sounds of him and Diana coming and going at all hours. At least with her being an officer, the neighbors wouldn’t think it at all strange.
He came in through the laundry room and found Diana sitting on the living room floor—out of sight of the wide front windows that had seemed beautiful and open at the time they’d bought the place. Now they were just another hazard.
She looked up at him. “Autopsy came back.”
When she’d come home, she’d been unsure what to do. If they ran, they would be followed. And it wasn’t just the Kurevs she worried about.
She’d made a mistake in making friends. It had taken a while, several years in fact. It was a mistake Will hadn’t made. He’d been happy going to work, coming home and simply being. He didn’t need companionship; it seemed some days he didn’t even need hers. Maybe because he’d had it once before, a full rich life marked by births and deaths and anchored by a feeling of safety.
He’d told her it was a grievous error—feeling like that—he’d been wrong to think he was ever safe. But for once she’d wanted to feel it. She’d felt it only as a child and even then only for a short time. Her safety had been ripped away like the worst of Band-aids one night. She fought like hell to get it back and keep it every day since. So she put down roots here in a way she hadn’t done even in Dallas.
No, this time she made real friends, had people to her house, and asked Will to cook them all dinner. He happily played along . . . but it had been a mistake.
No one here would buy the “ailing aunt” story she’d sold several times before when she needed to disappear. She could maybe concoct a few weeks’ worth of lead time, but Reese would call to check in on her and Nick would wonder what had happened to them. When they didn’t see answers, they would start digging. And when they dug they would do so with all the resources of the PD and all the pit-bull doggedness of worried friends. Hell, Nick and Reese would come to her house and lift Will’s prints. Having the house turn up devoid of prints would just make them really fucking suspicious.
Diana and Will couldn’t pick up and leave; it was a surefire way of bringing the past back. They were better off taking their chances with the Kurevs. Besides, if the Kurevs were coming here, wouldn’t they already have come? Maybe Ivan had figured it out, and she had killed him before he had a chance to tell the others that he’d found the Christmas Killers.
If they couldn’t run, they had to fortify. Luckily, much of that need was already at hand, if not in place.
Diana headed first to the crawl space. Even when they’d stashed things here, they knew everyone always suspected the crawl space, but since she and Will wouldn’t ever be accused of burying bodies below the house—she amended that with a quick “please, God”—and since a dog wouldn’t sniff out metal, they’d felt it was a pretty safe bet.
There was a square entry door to the crawl space from the backyard, well out of sight of the neighbors. It had been a selling point on this house—they could dig and do what they wanted in the back, and as long as no one screamed or made odd noises, the neighbors would never be the wiser. So she dressed in old clothing and took a hand spade down into the space beneath the house and dug up three separate bags.
She hauled the load out and beat off the dirt, first under the house, then brushed more dirt off the bags over the garden area before hauling them into the laundry room. There she opened them, pulled the contents, and threw the bags themselves in the trash.
Though she covered the spots in the crawl space as well as she could, the wounds in the hard dirt would raise suspicions if anyone saw them. But Diana figured that anyone crawling under her house would have looked through her house first and anything they found would only be additional evidence.
She still had an old lamp that sported a stiletto in the finial top. But they needed more. She peeled back the edges so the wrapped blankets yielded a few longswords, daggers, and a set of sais.
For a moment, she stood there in her laundry room, knees and elbows caked in dirt, and spun the instruments in her hands. She walked them across her palms, gave a flick of her wrist, and sent one around her thumb and back into her grasp. She nearly missed. She wasn’t as good as she once was. Previously, she spent hours each day practicing. In LA and here in Atlanta she didn’t practice at all . . . didn’t want to be associated with the weapons.
She tried to tell herself it was because these weren’t hers, weren’t the ones she’d used and loved for so long. These were replacements kept only as a backup plan.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter because she was out of practice and it was time for the backup plan. At this point they had to assume the Kurevs were coming, and Will and Diana had a choice: yield up some possible evidence of their past or get themselves very dead. Diana opted for the first.
She reached into the bag again and slid out a set of kamas, finding out she’d lost even more skill with them. After nearly dropping one on her toe, and not having enough room to jump out of the way, she considered herself lucky and quit before she needed medical attention.
The last set of rolled blankets gave up a personal arsenal. Lee’s. Hers.
Seven Springfield XDs. Five silencers. Two rifles. Boxes upon boxes of ammo.
None of it was original to the Christmas Killers, down to the brand of gun. Only the 9mm size was replicated. They didn’t know if the H&K P2000 was ever identified as the gun the Christmas Killers used, and Diana had never had the nerve—or the desire—to ask Dr. Dunham exactly what the FBI knew of her and Will’s activities. Still, it seemed smarter to use something else.
She changed her clothes there in the laundry room, and then piece by piece distributed the arsenal around the house. She already had a shotgun and her department-issued Glock, which she kept in a lockbox. Ironically, she was going to leave it there. Should anyone come to the house who knew her, that’s where he or she’d expect it to be. None of the other weapons would be in plain sight, but if she needed to grab something to defend herself, it sure wasn’t going to be her police-issued handgun.
She used Velcro and glue to attach scabbards to the inside of closets, opposite the hinge side of the door, at a height that worked for either her or Will. She tested her ability to grab the dagger, sword, whatever, as she ran by. It would seem a silly exercise to anyone watching, but to her it was as essential as breathing. Preparedness was why she was still breathing.
Several hours later, when Will returned, she informed him that she had the results of Ivan’s autopsy, but they didn’t talk. Instead, they kept working until each room in the house contained at least one weapon, if not two. Luckily it wasn’t that big a house. There was a holster with a set of kamas on the side of the washer, covered by hanging dresses Diana rarely wore. In the kitchen, several knives hid, stuck to magnets now mounted under the edge of cabinets, where only children or midgets would even see them—she decided to take that chance. The roll of the arm on the couch was now sliced and carefully stitched, the stuffing pulled away to make room for a handgun that could be reached from a sitting position or when running through the living room.
The beautiful panel work in front of the window seat now had a few dings, which Will promised to repair in what Diana considered a parody of normal life. Of course a husband would get out the putty and repair a dent in the molding. For them, of course the repair was necessary, because they’d pulled out the panel itself and mounted it on cabinet hardware stolen from the bathroom mirrors. Magnets held the panel on, but a quick press in two spots would pop the “door” open and the piece would come free, yielding two handguns, one for each of them, or one for each hand.
Given their schedules it was entirely possible that only one of them would be here at the time. Diana was at least armed at work. They had some thinking to do before Will went back on Monday.
When everything was in place, as much as it could be, they sat down and Diana shared what she knew.
“Ivan Kurev had no meth in his system. No drugs that showed up on the tox report. He was killed by two bullets, probably not the first that went into his gut”—Diana could have told them that—“the second bullet was point-blank and hit higher, pushing a clean hole into his sternum and nicking his aorta. He lived for about four minutes after the second shot.”
Luckily for Diana, most of the blood had gone the way of the exit wound, and she had gotten out from under him before she had too much on her. Still, it hadn’t been good. Will nodded at the info but didn’t contribute to the conversation.
“The report also showed that his arm had been grabbed shortly before his death. The ME was able to say this because of the very early formation of bruising. Damned ME.” Mostly, Diana liked the woman, but right now she wanted to strangle her. “There wasn’t any useful DNA, so she didn’t even send it off for testing. And the marks on his arms didn’t yield clear prints or even hand size.”
Diana knew, had they tested the skin under her fingernails, she would have been screwed. She’d scrubbed like nobody’s business.
“All good.” Will nodded again. “Is there anything that can come back to you?”
She shook her head. “I mean, the stupid ME could find something else, but I didn’t bite him or lick him or anything. Stelian said the witness reports yielded very little.”
“Wouldn’t he say that to you if anyone reported you?”
“Sure, but why would anyone report me? Even if someone gave Nick my description, unless they said ‘she’s a cop’ or pointed me out specifically, he wouldn’t withhold anything. In fact, if someone said, ‘It looked just like her,’ I think he’d laugh and then ask me if I could go find myself.”
Will was starting to nod for a third time when her phone went off.
She looked at the screen. “Well, speak of the devil.” It was the wrong thing to say. Diana knew the devil and it was not Nick. With a look at Will, she answered the call. “Stelian.”
“Hey, Junior Dick. I heard we got the autopsy back on John Doe.”
“Yes, we did. Didn’t you get a copy?” She looked at Will who mouthed the words to her “John Doe?”
She nodded as Nick replied in her ear with a sigh. “Yeah, it doesn’t look like anything to me. We don’t have a match on his fingerprints yet. They’re pulling AFIS Monday, so if we’re lucky we’ll get a preliminary list, and if we’re Lotto Lucky we’ll get a match.”
“We’re not going to be Lotto Lucky.” At least she prayed they weren’t.
“So what are you doing to solve this?”
She didn’t say, “arming my house” like she wanted to. “Same as you would, knock-and-talks. I found three more people in the adjacent buildings who were willing to talk. All three little old ladies, mostly homebound. One of them even said I wasn’t as scary as the big dark-haired man. She said she wasn’t even certain you were a real cop!”
His laugh was rich, even through the digital line of the cell connection.
She added, “And I’m waiting on fingerprints and ballistics. So nothing much is happening right now. If we get an ID we might get some speed behind this but not yet. No one is claiming him and I’ve run all the missing persons of any description close to his and nothing pops.” She purposefully changed the subject. “Where are you anyway?”
“Chicago, of all places.” He sighed. “I am not a big fan of this town.”
Though her heart stopped, she forced her brain to keep going. “So is that the ‘L’ I hear in the background?”
“Yeah, and the coffee shops aren’t that great. Not until I got directed to one in particular . . . Intelligentsia? I don’t know. But it was better than the others.”
She turned to whisper Stelian’s location to Will, but he was gone. With a gasp, she frantically scanned the area, her mind racing through various scenarios that really weren’t plausible. But she’d lived an implausible life, so it made sense, for just that moment to think he’d suddenly disappeared. That he’d been snatched by the Kurev family while she’d turned away. That he was, at this very moment, having payback extracted for his wrongs as well as her own.
Instead, she spotted him at the end of the driveway, having a leisurely conversation with Steven Daggley, the father of the one-year-old who was trying to get away, to see something down the street, even as his pudgy little fingers were firmly held.
“Diana?” Nick’s voice came through the phone, suddenly worried. Shit. She heard the concern and anticipated the next words. “Is everything all right?”
She hid in the truth. She was good at it. Letting out a sigh that hopefully sounded more like self-deprecation than relief, she answered. “Someone was lurking at my mailbox—”
“What?” He interrupted, suddenly fully engaged, even from another city.
“It was my husband.”
The laugh came again. Rich, deep, comforting. “Wow. Maybe I should have tested you a little more thoroughly before I recommended you for detective. Your husband, huh?”
“Shut up, Stelian. Go teach your classes and fetch more recruits.” She watched out the window as Will finished up his short conversation with the neighbor. “I’ll keep working the case, and I’ll call you with anything we learn as soon as we learn it, so you can still direct the investigation even though you aren’t here.”
“You’ll do fine. Just keep me posted.”
They each said a terse good-bye and hung up as Will came in the door.
She was getting ready to once again hiss her news at him, but he spoke first. “I told Steven—and I told Mrs. Wellesley earlier—that I thought I saw someone strange in the neighborhood the other day. Since you’re a cop, they could just come report to us if they spotted anything.”
Diana nodded. It was a smart move, but her news trumped that. “Nick Stelian’s in Chicago.”
“What?” He stopped dead, all movement frozen from where he was reaching to set the mail on the table. “Jesus, Diana. We have two and two and two. We can’t go on thinking things aren’t connected.”
She could only shake her head and whisper. “How can they be? No one has identified the body. It’s possible you and I are the only ones who know the son of the last Kurev mafia don is in the morgue.”
“Even if that’s the case, the Kurevs themselves are going to figure it out pretty damn quick.” Now, he let the mail plop onto the table, suddenly forgotten. “And how in hell does your mentor go to their city within days of you popping a Kurev in our own backyard?”
She still whispered, not wanting any of it to be true. She wanted weapons planted around the house out of sheer paranoia, not necessity. But necessity was rapidly winning that argument. “He’s teaching one of his classes. Those are planned well in advance—”
His head tilted. Will knew her, knew she’d suddenly put a piece into place. “What?”
“They’re planned well in advance. But I didn’t hear about this one until right after Kurev.”
He pulled out a chair and this time plopped down at the table. “It’s too damn coincidental. I don’t like it.”
She pulled the curtains closed against the setting sun. They had two nights and a day before Will was due back at work. She had three days before she was due for a patrol shift, but she was supposed to be working the John Doe case, a case she had no desire to find any actual evidence for. “How can it be anything but coincidental? Unless Nick is onto us, knows that John Doe is Ivan Kurev, and then went to Chicago to . . . what? Inform the family?”
Will’s hand tapped the table in a nervous gesture. That was new to this life, too. When she’d met him he had no extra energy; it was all expended keeping himself alive and killing others. Of course, when she’d met him, she’d entertained brief thoughts about killing him herself and knew he’d thought the same about her. Now, he had a tic. “I don’t know.”
He busied his hands opening the mail while she paced a circular track in the living room, trying to fabricate a plausible explanation—any explanation—for Nick Stelian to be in Chicago without knowing about Ivan Kurev. She was still thinking when Will’s voice cut through her thoughts with a sharp slash.
“Diana.”
It was all he needed to say. She focused on him. One of his hands held a Manila envelope that had only their name and address, a few stamps, no return. On the table, clearly having just fallen out of the envelope, was a small, black burner phone.