Six months after London, the threat came again. From a different direction this time — which was the thing about Dimitri's world, Jane had learned. The threats did not repeat themselves. They evolved. They found new angles, new approaches, new points of entry. The moment you had sealed one gap, something else was quietly finding another.
Not Natasha. Natasha had settled into her negotiated role with the careful discipline of someone who had been given one more chance and understood precisely what it meant. Not Holt's network either, which had been thoroughly and methodically dismantled over the preceding months in ways Jane had only the outline of and had chosen not to ask for the details of.
Something new. Or rather — because nothing in Dimitri's world was ever truly new — something old. Something that had been waiting, patient and unhurried, in the long shadows of his history. The kind of thing that didn't move until it was ready. The kind that was more dangerous for the waiting.
His name was Sarov.
Jane learned about it the way she had learned most important things since returning to London — not because she was told directly, but because she listened. She had become, without entirely planning to, very good at listening to the things that surrounded the things that were said. The late calls that Dimitri took in the other room with the door pulled almost but not quite shut. The particular set of his shoulders when he came back from them. The way Anton's presence at the London property had quietly increased over the past week — not dramatically, not in a way designed to be noticed, but enough.
She noticed.
She waited three days before she said anything. She waited because she had learned that there was a difference between noticing something and responding to it, and that the space between those two things was worth using carefully.
On a Tuesday morning — their mornings had become a ritual too, coffee and the particular comfortable silence of people who didn't need to fill every moment — she looked up from her cup and said: "Tell me about Sarov."
He looked up from his coffee. The expression that crossed his face was brief and quickly controlled, but she had become fluent in his expressions over months of careful study. It was the expression of a man who has been almost-caught not doing a thing he had explicitly said he wouldn't do. The expression of someone who had been intending to act and had been planning to tell you about it afterward, when the situation was resolved and the telling was easier.
"It's being handled," he said.
"Dimitri."
The pause. The specific one. "He's a problem from fifteen years ago," he said, setting down his coffee in the way of a man surrendering to the inevitable with as much dignity as possible. "A man my father wronged, in a business matter that should have been resolved then and wasn't. He's been building something — quietly, carefully, for years. Waiting. He made contact three days ago."
"Contact how?"
"A message." He looked at her steadily. "To Anton, but intended for me. Routed deliberately to make sure I understood it wasn't accidental. It referenced you by name."
Jane sat with this for a moment. Outside the kitchen window the London morning was proceeding normally — the sounds of the street, a bus going past, someone's dog, the ordinary texture of a city that did not know or care what was being said in this kitchen. She let the information settle. She turned it over. She looked at its shape.
"Well," she said. "That's clarifying."
"I was going to—"
"Tell me when you'd handled it, yes." She looked at him. Not with anger — she had moved through the first flash of that in the three seconds of silence and come out the other side. "I know. We talked about this, Dimitri."
He looked at her. She looked back. The particular, practiced standoff of two people who understood each other's patterns completely — who had mapped each other carefully over months and knew exactly where the pressure points were and had decided, mostly, to navigate around them with care rather than exploit them.
"He used my name," Jane said. Her voice was steady. She had discovered, in Italy and in the months since, that she was steadier under pressure than she would have predicted. "Which means he's already made me part of this. Which means keeping me in the dark doesn't protect me — it just means I'm operating without information."
A silence.
"Tell me everything," she said. "All of it. And then we figure out what comes next together." She paused. "That's also something we talked about."
He looked at her for a long moment. The look that was always an examination — thorough, honest, the look of a man who had spent his entire adult life surrounded by people with hidden agendas and had never quite gotten used to someone who simply said what she meant.
"Sarov has three people in London," he said. "He's gathering information about your routine. Your university schedule, your movements. Nothing has been attempted. Anton believes he's still in the assessment phase."
"How long do we have?"
"Weeks. Perhaps less."
Jane nodded slowly. She picked up her coffee cup. She thought about what she knew about Sarov — which was now more than she'd known five minutes ago, which was something — and what she knew about the way these situations moved, and what options existed.
"All right," she said. "Start from the beginning. Tell me everything about your father and Sarov and what happened fifteen years ago." She looked at him. "If I'm going to help you think through this properly, I need the full picture."
He looked at her across the kitchen table — ordinary table, ordinary morning, entirely extraordinary conversation — and began to talk.