Page 102 of Vasily the Hammer

This entire time, Sasha could have been eating Ana’s delicious honey cake.

I glare at him.

“You went someplace strange, didn’t you?”

I shake my head to clear my thoughts. “You may have Ana’s medovik.”But her honey cake is all mine,I think to myself to get over that little play on words.

“Aaaaaaand sheismaking it because her memoriesareback?” he tries again.

“Some. It took a couple weeks, and then a bunch came back suddenly. Now they trickle in here and there. The doctors are skeptical they’ll all come back, but she’s doing great. She’s already scouting locations to open restaurants in LA and Flagstaff. We just came out here to settle some things and officially announce the new management. She wants the transition to be smooth. And for this, of course.”

I tap the chip that’s in the side of the tablet Sasha brought me. The tablet isn’t anything valuable, but they’ve spent the last six months pulling together the contents of that chip, at a substantial cost to me.

And a stern reminder the money did not count as the favor I promised Consummate when Ana was handed over to me. I still owe them a favor on their terms.

“Alright, let’s go over what’s on here,” Sasha says, firing it up. “First thing, we were able to locate the schematics you thought might be hidden on Kostya’s equipment, but I have to tell you, Leo wasnothappy returning them to you. Wanna tell me what they are?”

I know Leo. Anyone else who saw the schematics and were able to identify them would have had a serious moral dilemma over handing them over. I trusted outsourcing this job to Consummate because, although I’ve only met their computer guy twice, Iknowhe doesn’t have a stitch of morality in him. I wouldn’t be even a little surprised to find out the only reason he fights on the side of good is because his buddies are do-gooders and it’s easier to workwith them than against them. If Sasha decided to return to the Bratva and bring his team with him, Leo would be my wrecking ball.

So the only reason Leo wasn’t happy to turn them over was because he wanted in on the fun. Maybe I’ll call him up sometime and see if he wants a few for himself.

To Sasha, I say, “Oh, it’s just my new product line. We think Kostya planned to present it as his own after I was dead to prove he was as good as me, the fucking thief. Fucking asshole. Fuck—prosti menya, pozhaluysta, babushki,”I murmur apologetically to the table of kindly old ladies with scarves around their heads, whom the hostess unfortunately sat next to us.

“I’m still as shocked as you are,” Sasha says. “He was always kind of a jerk, but not that much of a jerk.”

I never saw it, though. Or I ignored it. I wanted an easier life because I couldn’t handle responsibility. But it turns out I can handle responsibility; I just needed it forced on me.

It’s nearly three in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Lunch breaks are over, but it’s not quite time for the early birds. In the two weeks we’ve been in Tampa, I’ve come to appreciate this as the family hour, when everything is a bit more casual and the customers aren’t patrons, they’re friends. The kids of the employees have just gotten off the bus and loaded into the booth next to the server station, where everyone both front of house and back of house can keep an eye on them. We enrolled Artom in a homeschooling program for the rest of first grade while we figure out the finer details of where we’ll be living going forward, so he’s been happy about the social time he gets at the restaurant. He’s even excited to do his schoolwork alongside the older kids with homework.

Ana wasn’t lying. I couldn’t have asked for a better kid.

“Funny how, when you picked up your wife, you didn’t ask about your son,” Sasha muses with another bite of the medovik. “Damn, that’s good.”

“Are you questioning my parenting skills?”

“No, I’m questioning your marital status. According to Leo, you have no marriage certificate on file.”

I tap the tablet. “And this file is nothing.”

Seriously, that file needs to not exist for anyone who’s not me and an incredibly small pool of people. Leo has a stupid amount of money, way more than I, so I trust that he wouldn’t keep it, and this is the only copy in existence. This is going to be a secret between me, a single printer, and Dima. That’s it. Because Benedetti is still playing her part with us, and if she finds out we are printing guns that can get through airport security, we’re in major trouble.

She has a mess to clean up for us, and she nearly lost her assignment over these guns. Despite the effort we put into making sure that everything Kostya attempted to frame on Dima went right back on Kostya, they got uppity about the guns, made a bunch of reports. Turned out a lot of the agents didn’t appreciate the effort they went through just to nab Tony the Bitch.

On that note, Sasha gestures to the tablet and says, “You might be interested in the slideshow on there.”

“Oh?”

I know I shouldn’t get excited and I definitely shouldn’t pull it up here in Ana’s restaurant, but I don’t have anyone behind me. The temptation is too much.

The photos start at a distance, and they’re blurry. It’s of the industrial dryers at a prison, the type that run pretty much nonstop. Everything looks normal and unexciting about them, but then thenext photo is the side view of one, and then there’s a panel that’s been removed, showing a hole in the wall behind it.

The next one is zoomed in on the hole, showing me Tony’s face.

He’s alive.

His mouth is sewn shut, but he’s alive.

In that one, at any rate.

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