Semua Bab Crowned in Carnage: Bab 31 - Bab 40

The plan to extract Katerina from Moscow was the kind of operation that kept people awake at night, and Elena had barely slept since Marco first laid it out on the study desk with maps and timelines and too many variables to keep track of comfortably. Moving a seventy-year-old woman and her family across international borders without alerting Petrov’s network was the kind of thing that required both precision and luck, and luck was never something Elena had learned to rely on.They had seventy-two hours before Petrov would expect another report from Maria, which meant everything had to move fast and there was no room for mistakes or hesitation or any of the things that usually happened when you rushed an operation this complicated.Elena sat in the study going over the extraction timeline for the fourth time while Isabella napped upstairs under the watch of two guards who’d been vetted so thoroughly Marco had practically taken them apart and reassembled them. The paranoia was becoming

Marco had the pier at Red Hook pulled up on his laptop by the time Elena came back downstairs with Isabella finally settled for her nap. He’d mapped out six different locations across the city but kept coming back to this one, tracing sight lines and escape routes with his finger while explaining why it gave them the best chance of not getting killed.“Open space means we can see anyone approaching from a distance, and isolated enough that if things go wrong we’re not putting civilians in danger,” he said, zooming in on the satellite view. “We can position people on the warehouse roofs here and here without being obvious about it.”Elena studied the map and tried to imagine herself standing on that pier meeting a Russian intelligence officer who’d helped orchestrate her father’s death. The mental image kept slipping away from her, replaced by scenarios where everything went sideways and she ended up floating in the East River.“What about making sure he comes alone?” Damien asked from

The drive away from Manhattan felt longer than usual, not because of traffic, but because Elena kept replaying what she’d done and trying to decide how to explain it. She watched the city fade into the parkway and then into the quieter roads leading back to the estate, running through and discarding different ways to tell Damien and Marco that she had negotiated with the man responsible for her father’s death.Damien was already on the front steps when the car arrived. He opened the door before Elena could reach for it, his hands immediately on her shoulders and then her face, examining her as though she might be hurt in ways he couldn’t see.“I’m okay,” Elena said, taking hold of his hands. “We just talked. Nothing happened.”“You were inside for nearly an hour,” Damien replied, his voice tight in a way that suggested the waiting had been worse for him than the meeting itself. “Marco was close to sending people in.”“I needed that time to negotiate,” Elena said as she headed inside.

Organizing a simultaneous takedown of five individuals spread across three different family organizations in under twenty-four hours was the sort of operation that normally required weeks of preparation, but Elena didn’t have weeks and likely didn’t even have days, considering how quickly information spread in their world. Marco spent most of the night coordinating teams while Elena handled the deeply unpleasant phone calls to family leaders whose organizations were about to be hit without prior approval.Tommy Castellano reacted to the news about Dmitri Volkov better than Elena had anticipated, likely because at eighty-three he’d experienced enough betrayals that another one no longer surprised him. “You’re sure about this?” he asked over the encrypted line, his voice rough with either sleep, whiskey, or both.“I have material from Russian intelligence documenting three years of him passing them information,” Elena said, studying surveillance photos of Dmitri laid out across the desk

Elena waited three days before she went to see Giordano. She needed time to think about everything that had happened at the Commission meeting. She also wanted him to sit alone long enough to understand that no one was coming to rescue him. Marco was keeping him in a basement facility about forty minutes outside the city. It was the kind of place that did not officially exist. The walls were reinforced, and no sound escaped from inside.The drive felt longer than it should have. Damien sat next to her in silence. Marco drove and updated them on Giordano’s condition. He had barely spoken. He refused most of his meals. He either slept or lay on his cot staring at the ceiling. A psychological report said he understood the seriousness of his situation. He had not broken down. He had not become unstable. It was hard to tell if that meant he was strong or simply refusing to accept reality.“He asked to see you yesterday,” Marco said when they left the highway and turned onto a narrow servic