The threat didn't come in the form of a car accident or a bomb. It came in an envelope delivered to my desk the following Tuesday.
Inside was a single, charred piece of a silver hairbrush—the one with the letter S I had found in the mansion months ago. Yuri's sister's brush.
"He's alive," Yuri whispered, his face turning a terrifying shade of grey as he stared at the blackened metal.
"Viktor?" I asked, my blood turning to ice. "The explosion at the villa... no one could have survived that."
"Viktor didn't. But his brother, Mikhail, was never at the villa. He was the one who handled the Volkov archives. He was the one who actually pushed my sister."
Yuri walked to the window, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. The peace we had built was a thin sheet of glass, and Mikhail had just thrown a stone.
"He wants the last piece of the Ledger," Yuri continued. "The part you didn't wipe. The physical back-up that I keep in my head."
"You told me it was all gone," I said, stepping toward him.
"The data is gone, Jessy. But the names... the names of the men who funded the Volkovs for thirty years... I can't forget them. Mikhail knows that as long as I'm alive, I'm a witness who can't be bribed."
"Then we don't wait for him to come to us," I said, the fire I had discovered in the vault reigniting in my chest. "He thinks I'm the weak point. He thinks I'm the girl who needs to be saved."
"Jessy, no. This isn't your war."
"It stopped being 'your' war the moment he sent that brush to my desk," I countered. "We do this together, or we don't do it at all."