Engine 27

Engine 27 still has its brass pole.

That's the first thing you notice when Bogdan rolls up the old red garage door at one in the morning: a gleaming column of brass running from a hole in the ceiling straight down to the polished concrete floor, as if any second a crew of firefighters might come sliding down it.

"Does it work?" you ask.

"Yes," Kirill says, walking past you.

"Have you ever used it?"

"No." He hangs his coat on an iron hook. "Bogdan has."

Bogdan doesn't deny it. He just looks quietly proud.

The firehouse is enormous inside, all exposed brick and black steel and tall arched windows. Where the engines used to park there's a long open kitchen built around a steel island the length of a fire truck, and beyond it a sitting area with leather couches and a whole wall of vinyl records in floor-to-ceiling shelves. Everything is clean, dark, expensive, and slightly cold, like the man who lives here.

"Your room's on the third floor," Kirill says. "Bathroom's yours. The door locks from your side."

"Does it lock from yours?"

He pauses on the iron stairs and looks back at you. "There's no lock on my side, Ethan. If I wanted you dead, I wouldn't need a door."

"That's really not as comforting as you think it is."

"It wasn't meant to be comforting. It was meant to be true." He keeps climbing. "That's the only rule in this house, by the way. You don't lie to me. I don't lie to you."

"That's it? One rule?"

"It's a hard one." He doesn't look back this time. "Most people break it in a week."

You sleep three hours and wake to the sound of somebody playing Tchaikovsky very loudly on an expensive stereo.

Downstairs, Bogdan is at the steel island doing the crossword with a cup of black coffee. Kirill is nowhere. And sitting cross-legged on the counter in a cream silk blouse and heels that could kill a man, eating strawberries out of a carton, is the most glamorous woman you've ever seen before nine a.m.

She's dark-haired, red-lipped, with the same pale eyes and the same cheekbones as her brother. She looks you up and down slowly, from your bedhead to your socks.

"Oh, he wasn't exaggerating," she says. "You're cute."

"I'm sorry?"

"Alina." She holds out a hand without getting off the counter. "The sister. I run Zolotoy Zal, the gold disaster you were kidnapped to last night."

"I wasn't kidnapped. I was... invited. Firmly."

"Mm." She bites a strawberry. "Kirill called me at two in the morning to say he'd brought home a stray. I said a cat or a dog? He said, a man with a spreadsheet." Her eyes glitter. "My brother has never once brought anything home. Not a cat, not a dog, and definitely not a man with a spreadsheet."

Bogdan, very quietly, writes something in his crossword.

"Alina." Kirill's voice, from the stairs.

He's coming down in a black T-shirt and dark trousers, hair still damp from the shower, barefoot. You've seen him in a suit and you thought that was unfair. This is worse. The T-shirt shows the shape of his shoulders, his arms, a plain silver ring on his right hand. You become extremely interested in the coffee maker.

"I'm being welcoming," Alina says.

"You're being Alina." He takes the strawberry carton out of her hand on his way past. "Don't you have a wedding to ruin?"

"Three, this weekend." She slides off the counter, kisses her brother on the cheek, and then, to your total surprise, kisses yours. She smells like jasmine. "Be nice to him, Kirya," she says over her shoulder. "I like this one."

The door bangs behind her.

Kirill sets a laptop in front of you. A new one, still in its plastic. Beside it he stacks a tower of banker's boxes labeled in neat Cyrillic and English: SOKOL LOGISTICS 2018. 2019. 2020.

"Every company. Every account," he says. "Start wherever you want."

By evening you've filled four legal pads.

You've found Oskar Belenko's handwriting on everything, tiny and slanted and elegant, and you've started to feel like you know him: a careful man, a funny man, a man who wrote ha in the margin next to a particularly creative tax deduction. You've found the Amber Coast payments again, and something odd underneath them, a second rhythm, like two drummers playing the same song slightly out of time. You can't explain it yet. You write TWO HANDS? in the margin and circle it three times.

When you look up, it's dark outside the tall windows, and Kirill is leaning against the end of the steel island, arms folded, watching you.

You have no idea how long he's been there.

"You count under your breath," he says.

"Out loud, the numbers are louder."

That surprises a laugh out of him, short and low, like it escaped without permission. It changes his whole face. For one second he looks his age, thirty-one, a little tired, very human.

Then it's gone.

"Oskar wouldn't steal," he says. "I know you have to think it. I'm telling you anyway."

"How do you know?"

"Because when I was nineteen, I told him something I'd never told anyone, and he didn't tell my father." Kirill's jaw tightens. "If he could keep that, he could keep anything."

You set your pen down very carefully. "What did you tell him?"

The silence stretches. The refrigerator hums. Somewhere upstairs, Bogdan's radio murmurs a Flyers game.

"My father," Kirill says finally, not looking at you, "doesn't know everything about me."

He says it to the windows. To the bridge lights. Like it costs something.

"Kirill..."

"Good night, Ethan." He pushes off the island, and the moment closes like a door. "Don't work past two. You'll start seeing patterns that aren't there."

"That's literally my job."

"Then do it tomorrow."

He's gone up the stairs before you can answer.

Your room on the third floor is plain and warm, with a skylight full of orange city sky. You lie on top of the covers in your clothes, staring up at it, replaying the way he said doesn't know everything about me like a confession he'd been holding in his mouth for years.

You think you know what he meant. You think you might be wrong. You think about his hand in yours in your hallway last night, one second too long.

You are here to find a thief. In twenty-nine days you'll walk out with three hundred thousand dollars and never see Kirill Sokolov again.

You need to remember that.

Your phone buzzes on the nightstand.

Unknown number. One floor down, you hear a cupboard close, and the faint clink of a glass.

The message is short, perfectly punctuated, and somehow sounds exactly like his voice.