The plan was set. A symphony of controlled violence, orchestrated by Demetri from the penthouse war room. The isolated fishing cabin in the Catskills, pulled from Sasha’s memory, was the key. They would leak a false, encrypted message—a fragment of a code Sasha supposedly remembered Piotr using—suggesting the money was hidden there. Voronin’s men would converge. Demetri’s team would be waiting.
It was clean. Surgical. A classic Volkov gambit.
But Sasha, the ghost who had become the catalyst, refused to be a passive note in his symphony.
“No,” she said, her voice firm, standing in the doorway of the war room. She had changed out of the clothes Nora gave her and back into her own worn leather jacket and jeans, a warrior reclaiming her armor.
Demetri didn’t look up from the topographic ma
