Page 104 of Ruin
My father would have laughed at me.
Sentiment, he'd say, is the rust that eats through power from the inside.
He ran this organization for thirty-two years without ever once letting a woman sit in the space between his ribs the way Selene sits in mine.
He died powerful and alone and certain he'd made the right trade.
I'm beginning to suspect he was wrong about that, among other things.
Purgatory isdead at this hour.
The club levels are dark and silent, the bars cleaned and restocked, the floors still smelling of last night's liquor and perfume.
I don't come here often during the day, but the penthouse isn't an option for this conversation.
Too many entry points, too close to Selene, and Vincent was insistent that we meet somewhere the Russians haven't been watching.
Hell is the safest room I have access to.
Underground, no windows, one entrance, and the owner owes me enough favors that the space is mine whenever I need it.
Vincent is already there when I descend the stairs, along with Marco, Natalia, the twins, and Lionel, who arrived through Purgatory's back entrance while I came through the front.
We've set up at the long table near the east corridor—the same table where I've conducted interrogations, negotiations, and the occasional conversation that couldn't happen anywhere with a paper trail.
"Talk to me," I say, taking my seat at the head.
Vincent doesn't waste time. "Zhukov is mobilizing. Eighteen hours ago, our contacts at the port flagged three containers arriving under a shell company we've traced to his Brighton Beach operation. Contents listed as auto parts. Actual contents, based on the weight discrepancy and the armed escort, are weapons. Military grade."
"Source?"
"Eastern European pipeline. Same route he used for the shipment we intercepted last year, but triple the volume." Vincent pulls up a satellite image on the wall-mounted screen. A warehouse complex near the waterfront, vehicles clustered around loading bays. "He's also moved twelve men into a residential building on Coney Island Avenue. Not muscle. Specialists. The kind you bring in for a specific job and then send home."
"Timeline?"
"Based on the weapons delivery and the personnel movement, we're looking at seventy-two hours. Maybe less."
The room absorbs this in silence.
I scan the faces around the table.
Lionel, stoic and immovable.
Peter and Paul, mirror images.
Marco, running numbers in his head the way he always does, calculating cost and risk and probability.
Natalia, watching me with those sharp, dark eyes that miss nothing and forgive less.
"He's not coming for territory," Natalia says. Her accent is faint but present, a reminder of the years she spent in places where wars were fought with less sophistication and more brutality. "Territory he can take piece by piece, the way he has been. This is something bigger. He's coming for you."
She's right.
I've known it since the Cyrillic message on the warehouse wall.
The half-price protection, the dock worker in the river, the escalating provocations—they weren't strategy.
They were theatric.
