Ulica Žrtava translated to "Street of Victims," which Claire learned from a plaque bolted to a corner building, its bronze letters green with oxidation. The street ran along the eastern edge of Velden's old Jewish quarter, a neighborhood that had been emptied twice—first by the Nazis, then by the communists who turned the abandoned synagogues into warehouses for state-owned textiles. Now it was home to nothing much: a bakery that opened only on Tuesdays, a cobbler whose sign promised repairs in three languages, and a basement office reached by a stairway so narrow that Claire had to turn sideways to descend.
Adrian Voss's door was steel, set into a stone arch that predated electricity. A handwritten card taped beside the buzzer read: VOSS—CONSULTATIONS BY APPOINTMENT. NO JOURNALISTS. NO POLICE. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Claire pressed the buzzer. Nothing happened. She pressed it again, longer. A crackle of static, then a voice that sounded like gravel being shoveled: "Can you read?"
"The sign says no exceptions. I'm making myself one."
A long pause. Then a buzzer sounded, and the steel door clicked open.
The office was a single room with a ceiling so low that Claire could have touched it without stretching. Bookshelves lined the walls, stuffed with legal codes and case files and paperback mysteries whose spines had cracked from rereading. A desk dominated the center of the room, its surface invisible beneath layers of paperwork, coffee cups, and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. The air smelled of tobacco and damp stone and something sharper underneath—the smell of a man who had stopped caring about first impressions a long time ago.
Adrian Voss sat behind the desk, and he was not what Claire had expected. She'd pictured a detective from the movies—rumpled suit, tired eyes, a flask in the drawer. Voss was something else entirely. He was tall, even seated, with the lean build of a man who forgot to eat. His hair was gray but his face was younger, the skin tight across sharp cheekbones, the eyes a pale green that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. He wore a sweater with a hole in the elbow and reading glasses pushed up into his hair.
"Sit," he said. "Before you hit your head."
Claire sat in the only other chair, a wooden contraption that creaked under her weight. "The woman who sent me here said you used to be honest."
"Used to be. Past tense. She's not wrong." Voss leaned back, the chair groaning. "Who was she?"
"She didn't give me her name. She had a scar—"
"Mirko. Lena Mirko." Voss's expression didn't change, but something shifted behind his eyes. "Her son was killed three years ago. Found in a barrel of counterfeit whiskey, what was left of him. The police ruled it an industrial accident. She's been trying to prove otherwise ever since."
"She gave me my brother's phone." Claire pulled it from her jacket, still wrapped in newspaper. "And a photograph."
She placed both on the desk. Voss looked at them without touching them, the way a bomb disposal expert looks at a suspicious package.
"Your brother is Daniel Harper. American. Disappeared from The Old Spaniel five days ago. Inspector Novak has the case."
"You know about him."
"I know about everyone who disappears in this city. It's a small club, and getting smaller." He picked up the phone, turned it over in his long fingers. "Novak is competent. She's also careful. She knows which cases will get her promoted and which will get her buried. Your brother's case is the second kind."
"Why?"
Voss set down the phone and picked up the photograph. He studied it for a long moment. Claire watched his face, looking for a reaction, but his expression remained perfectly neutral—the face of a man who had learned, long ago, that showing emotion was a tactical error.
"This photograph was taken in a shipping container," he said. "Kovic's operation uses them to move product and people. The containers leave Velden on cargo ships bound for ports in the eastern Mediterranean, the Gulf, sometimes North Africa. What happens to the people inside depends on who bought them."
"Bought them?"
"The men usually go to construction sites. The women to private households or worse. The ones who are young enough and attractive enough end up in places where attractiveness is a commodity. Your brother—" He stopped, and for the first time something flickered across his face, a shadow of genuine feeling. "Your brother was likely photographed for a catalog. They circulate among buyers before the shipment. It's a business, Miss Harper. A very efficient one."
Claire felt the room tilt. She gripped the arms of the chair and forced herself to breathe. "You're talking about human trafficking."
"I'm talking about the part of Velden's economy that doesn't appear in any government report. Kovic's counterfeit spirits operation is the front. The bottles go out filled with fake whiskey, real whiskey, sometimes nothing but colored water. But the containers also carry other cargo. Cargo that doesn't pay taxes, doesn't require paperwork, doesn't leave a trail."
"And the police know?"
"The police know what they're paid to know. Some of them take Kovic's money directly. Others, like Novak, know enough to stay away. It's not corruption in the way you're thinking—brown envelopes and whispered deals. It's survival. A cop in Velden who investigates Kovic doesn't just lose his job. He loses his family. His home. His life. I've watched it happen." Voss's voice was flat, but Claire heard the undertow of something older, something personal. "I've watched it happen to people I cared about."
Claire leaned forward. "Then help me. You know who took him. You know how it works. Help me find him before they ship him out."
"Thursday," Voss said. "The shipments leave on Thursdays. Today is Tuesday. You have forty-eight hours, maybe less."
"So we have to move now."
"We?" Voss laughed, a short, humorless sound. "I don't investigate anymore. I do consultations. I advise foreign businesses on local regulations. I find missing heirs for probate lawyers. I keep my head down and my door locked and my name off any list that might reach Kovic's desk. That's how I've stayed alive for the past five years."
"You were a detective once."
"I was a detective when being a detective meant something. Before the system collapsed. Before the judges started taking bribes and the prosecutors started taking vacations in countries that don't have extradition treaties. I spent fifteen years building cases that died in committee, watching criminals walk free because their lawyers knew which palms to grease. And then I made the mistake of building a case against Kovic."
Claire waited.
"It was eight years ago. We'd traced a shipment of counterfeit pharmaceuticals to one of Kovic's warehouses. People had died—children, mostly. The counterfeit drugs were just chalk and rat poison pressed into pill form. I had witnesses, documentation, a clear chain of custody. The prosecutor's office sat on the evidence for six months, and by the time they filed charges, the witnesses had disappeared and the warehouse had burned down. Kovic's lawyers argued that the parody label on the pills—they were stamped with a cartoon dog instead of the real manufacturer's logo—was protected political speech. The judge agreed. Case dismissed."
"That's insane."
"That's Caladria. Kovic has built his entire empire on the legal loophole of parody. His lawyers argue that because his labels are jokes, they're protected expression, not counterfeiting. The courts have upheld this argument a dozen times. He sells fake whiskey, fake medicine, fake everything, and he does it under the banner of free speech. It's brilliant, in a monstrous way." Voss reached for a cigarette, lit it with a match struck against the underside of his desk. "After the case collapsed, my wife left me. My son stopped speaking to me. My partner—the detective who'd worked the case with me—was found in his car with the engine running and a hose from the exhaust pipe. Ruled a suicide. I knew it wasn't, and I couldn't prove a thing."
The smoke curled toward the low ceiling, blue against the yellow light. Claire sat very still, watching Voss's face, seeing for the first time the layers beneath the surface: the anger, the guilt, the resignation that was really just despair wearing a different name.
"I'm sorry," she said. "But my brother is still alive. Or he was when that photograph was taken. You're the only person in this city who knows how Kovic works and is still breathing. I'm not asking you to be a hero. I'm asking you to help me find him before Thursday."
Voss stared at her through the smoke. "You're not afraid."
"I'm terrified. But I'm more terrified of what happens if I do nothing."
"Fear is rational. Doing nothing is rational. What you're proposing is suicide."
"Then it's suicide." Claire stood up. The chair scraped against the stone floor. "Keep your head down, Detective. Keep your door locked. I'll find him myself."
She was halfway to the door when Voss spoke again. "Wait."
She turned.
He was stubbing out the cigarette with a violence that seemed to surprise even him. "There's something else you should know. The reason Lena Mirko sent you to me isn't just because I used to be a detective. It's because I've been watching Kovic for years. Not investigating—watching. Mapping his operations, his routes, his associates. I told myself it was for a book, or for a day that would never come. But I've been watching, and I've noticed something."
"What?"
"The disappearances are accelerating. For years, Kovic took people quietly—migrants, runaways, people no one would miss. But in the past six months, the pattern has changed. He's taking tourists now. Westerners. People whose governments make noise when they vanish. It doesn't make sense. It's bad for business. It draws attention. But he's doing it anyway, and I don't know why."
Claire thought of Daniel's voicemail, the laugh at the end. "Maybe he's getting arrogant."
"Maybe. Or maybe he's desperate. Desperate men make mistakes. Desperate men are dangerous." Voss stood up, and Claire realized how tall he really was—six-four at least, his head nearly brushing the ceiling. "I'll help you. Not because I'm brave, and not because I believe in justice. But because Kovic has been winning for too long, and I'm tired of watching."
He walked to a filing cabinet and pulled open the bottom drawer. Inside, beneath a layer of old case files, was a hand-drawn map of Velden's waterfront, marked with notations in a tiny, precise script.
"This is Kovic's network. The warehouses, the safe houses, the docks he controls. If your brother is still in the city, he's in one of these locations. We start at the abandoned distillery on the eastern wharf. It's where Kovic bottles his counterfeit spirits, and it's where the containers are loaded. If there's a shipment going out on Thursday, the containers will already be there."
He handed Claire the map. Their fingers touched briefly, and she felt the coldness of his skin, the faint tremor of a man running on caffeine and old anger.
"We'll need to be careful," Voss said. "Kovic has eyes everywhere. The bartender at The Old Spaniel, the dockworkers, the police who patrol the waterfront—they all report to him. If he knows you're looking, he'll move your brother somewhere we'll never find him. Or he'll kill him and dump the body where it won't surface until spring."
"Then we move fast."
"Fast, yes. And quietly. And with the understanding that if we fail, we don't get a second chance." Voss pulled his reading glasses from his hair and folded them into his pocket. "There's a service entrance on the north side of the distillery. It's used by the cleaning crew between three and four in the morning. If we can get inside during that window, we might be able to find the shipping manifests—they'll tell us where your brother is being held."
"And if we don't find him in time?"
Voss looked at her, and for a moment his pale green eyes were almost kind. "Then we find out what's in the containers. And we burn it all down."
The rain had stopped by the time they left the office. The streets of ulica Žrtava glistened under a sky the color of old pewter. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell was tolling the hour, its sound muffled by the damp air.
Claire walked beside Voss, the map folded in her pocket, Daniel's phone clutched in her hand. She thought about the photograph—her brother huddled in a shipping container, his eyes hollow—and felt the fury building again, a pressure behind her ribs that made it hard to breathe.
Voss seemed to sense it. "Anger is useful," he said without looking at her. "It keeps you moving when your body wants to stop. But don't let it make you stupid. Stupid gets you killed."
"I'm not stupid."
"No. You're not. You're something rarer." He stopped at a corner, scanning the street before crossing. "You're someone who still believes justice is possible. I lost that belief a long time ago. Maybe you'll be the one to prove me wrong."
They crossed the street and disappeared into the maze of Velden's old quarter, two figures swallowed by shadows that had been gathering for centuries. Behind them, a man in a gray coat stepped out of a doorway and lifted a phone to his ear.
"The American met with Voss," he said. "They're heading toward the waterfront."
He listened, then nodded. "Understood. The distillery. Tonight."
He pocketed the phone and walked away in the opposite direction, his footsteps echoing against wet cobblestones, a ghost in a city full of them.
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