Page 112 of Cruel Kiss

"Navi."

"Ro." His grin fades, just a little. "I know. I know. You'd have done the same. It doesn't need a speech."

But it does. I owe him a speech. Hell, I owe him ten. He took two bullets that were mine; the least I can do is let him know how much that sacrifice means to me. I open my mouth to say it anyway, but he holds up his taped hand.

"Fine. If you're gonna insist, then at least save it for later. When I'm not full of morphine and can enjoy watching you grovel properly." He wriggles against the pillows, wincing. "Right now, there's something you need. There's a reason I was late to the diner. And yes, it was worth getting put on your little black list."

"I didn't?—"

"Oh, yes, you did. Don't lie to me. I'd have done the same." He nods toward the small cabinet by the bed. "Bottom drawer. Grigor brought my things over. There's a folder. Get it."

I open the drawer. Under a phone and a set of keys and a wallet with somebody else's name in it, there's a manila folder, thin, worn soft at one corner. I pull it out.

"After the orphanage got out," Navi says—by which he means the meeting with the captains, Sergei running his mouth,the pakhan's got a secret little place in Brooklyn—"I stopped trusting anybody. Everybody. You, even, a little, though that's a different problem. I just couldn't figure out how it got to Lev. Anna House isn't in any ledger. It's clean money."

"Right," I say. "So how?—"

"So I audited the firm. Off-book. Quiet. Nobody knew, especially not you, because you'd have told me to stop wasting time on it." He coughs, and the machine behind him blips faster, then settles. "I pulled everything. And it all points one direction, Ro."

I open the folder.

The first page is a printout of a firm access log. A file name I recognize. Todd Bradshaw's retainer agreement. And next to it, a timestamp, and a user credential, and a note in Navi's blocky hand:pulled and copied. 2 A.M. no case reason.

The second page is a photograph of a badge—a fake one, the one Cali described, the one she caught because the ID number had too many digits—and beside it, a real Bureau case number. Live. Active. Mapping to a real matter.

And a note:only three people at the firm have standing to see live federal case numbers. narrowed to one.

The third page is a phone record. A number I don't know, calling out of a Midtown hotel ballroom on the night of a bar association gala. And another the night Semyon's daughter got married in Brighton Beach. And a third, weeks earlier: a call taken quietly during a fraud pitch on the thirty-eighth floor of Whitmore Stearns.

My hands have gone very cold.

I turn to the last page.

It's the stand-down. The routing order that pulled the men off Cali's house the night a man came up her stairs with zip ties and murderous intent.

Under it, Navi's handwriting:these codes were papered thirty years ago. drafted by the firm. by the man who set up the original structure. before you were pakhan. before you were anything.

And a name.

"Crosby," I whisper.

"Crosby," Navi confirms. He sags back against the pillow, spent, like giving me the name took the last of what he had. "Crosby Hess. Your senior partner. The man who asked you to meet Todd in the first place, as a favor, remember that?"

It's so long ago now, but yes, I remember. He's the reason all this shit started in the first place.

"He was never Bratva," Navi says. "That's why nobody could find him. We were all looking at the family. Grigor, Anatoly, Yuri, every man who ever spoke our tongue. And the whole time, it was a suit. A man in a nice tie who's been quietly skimming a percentage off this operation since before you inherited it, back when Igor set the firm up as the front and Crosby wrote the paper. He knows the codes because hewrotethe codes. He knows the case numbers because he's a real lawyer at a real firm. He copied Todd's retainer because he had the access, and no one questions a founding partner in his own file room."

I think of the scale.

I feel it hit me the way it must have hit Cali the night Navi answered her call. Everything sliding into place at once, cold and horrible and undeniable.

"The conference room," I say. "Whitmore Stearns. Crosby was in the room."

Navi watches me get there.

"He got pulled into her pitch. I saw it happen. I was in the back against the glass wall where nobody looks, and Crosby came in ahead of me. He heard all of it. She laid her whole life out on a screen for a room full of bankers, andhe was in the room." I jump to my feet and start to pace. "That's how Lev knew. FuckingCrosby."

"I said someone unwelcome was watching us close," Navi reminds me. "I was righter than I knew."